Musing on McCarthy

Read The Road over my holiday work break. Cormac McCarthy's prose verged on poetry, as usual, but I cannot quite imagine trying to translate his vision into film, so I have my doubts about going to see the John Hillcoat movie. From what I understand from reviews the filmmakers actually soft-pedalled the bleakness of the book....Blood Meridian still appears to me to be McCarthy's greatest accomplishment, but it would take an unconventional filmmaker to carry off an adaptation in this era when movies are market-tested to death. The potential to produce an epic visual palette is there -- I'll carry his jagged, lightning-struck cordilleras in my mind's eye for the rest of my life. McCarthy's vision of human nature is unrelentingly grim; I have to honor him for being more honest that many mythologizers of the old West have been -- there is nothing sentimental in Blood Meridian. As good as they were with No Country for Old Men, I still can't imagine even the Coen brothers pulling it off.