No Country for Old Men (Vintage International)
by Cormac McCarthy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Cormac McCarthyEdition: Paperback
Published: 2007-10-09
ISBN: 0307387135
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of No Country for Old Men (Vintage International)
Book Review: Call It
Summary: 4 Stars
Some seven years after he completed the final novel of his famed Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy released to the world his ninth novel No Country for Old Men. With its title borrowed from a poem titled "Sailing to Byzantium"-- That is no country for old men. The young, in one another's arms, birds in the trees- Those dying generations - at their song--No County for Old Men centers upon three men and the occasion which would bring them together and drastically change the lives of at least two of the men.
The novel opens with the welder Llewellyn Moss hunting antelope. After missing his desired shot, follows a wounded antelope. First, he sees a large wounded dog and a bit later he comes to still scene where chaos had taken place a short time earlier. Dead bodies strewed here and there, a dead dog, and bullet ridden pickup trucks. One of the trucks contains a large number of packages containing heroin and another contains a Mexican drug smuggler begging for water and worrying about wolves. Moss leaves the man and searches for the Last Man, the one who survived the chaos. Finding a trail of blood, Moss follows it until he finds the body of the Last Man. The man is holding a black leather case, and inside that case there is more than two million dollars. Under these circumstances Moss takes the money back with him to his trailer were his nineteen-year-old wife waits for him.
It seems that the welder and Vietnam veteran Moss is now a millionaire, but it is not thoughts of new wealth that keeps him awake, it is the thoughts of the Mexican man dying of thirst that bothers Moss and so against protests from his young wife and from his own inner conscious, he goes into the night to take water to the dying man and there encounters some men whose boss the money belongs. Worse yet, the encounter leads to Moss becoming the target of a fellow named Anton Chigurh, a hitman whose figure seems more demonic than human and whose cattle gun blasts the brains out of his victims.
Besides Llewellyn Moss and Anton Chigurh, there is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. The fellow whose personal narratives give the backbone to the novel and whose narratives further the cat and mouse game played by Moss and Chigurh, Bell is nearing retirement and believes that the world is going to Hades in a hand basket. Drugs spreading, violence increasing, and senseless murder prevalent, Bell believes that he is no match to the changing times, so when the dead Mexicans are discovered, and one of his deputies has his brains blown out, Bell is faced with the destruction of time and change.
No Country for Old Men is a beautifully written novel which might leave some readers reaching for their dictionaries to find meaning to some of the words in McCarthy's expansive vocabulary. McCarthy does a wonderful job being able to put the readers in the heads of the vastly different characters Moss, Chigurh, and Bell and making the readers understand their emotions and worldviews and give meanings to their actions, even ones as heinous as those committed by Chigurh.
Through Bell, McCarthy seems to displaying his own thoughts. The times are changing, and times seem to be getting worse instead of better. Old values and morals seem to have been cast aside and the new age is one of destruction, an age for men like Anton Chigurh, one in which "old men" like Bell no longer have a place.
A fine novel by a writer who many consider America's finest; No Country for Old Men will both horrify and entertain its readers, and hopefully make them think of time and its relationship to violence. I don't quite agree with all of McCarthy's rather conservative statements, but it is definitely food for thought.
Summary of No Country for Old Men (Vintage International)
In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.Movie Tie-Ins Books
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