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Summary: As a Knoxville native......
Review: .....I was drawn to this book to see how my hometown was portrayed. While the prose and language were unique and painted interesting pictures at the end of the day I found the characters, pace and story a bit too much and put it down a little more than halfway through the book. I do agree with an earlier review that this would have made an excellent short story
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Summary: Where have you gone, my blue-eyed son?
Review: At some point in the adult or even young life, individuals undergo a period of inevitable self-doubt, wondering hypothetically, 'wouldn't it be great if I could just rid myself of all of this and live on a boat somewhere, in a place where no one I know now would ever find me?' or 'God take this pain away from me for I can't take it anymore!' Welcome to the life of Cornelius Suttree, the man who gave up the Matrix for a cragged houseboat in poverty-stricken Knoxville, where the river from which he hauls duck-billed catfish oozes, does not flow. Here the blind stagger and prophecize, junkmen and railroadmen or men who once were railroadmen philosophize on hopelessness (eg. God wouldn't have brought Lazarus back from hell, so he must have been sent back to the living world from heaven, and having seen heaven, how could he ever be happy again?), and black witches from their windows overlooking the gray, stinking city where decrepid youths poison bats with strychnine in order to exchange their stinking black corpses for cash at the local infirmary offer you your fate for a beer...or something like that. Suttree lives the simple life of a riverman, dabbling in catfishing, turtle-dining, and drinking down viscous moonshine - but this is not just a dark story of a man who has lost all hope for the world, though in it nothing goes as we, the readers, would like it to go. The book is an extremely slow read: it can take weeks and even months if not for its darkness then for its implicit requirement for the reader to thumb through his Oxford English Dictionary at least once per page. God, the beauty of the English language CANNOT be lost on the reader when McCarthy is at the pen. By the end of this swelling novel you are trapped in a world of characters, whom McCarthy goes to great lengths to develop. More importantly, you wish for an ending, in the same way you do when watching "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship..." But what you are confronted with is rather a continuance, as in an important court case. The question is, can the reader find triumph in continuance as opposed to his usual search for the happy ending or just an ending, period? The answer: there is no ending, there never is. But there can be dignity, even in chosen poverty. The book is ultimately a tale of dignity and integrity in a land of hopelessness. Can you bear this?
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Summary: McCarthy's best
Review: Cormac McCarthy is the best writer alive today. Period. His prose reads like the finest poems. His descriptions of the people in Corneilius Suttree's Knoxville sweep you into that time and place like no other writer can. At turns the book is a comedy, tragedy, and travelogue. His encounter with Gene Harrogate will make you laugh out loud.
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Summary: Suttree: an existentialist's search for meaning.
Review: Cormac McCarthy treats the reader to a splendid tale of one man's search for meaning. Cornelius Suttree, a college-educated man recently released from prison, searches for meaning in an unforgiving and absurd world. The reader -- as well as characters in the book -- quickly realizes that Suttree is out of place among the people with whom he lives. His failure to break out is caused by his inability to find purpose or meaning in life, and it is this search which most fascinates me. McCarthy masterfully conveys the complicated struggle within Suttree's mind: a picaresque journey of indecision and enervation. The author's accurate rendition of speech patterns and regionalisms animate characters like the ragman and Reese like few depictions I've ever read. At times the book becomes too impressionistic, whole pages devoted to a dizzying stream of images that I found difficult to read. In addition, I recognized unusual words repeated throughout the book, but despi! te these few criticisms, Suttree is an unforgettable read!
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Summary: A great [read]
Review: Going through the bookstore, I spotted Suttree on the shelf. After reading the back cover I thought it would be a very interesting book since I've never heard of a more stranger plot and characters. In the end they didn't seem so strange, but more like your corky neighbors each different. McCormac's excellent description walks along the fine line of too much and not enough. By the first 50 pages it was the best book I've ever read, by the end of the book, it was the only one that moved me, made me want to read it again and again, and it is the ONLY book I've ever recommended to my friends. You Have to go and buy this book!!
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Summary: An Original
Review: How does McCarthy do it? Once again he manages to create a compendium of totally original, three-dimensional characters. If I had to pigeonhole this book, I would call it a picaresque, a type of novel not seen much anymore. This is a modern day Don Quixote or Tristam Shandy or Tom Jones, although it is set among a bunch of likeable (mostly) losers (mostly) in Knoxville, Tennessee in the early 1950s. The title character, Cornelius Suttree, reminded me of the Jack Nicholson character in "Five Easy Pieces," a man from a somewhat privileged background who gives it all up to live on a dilapidated houseboat near Knoxville. One of the best episodes in the book occurs early on, when Suttree learns that his child has died and goes to be with, and comfort, and hopes to be comforted by, his estranged wife. I won't spoil it for anyone, but after you read it just imagine how it would be handled by a lesser writer. There would have been a lot of flashbacks showing what happened historically in the relationship, etc. McCarthy gives us none of that. He just describes what happens in the present, then moves on, never looking back. This book is longish, and McCarthy's prose is riveting but difficult. I find McCarthy's usee of pronouns especially annoying. He may be discussing two male characters, and then say "he," and I am never sure which one he is referring to. By and large, however, this is an excellent read.
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Summary: Best by Far
Review: I cannot understand anyone having a problem with this book. Maybe it is too long for some but that is why it is called literature. Likewise, if you do not like the slow pace and lack of action, pick up a Grisham novel during your visit to the airport and chuckle along the way. This is the best southern McCarthy novel by far and equal to Blood Meridian. Remember, turtles make good soup and do not try and kill your neighbor's pig without first asking.
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Summary: A terrestrial Hell
Review: I have never used this term in a review, but this is a work of genius. McCarthy's Blood Meridian may have a more taut artistic virtuousity to it, but Suttree rings sprawlingly true to life and love while at the same time delivering the poetic lyricism of the arabesques and grotesqueries of life that stamp McCarthy as the greatest and most visionary writer of our time. Here is the pathos, bitterweetness, and comedy (Can anyone forget Harrogate and the bats, much less his getting off the charge of bestiality because "A mellon ain't no beast"?!?) of being human.-All this delivered in the most magnificent sweeping prose since Lowry (A writer I'd recommend to McCarthy fans) and Faulkner.
But down to some philosophical nuts and bolts: This is a dark novel displaying a visionary medieval mindset, much like Lowry's Under The Volcano (To my mind, the only other novelist of pure genius of this century..). It is the seemingly effortless interweaving of the visionary with the mundane that make this novel so astounding. We are witnesses to page upon page of brilliant poetic lightenings upon a tableau of "a terrestrial hell" as Suttree puts it, a place which not only he, but we all inhabit. To quote at length: "What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle."
This is the question this brilliant work thrusts before the reader in page upon glowing page.
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Summary: May be the Best Book I've Ever Read
Review: In my opinion, this novel by Cormac McCarthy is one of the great pieces of American fiction. The story follows Cornelius Sutree, a son of a wealthy family, who has exiled himself to a fishing boat in mid-20th century Tennessee. Sutree mixes with a cast of down on their luck, eccentric charecters while scraping for a living in the outer margins of society. McCarthy's descriptive imagery is strong enough to put you in the midst of the story. His use of dialect and atmosphere is down to earth on minute, then drifting into almost hallucinagetic prose the next. The mixture of brilliant characters and rich atmosphere make this a pleasure to read or re-read.
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Summary: Suttree is a special character
Review: Many of McCarthy's books have received much more fanfare than "Suttree", but Suttree is my favorite read of all of McCarthy's work. Something about Suttree's character stuck to my ribs... this oddball character became a living memory to me; how do I describe it? No other character from a book has had quite the same effect on me. That is why I liked the book, and why I will re-read it time and again.
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