BAUMAN RARE BOOKS 26 “But There Are No Absolutes In Human Misery And Things Can Always Get Worse” 34MCCARTHY, Cormac. Suttree. New York, 1979. Octavo, original half black cloth, dust jacket. $3500 First edition of McCarthy’s celebrated, searing, semiautobiographical novel—”like a good, long scream in the ear.” Considered by many McCarthy’s finest novel, Suttree features “a sensitive and mature protagonist, unlike any other in McCarthy’s work… Part Stephen Daedalus, part Prince Hal—he is also McCarthy, the willful outcast” (New York Times). Like so much of McCarthy’s fiction, the book exemplifies what Saul Bellow (who sat on the committee that awarded McCarthy his 1981 MacArthur Fellowship) called the writer’s “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.” In his contemporary review, Jerome Charyn said Suttree’s language “licks, batters, wounds—a poetic, troubled rush of debris… [McCarthy’s] text is broken, beautiful and ugly in spots… Suttree is like a good, long scream in the ear.” Small remainder stamp, as often seen. Privratsky, 27. A fine copy. “The Major Esthetic Achievement Of Any Living American Writer” 33MCCARTHY, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West. New York, 1985. Octavo, original half red cloth, dust jacket. $28,000 First edition of McCarthy’s mythic vision of the American West, inscribed by him, “For Bonnie All the best from your friend Cormac.” Harold Bloom called Blood Meridian “clearly the major esthetic achievement of any living American writer.” To fellow novelist Madison Smartt Bell, “McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame… His diction and phrasing come from all over the evolutionary history of English and combine into a prose that seems to invent itself as it unfolds, resembling Elizabethan language in its flux of remarkable possibilities” (New York Times). Little noticed at the time of publication, most copies of the first edition were remaindered— this copy, however, has no remainder mark on the bottom of the text block. Book with a bit of soiling along front joint; dust jacket with one small closed tear to front panel, minimal wear to spine ends, crease to front flap. A near-fine copy.
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