In Memory of Cormac McCarthy: Oscar Villalon on an Iconic Writer’s Life, Work, and Legacy

Editor and literary critic Oscar Villalon joins V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to celebrate the life and legacy of the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who died last month. The hosts and Villalon reflect on McCarthy’s vast vocabulary and cinematic descriptions, in which he juxtaposed lyrical prose with graphic violence. Villalon considers McCarthy’s use of regionally accurate Spanish in the Border Trilogy as evidence of the author’s broad understanding of the US’s multilingual diversity. Villalon also reads and discusses a passage from McCarthy’s 1994 novel The Crossing , the second book in the trilogy. Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel , Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel , and our website . This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf and Todd Loughran. * From the episode: Oscar Villalon: I think it’s very interesting that he thought it important to include Spanish in those books. It’s all through The Border Trilogy as well—not just not just in All the Pretty Horses . I think that speaks to somebody who has an understanding of the U.S. that isn’t narrow. Just reading his books he has a grand view, a cosmology of… I guess you would call it menace. The cosmology of evil versus good. I think that vision allows him to see things differently; it allows him to see things as they are as opposed to the way people want them to be. So what I found thrilling was to say, “Oh, my characters—these Anglos who grew up on the border–would know Spanish. They would be, to a degree, bicultural.” The late Carlos Fuentes talked about this all the time, about the U.S.-Mexico border being its own thing. I think he had a whole story collection, The Crystal Frontier, that this is a specific region, and a region with its own culture and its own understanding of history. And he reflected that, which I found to be tremendous but also found to be liberating. Because if he can do this, then other folks… Why not you? If you want to employ Spanish or whatever other language […]

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