Of Cormac McCarthy, Saul Bellow said that he wielded the tongue with irresistible power, and that his sentences “gave life and death”. “He’s the only one who understood this damned country,” told us, in a more western style, comedian Tommy Lee Jones, who dreamed of bringing Blood Meridian to the screen. The great American novelist, who died on June 13 at the age of 89, left behind him a considerable body of work.

Born in 1933, he grew up in Tennessee and appears on the literary scene as a kind of neo-Faulkner who does not hesitate to add macabre (necrophilia, cannibalism) and the grotesque. Suttree, in 1979 (Actes Sud, 1994 for the French edition), is the best of his four Gothic Southern novels. Then opens a new creative period for Cormac McCarthy, who moved to El Paso (Texas) in 1975, after a divorce.

Cormac McCarthy’s first masterpiece, this novel written with a scalpel takes place in the middle of the 19th century in western land, between Texas and Mexico. Its hero, the “Kid”, just 14 years old, has no name or psychology. He is an agent of chaos and violence, a brute force who hunts down the Indians in the company of a gang driven by an unquenchable thirst for blood. We often talk about the biblical reference in McCarthy, whose short sentences often evoke the verse. With him, whose universe is so profoundly nihilistic, the notion of transcendence is nevertheless absent. But his style of enigmatic simplicity willingly takes on a metaphorical scope. And the abrupt violence of his characters falls on the victims as relentlessly as the wrath of the God of the Old Testament.

Translated by François Hirsch, Gallimard, 1988 for the French edition. Available in paperback from L’Olivier editions, 464 pages, €12.90.

From the famous opening pages – the lyrical description of a train slicing through the landscape at dawn – So Pretty Horses sweeps you away. As in Blood Meridian, the action takes place between Texas and Mexico, and concerns a teenager. But the resemblance ends there. John Grady Cole and his friend Lester Rawlins dream of another life, with horses, and the sweetness of their aspirations is communicated to the entire book. It is in this novel, the first of the “borders trilogy” (which continues with The Great Passage and ends with Cities on the plain), that Cormac McCarthy cements his reputation as a great novelist of the American landscape. The book earned him the National Book Award, his first major award.

Translated by François Hirsch and Patricia Schaeffer, Actes Sud, 1993 for the French edition. Available in paperback at Points, 408 pages, €8.90.

In this noir novel, all the more famous for being brought to the screen by the Coen brothers with breathtaking virtuosity, McCarthy tells the story of a drug deal that goes wrong and a poor wretch who thinks he can steal drug traffickers with impunity. We are in Texas, in the jurisdiction of old Sheriff Bell, already very disillusioned when the story begins and who will not find in the unfolding of events any reason to believe more in humanity… Especially when he meets Anton Chighur, a killer inscrutable hired man who executes his victims with cattle guns. Never was McCarthy more pessimistic or more virtuosic.

Translated by François Hirsch, L’Olivier, 2007 for the French edition. Available in paperback at Points, 320 pages, €8.90.

Leaving the arid landscapes of the American West, Cormac McCarthy imagines a planet ravaged by a nuclear apocalypse, a world of radical hostility where a man and his son try to survive against all odds. The son, born just after the tragedy, only knows this desperate version of life where the only stake is to survive each day, the worst dangers coming not from the natural world but from the cruelty of men. The novelist sprinkles this tragedy of modernity with rare moments of sweetness. The strength of the father-son bond (McCarthy dedicates the book to his son John) ends up shrouding his despair with a little light.

Translated by François Hirsch, L’Olivier, 2008 for the French edition. Available in paperback at Points, 256 pages, €8.90.

McCarthy’s latest novel, Stella Maris works in tandem with The Passenger. In these two ambitious novels, the writer’s passion for physics and mathematics is embodied in unforgettable characters, notably Alicia Western, a doctoral student in mathematics at the University of Chicago who is threatened by madness and haunted by the figure of her father, who participated in the manufacture of the nuclear bomb. A rare heroine in the man-populated world of McCarthy’s books, Alicia never stops talking and is overwhelming with her humor and liveliness. We find there the existential depth of the great novels of McCarthy and the elegiac sweetness of So Pretty Horses. A great book to conclude a masterful work.

Translated by Paule Guivarch, L’Olivier, 2023 for the French edition. 256 pages, €21.50.