|
| 
 enlarge | Author: Cormac Mccarthy
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy Used: $6.38
You Save: $8.57 (57%)
New (31) Used (30) from $6.38
Avg. Customer Rating:  60 reviews
Sales Rank: 3980
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 1
ISBN: 0679736328
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679736325
ASIN: 0679736328
Publication Date: May 5, 1992
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Fantastic. July 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Mr Suttree...the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees."
Such are the characters and such is the language of Suttree, a novel about Cornelius Suttree, who in 1952 has abandoned his life of privilege because of his relationship with his father and has opted instead for the life of a river rat, living in a shoddy houseboat under the bridges of Knoxville, Tennessee and eeking out a living as a fisherman. When not checking his lines, he spends his time drinking, fighting, in jail, wandering through the woods alone, and hanging out with the dredges of society.
The world of Sutree is an underbelly of grime and muck, populated by a violent, immoral, idiotic but usually likable cast of characters. Suttree himself is one of the more noble of them, but the most enjoyable is a hare-brained schemer named Harrogate. Suttree meets the "country mouse" (as he calls Harrogate) in the workhouse after Harrogate is arrested for engaging in repeated carnal relations with watermelons. Later in the book Suttree finds him shooting poisoned meat from a slingshot, killing bats which he then delivers to the local hospital for a bounty ($1 per bat), and then again Suttree discovers him in a cave unconscious after his plan to dynamite a tunnel under the city and into a bank vault goes awry.
It takes awhile to care for Suttree, partly because he doesn't seem to care about much himself. But by the end of the novel, McCarthy has given us enough, in small pieces here and there, that we have in Suttree a deep, well-rounded and sympathetic, if flawed, character. All the big names have been thrown around by critics describing this book--Twain, Joyce, Steinbeck, Faulkner--but I feel like McCarthy is his own. Just as quintessentially American as Twain or Steinbeck, but wholly original. I'm actually surprised to say that I may like this book better than some of his later, more sparsely written novels. It's really really good.
Definitely in my all-time 5 favorite book list. July 2, 2008
In my opinion, this is Cormac McCarthy at his absolute finest. The story of Suttree, the homeless vagabond, is so utterly compelling that time just falls away as you're reading it. If you've never read McCarthy (*gasp!*), this would be a helluva great place to start. This story haunts me.
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy June 29, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
I enjoyed this book very much. I have enjoyed all the books I have read by Cormac McCarthy. They don't always end happily but are true to life.
Suttree May 31, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I've just read Suttree. As did McCarthy's later book, The Road, Suttree gave me the feeling of knowing, or having known, the protagonist, and liking him very much.
Dusty clockless hours of penetrating prose...... April 3, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Knoxville, Tennessee is the setting of this masterfully mesmerizing novel of life at the edge and inside the cesspools of dozens of outcasts and derelicts.
Cornelius Suttree, as the story's main protagonist, takes the reader unhurriedly into the very heart of Knoxville as it existed in the 1950's.
Murky waters, strife, poverty, perversion, and crime all mingle within the bowels of the city.
McCarthy deftly captures the pulse of people's lives and spins stories with such a leathery, tenacious grace, that the reader is gently pulled into a stark and unordered life.... and down into the bare rawness of life with powerful prose.
When I first finished SUTTREE, I grabbed a pen before my mind had a chance to roam away somewhere else; I wrote the following....mimicking what I had just unraveled for the last few days and 471 pages....
'Hardswaggering through Suttree til my rheumy peepholes drank in the cloacal riverbottoms. Fareyed half naked cockerels nodded in a constant blue dawn.
Leprous waters churned bobbing maimed melons. Dragged up rawlooking tawed treponema on trotlines in the crepuscular dawn and almost drowned in the miasmic mierda and upflung penumbra.'
I dare not disremember this journey and Knoxville for a very long time!
Susanne
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
