داستان درباره­ی گروهی از مزدوران است که در ازای پولی که گرفته­اند می­بایست هر چه سرخپوست و مکزیکی و البته سیاهپوست ببینند، بکشند. آنان از چندین ایالت گذر می­کنند و می­کشند و تجاوز می­کنند و غارت می­کنند و به آتش می­کشند. حتی سگانی که بی­موقع پارس ­کنند هم از شر گلوله­ ها و ضربات چاقویی که سخاوتمندانه نثار هر جنبنده­ای می­کنند در امان نیستند. شخصیت­های خاص و عموماً خونخوار و وحشی وارد داستان می­شوند و ریتم خاصی به روند اتفاقات می­دهند. روایت اما به گونه­ایست که تا یک سوم پایانی هنوز مطمئن نیستیم که قهرمان کدام است یا اصولاً قهرمانی در این داستان وجود دارد. گاهی به شخصیتی امید می­بندیم و در انتظار بارقه­ای از انسانیت از او می­نشینیم اما مک­کارتی بارها و بارها بی­رحمانه حباب خیال ما را محو می­کند و ما را متعجب از توانایی­های انسان در فاصله گرفتن از انسانیت رها می­کند.

معرفی و دانلود کتاب نصف­النهار خون: یا سرخیِ غروب در غرب

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

نام انگلیسی کتاب:

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

نام فارسی کتاب:

نصف­النهار خون: یا سرخیِ غروب در غرب

نویسنده:

کورمک مک‌کارتی

Cormac McCarthy

درباره رمان نصف­النهار خون: یا سرخیِ غروب در غرب نوشته کورمک مک کارتی:

داستان درباره­ی گروهی از مزدوران است که در ازای پولی که گرفته­اند می­بایست هر چه سرخپوست و مکزیکی و البته سیاهپوست ببینند، بکشند. آنان از چندین ایالت گذر می­کنند و می­کشند و تجاوز می­کنند و غارت می­کنند و به آتش می­کشند. حتی سگانی که بی­موقع پارس ­کنند هم از شر گلوله­ ها و ضربات چاقویی که سخاوتمندانه نثار هر جنبنده­ای می­کنند در امان نیستند. شخصیت­های خاص و عموماً خونخوار و وحشی وارد داستان می­شوند و ریتم خاصی به روند اتفاقات می­دهند. روایت اما به گونه­ایست که تا یک سوم پایانی هنوز مطمئن نیستیم که قهرمان کدام است یا اصولاً قهرمانی در این داستان وجود دارد. گاهی به شخصیتی امید می­بندیم و در انتظار بارقه­ای از انسانیت از او می­نشینیم اما مک­کارتی بارها و بارها بی­رحمانه حباب خیال ما را محو می­کند و ما را متعجب از توانایی­های انسان در فاصله گرفتن از انسانیت رها می­کند.

شخصیت­های اصلی داستان عبارتند از: “پسربچه” که در میانه­ی راه به این گروه می­پیوندد، “گلَنتون” که سرگروه مزدوران و مرد سفاکی­ست و البته “قاضی هولدن”(یا “دادرس هولدن”) که یکی از جذاب­ترین و در عین حال وحشتناک­ترین شخصیت­های ادبیات معاصر است، می­توان گفت که او آخرین جامع ­العلوم است، کسی که بر چندین و چند زبانِ اروپایی و امریکایی تسلط دارد، دستی در تمامِ علوم دارد و در طول داستان به جمع ­آوری گیاهان و طراحی و نکته­ برداری از رفتارهای جانداران است تنها برای اینکه پس از طراحی و مطالعه و نمونه­برداری نوشته­ ها و نمونه­ ها را از بین ببرد و نابود کند چرا که به نتیجه­ای ناامید کننده در باب هم­زیستیِ طبیعت و انسان رسیده و فلسفه­ای وحشتناک برای زندگی خود برگزیده. داستان بر اساس واقعیت است و جنایت­های “گلَنتون” و دارودسته­ی خونخوارش در میانه­ی قرن نوزده یکی از تاریک­ترین نقاط تاریخ امریکا را رقم زده­اند.

رمان در پایان چشم ما را به حقیقتی می­گشاید که از دیدنش هراس داریم و به محض مواجهه با آن، سعی در فراموش کردنش داریم. داستان توجیهی­ست برای جنگ و روایتی­ست در باب اهمیت وجود خوی وحشی انسان و نقش آن در پایه­گذاریِ یک تمدن مترقی (در اینجا امریکا) و پیشرفتِ آن. این رمان در زمره­ی برترین آثار ادبیات معاصر امریکا قرار گرفته و خودِ مک­کارتی نیز از مهم­ترین نویسندگان زنده­ ی امریکا به شمار می­رود. از میان دیگر آثار مطرح او نیز می­توان به «همه­ی اسبان زیبا»، «جاده» و «جایی برای پیرمردها نیست» اشاره کرد. او تاکنون موفق به دریافت جوایزی چون جایزه­ی ملی کتاب امریکا، پولیتزر و پِن/سال بلو شده است. منتقدین به او لقب «شاعر خشونت­های انسانی» داده­اند و او را با نویسنده­ی بزرگ امریکایی، ویلیام فالکنر مقایسه می­کنند. رمان «نصف­النهار خون» همچون بسیاری دیگر از آثار مهم ادبیات معاصر امریکا مورد بی­توجهی مترجمان و ناشران کشور ما قرار گرفته و ترجمه­ای از آن در بازار کتاب کشورمان موجود نیست.

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

جملاتی از  متن انگلیسی کتاب 

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West Quotes

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“They were watching, out there past men’s knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“All other trades are contained in that of war.

Is that why war endures?

No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.

That’s your notion.

The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man’s vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgments ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to his moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

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