After reading his later novel "The Road", I thought I would give this early work a try.

Bottom line is this was one of the least appealing works of fiction I have read in a long time. The author's prolix style is off putting and frankly makes it seems that he is trying too hard. His writing style was often obscure and confusing - at several points during the novel I wondered what was actually transpiring.

While the premise of the work and Southern Gothic style had potential, this fell entirely flat. Not recommended. ( )

Situada en una pequeña y remota comunidad rural de Tennessee en el período de entreguerras, nos habla de la vida de John Wesley Rattner, un muchacho, y de Marion Sylder, un vagabundo fuera de la ley que ha matado al padre del chico, aunque ninguno de los dos lo sabe. Ambos, junto a Ather, el tío de Rattner, cuya estoica independencia pertenece ya a otra época, protagonizarán un drama que parece nacer de las entrañas de la tierra. Los tres son antihéroes de una intensa y emotiva reivindicación de valores perdidos en el tiempo.

Set in the rural, poverty stricken foothills of the Smoky Mountains in 1930s Tennessee, the time and place of this book is foreign to me. More foreign to me is Cormac McCarthy’s overwrought and verbose writing style. (Fans would call it evocative and descriptive.) McCarthy’s reputation and the brooding red cover of this short novel drew me in, as I had read and enjoyed his book The Road a few years ago.

My problem is, I’m still not sure what The Orchard Keeper was about. Its defining feature is the author’s dense, extended descriptions of landscape, weather, and the minutiae of seemingly banal events.

For characters there are a couple of young male friends causing trouble. A bar that burns down. Hitchhikers who disappear. A dead body in a pond in a gravel quarry. An old man living alone in the woods. A bootlegger who gets arrested by the cops. How are they all connected? I’m not sure. Who was McCarthy talking about in any given scene? I’m also not sure.

I can appreciate McCarthy‘s skill as a gritty poet of earth-bound and outcast living, however I don’t aspire to it as a style of writing. It compelled me enough to read on, but it did not move me. I had to decide to read the slow moving and confusing scenes for an appreciation of the words alone, and not for plot or character development.

I’m always looking for a key take away in what I read. McCarthy’s style was my great inhibitor here. I could not find what was universal in this story about the human experience. Here’s my best effort: I sense in this novel an opportunity to reflect on and appreciate life amidst the ceaseless march of time and the small moments that make up the mosaic of our lives. A summer rain. The rustle of leaves under foot in the woods. Sunset. A flock of sparrows.

The characters and plot were as fleeting and ephemeral as McCarthy’s writing. Ghosts. Shadows. Just another part of the earth, which seems in The Orchard Keeper to be his true protagonist. ( )

I usually like Cormac McCarthy, but this one saw my feet caught in the mud. I often found it difficult to understand what was happening and to whom (characters in new chapters are often introduced only as 'he', despite having names); the moment when the dog was abandoned was the only moment that really struck me, from a dramatic point of view. The words sometimes look good on the page, but The Orchard Keeper is overgrown and hard to dig into. The narrative is buried under the prose, and the prose is hard ground.

The book is verbose and overeggs its portentousness ("a fevered look in his eye like some wild spodomantic sage divining in driven haste the fate of whole galaxies against their imminent ruin" (pg. 240)) – a common and justified criticism of this author. McCarthy can deliver atmosphere and landscape, but I can only listen to twigs crack underfoot so many times. I craved plot. It's well to paint a sunrise, but you've got to do something with the day. ( )

I decided to read McCarthy in order, including the novels I hadn't got around to reading the first time, because I just kept re-reading Blood Meridian. Well, as others have noted, this one is more or less McCarthy juvenilia. It gives you much of what is best about his later work--the sheer density of nouns, mostly--but also a bunch of what is worst about 20th century American literature: the tiresome scene-setting ("Fartswogton was a small town about twenty miles outside Nashville..."), the haziness masquerading as profundity (see also: Robinson, Marilynne, Housekeeping, which is more or less this book but with women instead of men), and the simultaneous need for a plot (because there are no ideas, or formal innovations, or really form at all) and inability to provide one.

On the other hand, this man could always write sentences. ( )