Dusty clockless hours of penetrating prose......

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	• Suttree Cormac Mccarthy Vintage, 1992 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 52 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Words oozed from the muddy river

Perhaps not the first CMcC title one should look at. But I strongly recommend this book to the dedicated reader. I feel it is full of rewards for those who can persevere. The stoic Suttree, almost unknowable, inhabits a world of depressive sludge where the dank sky brings forth very little hope. The characters and scenes are painted meticulously, all crying out from their painful existence. Yet there is very little complaint but a great deal of ingenuity, although mostly fraught with failure. Like a bitter jar of moonshine whiskey this story must be suffered to be savored. The overall effect, a numbing dreamscape depicted so thoroughly that falling into its murky reality finally made sense.

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Dusty clockless hours of penetrating prose......

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

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Suttree

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.

McCarthy's Dystopia

Cormac McCarthy's Suttree is really quite marvelous. He outdoes Melville for extended descriptive passages; his stygian Knoxville is a much better Gothic symbol than Moby Dick; his rounds of Hell are much more vivid than Dante's but without any Canon law; his dialogue more precious than Faulkner's, his Ulysses more appealing than Joyce's. Paradise has been lost--thrown away--and God's ways are rationalized to man in one key quote: "I always knowed they was a god. I just didn't like him."

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The Shoes of the Fisherman

Set in 1950's Tennessee, McCarthy reprises an appearance by one of the original disciples as he tends to his flock of the poor, the humble and the n'eer-do-wells residing in the underbelly of Knoxville. Fisher of catfish and men and utterly,fallibly human, Suttree surpasses the limits of humanity (in stark contrast to the violent,vile and obscene setting of the novel) in his limitless concern for the slum-dwellers that populate his universe.

This book left me shaken for a week after I finished it.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

By the author of Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, Suttree is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there--a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters--he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.

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