Farewell to Cormac McCarthy, the author of "No Country for Old Men"
He was 89 years old, among the greatest in US literature
The great American writer Cormac McCarthy died yesterday at the age of 89 at his home in Santa Fe , New Mexico. This was announced by the Knopf publishing house.
His most famous works include “ Wild Horses ”, the post-apocalyptic “ The Road ” for which he won the Pulitzer and “ No Country for Old Men ”, adapted by the Coen brothers into a film with Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin, awarded at the Academy Awards.
In Italy McCarthy was published by Einaudi.
The writer's early works were set in Appalachia in the style of William Faulkner, and it is no coincidence that the editor of McCarthy's first five books at Random House, Albert Erskine, was also the editor of "The Reveirs", the latest novel by the Nobel Prize winner.
Last year, defying age, the author of the Frontier Trilogy had returned to writing after a long break: "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris", released in the US two months apart, were two novels with a intertwined that detached itself thematically and stylistically from the writer's previous work to tell the story of the obsessive love of Bobby and Alicia Western, two brothers tormented by the legacy of their father, a physicist who had helped build the atomic bomb.
Most of McCarthy's books, which had recently been talked about as smacking of Nobel, were set in the South and Southwest of the United States . Many have been adapted by Hollywood: in addition to "No Country for Old Men", "The Road" was brought to the cinema by John Hillcoat with Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee while "Wild Horses" - his first bestseller - from Billy Bob Thornton with Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz (in Italy it was released under the title Passione Ribelle).
Active in the community of Santa Fe, the writer did not frequent the literary and worldly world and in this sense he has been defined as one of the "invisibles" of US literature together with JD Salinger and Thomas Pynchon.
The critic Harold Bloom held him in the highest esteem: in his opinion McCarthy was part of the "magnificent four" of contemporary star-spangled fiction alongside Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Philip Roth.
The release of the two novels last year had closed a long period of silence on the part of the writer, whose 10 previous books had come out regularly starting with the first, "The Guardian of the Orchard", published in 1965.
In the interregnum of recent years McCarthy had instead limited himself to the screenplay of The Counselor by Ridley Scott in 2013.
(Unioneonline/vl)
