A masterclass by Adrian Wootton on the world-class author of the novel Blood Meridian and other contemporary masterpieces was held at IULM. An article by Zoe Benatti
The fourth day of Noir in Festival kicked off with a masterclass conducted by film and book connoisseur Adrian Wootton and devoted to the multi-award-winning author and screenwriter Cormac McCarthy, who died last June.
Surveying the writer’s entire career, from his childhood to his greatest successes, the novels No Country for Old Men and The Road, Adrian Wootton discussed McCarthy’s turbulent life, connecting it to the larger themes of Southern Gothic and Western Noir.
As enigmatic as the protagonists of his novels, McCarthy has always preferred life on the margins of society, even in abject poverty, and never chased the limelight. Only by reading and analyzing his books, Wootton explains, can we come to understand the personality and sheer genius of one of the most-acclaimed genre writers in the last sixty years.
As well as the aforementioned No Country for Old Men and The Road, other works such as Child of God, Blood Meridian, and the most recent The Passenger are distinguished by the crudeness of the subject matter and the absence of taboos of any kind. Violence, murder, cannibalism, and incest are just some of McCarthy’s implacably recurring themes.
Ranging from the printed page to the screen and the stage, Wootton brings home the uniqueness of this author who, right from the start, “believed in obscurity above all”.
