Cormac McCarthy gave up the battle against those less good than him

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa distinguished between fat writers and thin writers. Baroques generous with words, and those from whom nothing can be taken away, there is only the essential on the page. Cormac McCarthy rather than thin he was skeletal. Even in punctuation. He admitted full stops and rare commas. No quotes, he hated “those fly marks”. He hated semicolons above all else (incidentally and by the way, attracting the writer’s posthumous lightning bolts, the issue was long debated between me and Giuliano Ferrara, who uses semicolons like a master also on WhatsApp). Woe to inverted commas and colons to introduce direct speech. He didn’t even bother to clearly indicate who was speaking. If the reader is distracted, too bad for him – he who has read knows it well The street the novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 and circulated the name of Cormac McCarthy outside the circle of orphans of William Faulkner. Together with It’s no country for old menwhich later became a beautiful film by the Coen brothers.