As noted when I posted Suttree, I’ve been on a Cormac McCarthy reading kick – The Passenger and Stella Maris and The Orchard Keeper and Suttree and Child of God and now Outer Dark.
It’s another Odyssey / road book – and a very bleak one. Almost every chance encounter takes some sort of dark turn.
Notes and quotes…
2682 No. Well. I ain’t much neither but that’s the way I believe. The more I study a thing the more I get it backards. Study long and ye study wrong. That’s what a old rifleshooter told me oncet beat me out of half a beef in a rifleshoot. I know things I ain’t never studied. I know things I ain’t never even thought of.
2898 Everbody’s subject to get in a ditch sometime or anothern, Holme said. I ain’t lookin for nobody to be sorry for me.
2936 Cholera? Cholera?
Hell, it weren’t nothin but a mouthful of corn.
I lost a whole family to it now don’t lie to me like I ain’t never seen it goddamn it.
Shit, Holme said.
O yes. Five youngerns. Five. And damn near the old lady too. God knows why he didn’t … I taken it back—God knows all right. Why he’s kept that flaptongued bitch down here as long as he has. The flowered crown to all other abominations. A walkin plague in your own house. That’s what’s been visited on me. You sure you ain’t sick?
Shit, Holme said. I ain’t never been sick a day in my life savin the whoopincough one time.
- Read Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy