Cormac McCarthy
Suttree

"Dear friend, now in the dusty timeless hours of the city when the streets stretch dark and steaming in the wake of the watering trucks and now that the drunk and the homeless have taken shelter behind walls in the alleys or in the wastelands and the cats move forward gaunt and hunched in these gloomy surroundings, now in these cobbled or paved corridors black with soot where the shadow of the power lines draws gothic harps on the basement doors, no living soul will walk except you."

These few lines could be enough to describe an entire world. A visceral work that condenses, often with temporal superimpositions and sudden flashbacks, a slice of life of the fisherman Cornelius "Buddy" Suttree.

Suttree is an anti-hero, a self-exile who has rejected a better life. A sort of "return to the origins," a theme dear and recurring in the poetics of McCarthy. He lives by fishing, by expedients, circulating in the unhealthy nooks of a Knoxville never so rotten and inhospitable. He is surrounded, despite himself, by human wrecks like J-Bone, Oceanfrog, Hoghead, and especially Harrogate, probably one of the most bizarre and troglodytic figures ever produced in literature.

Within this smoky world governed by poverty and alcohol, Suttree does the only thing human beings can do: live. In a world that devours life, which seems to have been spat out specifically to drive man away, Suttree and all his crooked friends carry on. Because "Suttree" is also a story of survival, of those relegated to the margins of creation but who continue to breathe their anxious life.

The fourth work of Cormac McCarthy is certainly the most complex ever produced by the writer from Rhode Island. Nothing could be further from the stylistic stripping of the later "No Country for Old Men" and "The Road," but instead, an implausibly dense style, attentive to the most invisible details. Even the opening that began the review can give an idea of the stylistic hallmark of the work, as can one of the most accurate descriptions contained in the novel: "He could hear the river faintly confabulating beneath him, an old and dense river lined with wrinkles. Under the flow of the water, cannons and trucks, grapnels entangled rusting in the mud, keelboats decomposing into mucilage. Legendary sturgeons with bony and pentagonal bodies, catfish, and carp coppery and shining like dace, with their pale, sprueless belly, a dense muck studded with broken glass, bones, rusty cans, and shards of crockery veined with black mud cracks."

"Suttree" is a true epic, a work that transcends any kind of label to enter the temple of the "milestones" of twentieth-century literature. It is impossible to delve into all the themes and subplots brought to life by McCarthy's pen. Impossible not to get lost in the chaotic and at the same time enchanting flow of words. "Suttree" is a unicum in the career of Cormac McCarthy, his certainly most autobiographical and complex effort. The reading, especially for those not accustomed to the prose of the "early McCarthy," could also prove to be very challenging. This is because McCarthy delves into his characters and leaves us within their consciousnesses, often abandoning us to pages and pages of visionary and apocalyptic "stream of consciousness." It is almost evident to think of that William Faulkner to whom he has often been compared for lyricism and violence.

The fourth literary offspring (1979) of Cormac McCarthy is a work that should be read at least once in a lifetime. One of those stories that simply gets inside you. "Suttree" is the result of the pure genius of what many consider the greatest contemporary storyteller. An author who delivers punch after punch, never yielding to sentimentality, yet capable of poetic openings and images of unusual beauty. A great author, one who, in the age of the triumph of "commercial literature," should be widely rediscovered.

And anyway, deep down, there's a bit of Cornelius "Buddy" Suttree in all of us..