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Title: Child of God
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Manufacturer: Vintage
List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $7.89
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| Customer Reviews: |
| Child of God by Vintage too strange for me... | | This book was too weird for me, it was just too graphic. I read it only because it has caused a controversy in an area school. The teacher that allowed his student to read this book has now been fired. I know that I don't want my own kids to read this book. Mr. McCarthy has done much better with his other works. | | Child of God by Vintage good book | | i didn't like it as much as The Road, but i still thought it was pretty good. Sometimes i got a little lost as to who was speaking, narrator vs character, but the "story" was good. | | Child of God by Vintage Child of God | | This book is not for the easily offended or a young audience. While reading this novel, I was shocked yet could not put it down. The main character, Lester Ballard, is disturbing but somehow the author makes the reader have empathy for him. VERY SHOCKING and DISTURBING! | | Child of God by Vintage Disturbing | | Cormac McCarthy fuses Faulknerian dialog with the violence of Sade in this particularly gruesome and short novel. This novel's critical acclaim is probably nothing more than the combination of McCarthy's considerable technical skills and the shock value of the content. The 'protagonist' engages in violent rape, murder, and necrophilia in this repugnant piece of literary stylism. I could not put it down but I also could not help from thinking that it is ultimately a thin achievement. | | Child of God by Vintage A dark, bitter tale of good and evil | Saying that "Child of God" is about good and evil may sound a bit pretentious. Indeed, this tale of Lester Ballard, an outcast from society, doesn't seem too high-handed at first. It initially comes off as a gritty, honest portrayal of a man driven to murder and necrophilia. It's a bit hard to read, both due to imagery and language; readers will wince at the horrible scenes as much as the complicated dialogue and phrasing.
But that's just Cormac McCarthy for you; his grasp on the English language is unparalleled in today's literary circles, and at times is daunting, a puzzle that must be unravelled. Therein lies half the fun. The other half is putting the novel down and thinking about what you've read. "Child of God" makes us question our own humanity; like McCarthy's more recent "The Road," or any other of his novels, it makes you wonder what you yourself are capable of doing, if driven to your outermost limits. Is this an easy read? No, not hardly. But is it a worthwhile read? Oh, most definitely. Cormac McCarthy is one of the few fiction writers today who genuinely has something to say, and who won't beat you over the head with it; he'll say his piece, then leave it up to you to figure it out. That's one of the things that makes great literature so great. | | Child of God by Vintage Product Description | | In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard--a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape--haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance. | | Child of God by Vintage Amazon.com | | "Scuttling down the mountain with the thing on his back he looked like a man beset by some ghast succubus, the dead girl riding him with legs bowed akimbo like a monstrous frog." Child of God must be the most sympathetic portrayal of necrophilia in all of literature. The hero, Lester Ballard, is expelled from his human family and ends up living in underground caves, which he peoples with his trophies: giant stuffed animals won in carnival shooting galleries and the decomposing corpses of his victims. Cormac McCarthy's much-admired prose is suspenseful, rich with detail, and yet restrained, even delicate, in its images of Lester's activities. So tightly focused is the story on this one "child of God" that it resembles a myth, or parable. "You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you.... A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it." |
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