Outer Dark hard and dark book where the beauty is only in the language of the inevitable apocalyptic end. Lost people wander in a violent world where with some grace they sometimes find a piece to eat or a fire to sit by. The setting is the beginning of the 20th century in the Appalachian mountains and the hard life of survival till a violent demise. The story: Culla Holmes takes the baby born from his incestuous relationship with his and lays it out in a wintry wood. A thinker with a cart goes looking for it and places it with an other woman. Rinthy, sickly and weak, goes looking for the tinker in order to find her child. The novel is peopled with cripples, murderers, violent men, all constituting a graceless world without redemption.
The language however is so precise that it hurts, so beautiful that one longs for the next page.
Examples of beauty in this godless mythology: The sun hung on the cusp of eclipse and the prophet spoke to them.
(...) the dull lowing of an alligator (...)
He crossed to the table and took the lamp and lit it, shaping the room from darkness.
(..) these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.
What discordant vespers do the tinker’s good chime through the twilight...
Yes in this novel darkness and blindness reigns supreme yet in beauty. This is a truly existentialist novel till the last sentence: Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.
Cormac McCarthy, one of the best...
Cormac McCarthy, one of the best...
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