false125548true6088260read2true1543595currently-reading5true1543594to-read0false1684214on-hold-too-busy-to-live
<![CDATA[Carrie added 'Pnin']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/56050131
to: Pnin (Everyman's Library)byVladimir Nabokov
]]>
<![CDATA[Carrie added 'One Hundred Years of Solitude']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/54401455
to: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Hardcover)byGabriel García Márquez
]]>
<![CDATA[Carrie added 'No Country for Old Men']]>
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/52177226
to: No Country for Old Men (Paperback)byCormac McCarthy
My initial response:
It is proving nearly impossible to read this book having seen the movie.
Normally McCarthy's stripped-down and umembellished prose weaves a type of magic; the reader slows and halts on each stoic period, unsure what horrors will unfold in the next blunt line. The floating narrator is transfigured into an unthinking god, content to observe the miseries fated to the characters without sympathy or intervention.
However, the movie has killed this inclination. Now the writing drags on and on, stiff barriers of sentences between the familiar and anticipated dialogue. The bluntness reads as an unsophisticated transcription of the mise-en-scène. Moving pictures have felled another masterpiece and it is the reader who suffers.
Having finished:
After 100 or so pages I finally fell into the rhythm of this novel. I ran from hotel room to hotel room, blindsided and wounded, crossing back and forth over the Mexican border to the gruesome end. Llewelyn Moss operates as a blank everyman. He dilemma is universal - how does one react to opportunity, when it is laced with blood and the specter of destruction? McCarthy would argue that humans are too easily swayed by our innate greed, a talent which kept us alive in the cruel land but now more often brings us to the muzzle of a gun. This urge, compounded by the violent and self-preservationist nature of the American psyche, creates the crux of the novel. The last 50 pages are so are dedicated to Sheriff Bell's struggle with the monstrous evil of which we are capable, reflected through his memories, conversations and hauntingly-told dreams.
Although so much of the novel concerns itself with the hideous acts, McCarthy is careful to never ascribe evil onto the characters themselves. Anton Chigurh, the mechanically cold hitman, does not carry an ounce of spite in his blood. Rather, his worldview is ruled by chance and consequences. As he explains to the doomed Carla Jean, some course of action bought her to him, and he cannot stop the turning of fate. His conversations with those unlucky enough to cross his path brim with Socratic questioning and cool exposition. He is a supernatural force in the novel, much like the judge in Blood Meridian. And like fate itself he is deaf to emotion; Chigurh's compass is reason, cold and unrelenting and terrifying.
McCarthy is considered one of the greatest modern authors, and a cornerstone of the new American cannon. After losing myself in another of his sun-bleached American landscapes, it is easy to see why. He has reinvented the Western as platform on which the everyman grapples with the stuff of life: goodness, evil and the cold inevitability of death.