So are we gonna talk about No Country For Old Men, he said.

Why not, she replied.

Then we gotta do it like McCarthy, he said. Short sentences. Southern dialect. No punctuation.

I can drop the punctuation, she said. But I can't do Southern.

You can try.

Well then I caint. That good enough for you?

Youre tryin. That's the important thing. Caint do more than try.

Thank you. I wish I could speak it. It's a beautiful language. But I aint got his ear. He's got the best ear for dialect this side of Mark Twai More...

I appreciate the nuances of a McCarthy novel: his voice, the settings, the very real characters he conjures within that mind of his. But the one thing I cannot accept is when people say he only writes westerns. His books cannot be categorized with such a simple claim. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is a perfect example. Sure, McCarthy uses some sterotypes (easy-going sheriff, bumbling hero, and creepy psychopath) to tell his story, but he uses them in ways that few writers can--McCarthy breaths life int More...

This is started as a one-star book, then progressed to four slowly as the story unfolded. The novel grows on you.

No Country for Old Men starts out in a thoroughly disjointed way. Multiple POVs, total lack of punctuation, dialogue rendered exactly as the characters speak it... the reader is utterly confused as to where the focus is, who the protagonist is, and what the story is about.

It could be about one Llewlyn Moss who stumbles upon a fortune while hunting antelope near the Rio Grande. A tran More...

This is my least favorite McCarthy that I have ever, ever read. And you know what that tells you? Not shit, except that the man can basically do no wrong in my eyes. I can and will nitpick, but just know that I don't really mean it and it's only because I love you, baby.

First thing's first: I saw this movie about a zillion times before I read the book, though I wish, I wish, I wish that I hadn't. When an author bases a novel's emotional heft largely on the momentum of its action, suspense, and g More...

Cormac McCarthy is a goddamned poet with some mad, kick-ass storytelling skills. Speechless for the moment. Brain is goo. Please stand by.

This book broke my brain. On the surface, McCarthy is weaving a modern day western aptly soaked in blood and ruthlessness, where the line between hero and villain is sharply drawn. On that same surface, what we have is a cast of archetypes – the weary sheriff who has stayed too long and seen too much; the everyday man living right until he is undone by greed; More...

4.5 to 5.0 stars. First, a pre-emptive apology...this is my first Cormac McCarthy novel and so my gush of praise may be a tad too CAPTAIN KIRKISH in its melodramatic over the top-ness, so please forgive me. I will attempt to keep my giddiness to a minimum...but man can this guy write a novel!!!

I will start by saying without trying to sound overly stuffy or pretentious that I thought this was a brilliant, nuanced, multi-layered story that was told in extremely simple, straight-forward prose yet More...

Just adding a link; http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/dru...

It's a modern day shoot-em-up with bad ass Mexican drug dealers in Texas. What can I say?. What else do you need to know?. I mainly read it after reading McCarthy's "The Road" that everyone (well nearly everyone) seems to be falling over themselves in saying it's the greatest thing in literature since sliced bread - or words to that effect. Meh. While reading "The Road" I kept getting the feeling that it was either a very poor translati More...

My first attempt at Cormac McCarthy. The movie just won an oscar and the hype was starting to wane some (being a month and a Britney relapse ago) and well, 'The Road' was out at the library.

I wasn't sure what I was going to get out of it. The writing style and use of southern dialect was a bit off putting, but once I found the rhythm...
It reminded me of that old cliche (the story, not the dialect--keep up)of the good guys with the white hats---bad guys in black (or Spy vs. Spy if you want to get More...

Right off the bat I have to say this is a book that I'm not so sure I can do enough justice to in my review. There are so many themes and subtleties here (this is another book as much about what isn't said/done as what is), and I'm not sure that I've entirely digested all of them. A lot of the "professional" reviews tie some of the themes to the Bible, and having little knowledge of the Bible, there's a chance I'm missing out on some things. That said, even without that knowledge, this book stil More...

I wrote a review of this for the Sackets Harbor Gazette!
If you think that the western novel genre died with Louis L’Amour. Think again. Cormac McCarthy has been writing them after a fashion for a while with a style all his own and a voice as stark and certain as the plains of Texas he often describes. No Country for Old Men, first published in 2005 and recently brought out in paperback as a movie tie-in, is a story of duty, treachery, loyalty, and evil; of a decision to act made by instinct the More...

No Country For Old Men may be Cormac McCarthy's most accessible and fun book yet, but that doesn't mean there's nothing more to it. Ostensibly the story of a drug deal gone bad, it's also an elegy for simpler (or at least, less horrible) times, a study of the relationship between fathers and their sons, and - like all Cormac McCarthy books that I've read - an existential probe into the nature of evil with only the faintest glimmer of any hope or any God. It also features one of the most frighten More...

Here's an unusual encounter.

I met Cormac McCarthy at the Oscars this year, and we had a very pleasant little chat. This was an important moment to me not only because he is the author of Blood Meridian, No Country For Old Men and The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize, but also because McCarthy is famous for his almost Salinger-like reclusive tendencies. He does not do interviews or show up on The Tonight Show. He doesn't walk red carpets, tour colleges on lecture tours, or do any of the public More...

This is definitely a man's book, loaded with violence and male tendency toward underexplaining vs female overanalyzing. The first half I thought there must be nothing gained from the book over the movie (I haven't seen it) because it read like a movie script describing one violent murder after the next without any insight into characters' motives, emotions, intentions, all the reasons a book is better.

But near the end of the book, you realize that this is not Moss' story, but sheriff Bell's. Yo More...

"You can't go to war without G-d." So says Cormac McCarthy. The concept that G-d has a vested interest in war is as ancient as war itself. Fore did G-d not say to the Israelites as they prepared to enter Canaan: "My terror I send before thee, and I have put to death all the people among whom thou comest, and I have given the neck of all thine enemies unto thee. (EX 23:27)." It is not only in Judaism that a deity steps to the plate in the eternal struggle between men. In the Greek classic "The Il More...

Ah sureas hell aint foolish enough to write this here review in dialect cause ah sureas hell know itll sound like ahm fixin for a spankin from the real deep south folks, but ah caint resist the urge when the whole damn novel sounds like this, an why the hell not? Ah mean were in some southern location maybe Texas aint we? But cain ah keep up the dialect for the whole review? No, I sure as hell can’t. So let me review in my usual arch and brusque manner and dispense with these dialectical fripper More...

I'm one of the many who left the movie theater completely unfulfilled. I saw No Country for Old Men on it's opening weekend, and could not wait to see the fantastic performances on screen. I loved everything about it, until the last fifteen minutes or so stopped making sense. As soon as Ed Tom Bell finished sharing his dream with his wife, the screen was black for a moment, and I said to myself "this f___ing movie is gonna end...it's gonna f___ing end!!!" Roll the credits.

So, my next move was to More...

While out shooting antelope, Llewellyn Moss stumbles upon a crime scene: three trucks, all shot up, and numerous bodies. Upon further inspection, Moss finds a substantial quantity of heroin and a briefcase containing over two million dollars. Moss takes the money and quickly ends up a wanted man. Can Moss survive long enough to enjoy the money?

This was my first McCarthy book and probably won't be the last. I devoured it in a single sitting. The clipped style really drove the story forward, remin More...

Magnifico thriller adrenalinico costellato di stelle di fulgida poesia.
McCarthy conosce alla perfezione le regole del gioco per catturare l’attenzione del lettore e tenerlo incollato alle pagine fino all’imprevedibile epilogo: scene raccapriccianti, sequenze concitate di caccia all’uomo, ritmi sostenuti e dialoghi serratissimi. A tratti, inoltre, ricorre a delle “dissolvenze”, che stimolano l’immaginazione e acuiscono l’ansia di scoprire cosa succederà in seguito.
Anche i personaggi principali More...

I still can't get over Cormac McCarthy's habit of omitting quotation marks. But I'm starting to see how it actually helps to open up the flow of his dialogue that goes on for pages and pages. The antagonist Anton Chigurh transcends the typical bad guy and becomes the personification of all things haunting within the soul of man. He is an implacable, relentless, inhuman force that cannot be bargained with. Those who escape him only do so because of luck and not by cleverness or goodness on their More...

Cândva în 1980, un veteran al războiului din Vietnam pe nume Llewelyn Moss braconează antilope în sudul statului Texas, în apropierea graniței cu Mexicul, când dă peste scena unei lupte între traficanți de droguri. Croindu-și drum printre cadavre de oameni și câini și mașini ciuruite, Moss abandonează un portbagaj plin cu droguri dar își însușește o valijoară plină cu bani. Deși nu are niciun regret că a pus mâna pe bani negri, peste noapte este cuprins de remușcare că nu i-a dat apă unicului su More...

In questo libro probabilmente si muove uno dei personaggi più cattivi della letteratura moderna.

I personaggi sono tre, impegnati in una corsa senza tregua alcuna, che lascia incollati alle pagine. Moss è l'uomo qualunque, che si trova suo malgrado ad affrontare qualcosa di più grande di lui; lo sceriffo Bell, uomo che ancora crede alla giustizia ma che si rende conto che il mondo è cambiato e lui è rimasto troppo ancorato a quello che adesso non c'è più, e adesso i cattivi, oltre a essere catti More...

McCarthy writes distinct characters. Each character has a unique voice. The plot is high adventure and high violence. He attempts to give us wisdom through the dialog of three main characters. The wisdom often comes out trite because it is written with a southern rural dialect which is melodramatic and feels strained. Sometimes there are some funny attempts. For example, one of the main characters, the Sheriff, remembering a conference in Corpus Christi, thinks,

“Me and Loretta…got set next to t More...

After going all fanboy over 'The Road' I had to run out and grab this one.

While this is a fine book, it has a more straightforward narrative style than 'The Road'. Personally, I found this fact a little disappointing.

Essentially, a drug deal goes bad and the money goes missing. This leads to several extra dead bodies.

There are two characters of note: Anton Chigurh and Sheriff Bell. Chigurh who serves as the "bad guy" is interesting because he seems to operate on his own personal moral compass. More...

To be honest, I found this a bit irritating. It jumped around a little too much and the violence was pointless and excessive. I also found the ‘home-spun’ philosophy a bit hard to take.

There was not a single character in this book that I would urinate on if they were on fire – their deaths, therefore, were devoid of interest. I guess this book is Dirty Harry from the darkside. Same crap, same fascination with guns and the voyeurism caused by the effect bullets have on the human anatomy - I wond More...

This book most explicitly addresses what seems to be a common theme for McCarthy, that being a man's view of the world as it spirals inexorably out of control. The author, and in this case, one of his characters, stand back and tremble, unable to comprehend the more terrible aspects of life and its unraveling. Instead, McCarthy writes them down in a matter of fact way, as if to move closer to finding meaning in such mayhem, only to leave us, as readers, with the charge of doing so, and perhaps l More...

Very good but not great. Still recommended.

No Country For Old Men is memorable in many ways: the quick pace, the easy read, the crazy violence, the merciless villain and the likable characters. Unfortunately, its the way they interact, the story itself, that falls short.

Chigurh is a horrifying villain. Moss is likeable for his stubbornness, his salt-of-the-earth personality and his young wife lovable for the same reason. The Sherriff is also enjoyable as he is constantly one step behind, cleanin More...

I enjoyed this, well as much as I really could when it's a story of people getting their brains and other gooey bits splattered across the scenery, but I was so bugged by the vagueness towards the end.

The first half of this seemed very clear and, while it was stark in terms of prose, it told the story very well and I never felt confused. Around page 250, though, I swear McCarthy rushed it or something because he skipped some scenes which I would have thought would be pretty important to show. An More...