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Loading... No Country for Old Men (original 2005; edition 2005)by Cormac McCarthy (Author)
Work InformationNo Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (2005)
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» 43 more Favourite Books (399) Best Noir Fiction (12) Best Crime Fiction (67) Books Read in 2015 (433) Top Five Books of 2020 (779) Unread books (244) 2000s decade (24) Books Read in 2019 (1,020) Books Read in 2022 (1,573) Books Read in 2020 (3,133) Sense of place (69) AP Lit (140) Books About Murder (138) Fiction For Men (59) Thrillers (13) Protagonists - Men (20) Speculative Fiction (32) Best Westerns (20) No current Talk conversations about this book. ![]() This is a book which is better than the movie. Anton Chigurh is the embodiment of evil, "a true and living prophet of destruction." His reign of terror changes the life of a dedicated sheriff forever. The story is told in direct, uncomplicated language,which made the violence even more horrific for the reader. Chigurh is a cold-blooded killer and his acts are described as such. The book also has a much better ending than the movie. Cormac McCarthy often uses simple, clear and short language, but the reader feels the mountains of weight behind each sentence. Everything is so meticulous and unique, only giving you glimpses of possible meaning. This book has great writing on the disaffection felt by any generation upon reaching old age and the incomprehensible nature of senseless violence that is a common theme for him.
All that keeps No Country for Old Men from being a deftly executed but meretricious thriller is the presence, increasingly confused and ineffectual as the novel proceeds, of the sheriff of Comanche County, one of the "old men" alluded to in the title. "No Country for Old Men" is an unholy mess of a novel, which one could speculate will be a bitter disappointment to many of those eager fans. It is an unwieldy klutz that pretends to be beach reading while dressed in the garments of serious literature (not that those are necessarily mutually exclusive concepts). It is a thriller that is barely thrilling and a tepid effort to reclaim some of the focus and possibly the audience of McCarthy's most reader-friendly novel, "All the Pretty Horses." Worst of all, it reads like a story you wished Elmore Leonard had written -- or rather, in this case, rewritten. Mr. McCarthy turns the elaborate cat-and-mouse game played by Moss and Chigurh and Bell into harrowing, propulsive drama, cutting from one frightening, violent set piece to another with cinematic economy and precision. In fact, ''No Country for Old Men'' would easily translate to the big screen so long as Bell's tedious, long-winded monologues were left on the cutting room floor -- a move that would also have made this a considerably more persuasive novel. In the literary world the appearance of a new Cormac McCarthy novel is a cause for celebration. It has been seven years since his Cities of the Plain, and McCarthy has made the wait worthwhile. With a title that makes a statement about Texas itself, McCarthy offers up a vision of awful power and waning glory, like a tale told by a hermit emerging from the desert, a biblical Western from a cactus-pricked Ancient Mariner. Cormac McCarthy's ''No Country for Old Men'' is as bracing a variation on these noir orthodoxies as any fan of the genre could expect, although his admirers may not be sure at first about quite how to take the book, which doesn't bend its genre or transcend it but determinedly straightens it back out. Is contained inHas the adaptationHas as a student's study guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Llewelyn Moss is hunting antelope near the Texas/Mexico border when he stumbles upon several dead men, a big stash of heroin, and more than two million dollars in cash. He takes off with the money--and the hunter becomes the hunted. A drug cartel hires a former Special Forces agent to track down the loot, and a ruthless killer joins the chase as well. Also looking for Moss is the aging Sheriff Bell, a World War II veteran who may be Moss' only hope for survival. No library descriptions found. |
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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