In Harold Bloom's prologue to Blood Meridian he calls the novel a genuine work of genius, easily the best novel by any living American writer, for these reasons:
1) The descriptions of nature
2) The descriptions of violence; Bloom says these initially made the novel unreadable to him but the artistry of the imagery transports the violence into metaphor, as in the Iliad.
3) Maybe most of all, the judge's philosophical monologues.
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Interrupt all you like. We're involved in a complicated story here, and not everything is quite what it seems to be.
—Paul Auster
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