No Country for Old Men
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| Author | Cormac McCarthy |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Western, Novel |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
| Released | 19 July 2005 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 320 pp (hardback edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-375-40677-8 (hardback edition) |
No Country for Old Men, published in 2005 by Knopf is a novel by prize-winning American author Cormac McCarthy. The title comes from the first line of the poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats.
Contents |
[edit] Plot introduction
The novel is set on the Texas-Mexico border in 1980. The tale concerns an illicit drug deal gone wrong in a remote desert location.
[edit] Plot summary
The plot follows three central characters: Llewellyn Moss (a hunter who stumbles across the aftermath of the drug deal, and who takes the cash he finds there); Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and other law enforcement (who investigate the crime) and the sociopath/"corporate warrior" Anton Chigurh, hired to recover the money.
McCarthy tells this story in two voices. The bulk of the book is presented in third person, interspersed with first person reminiscenes from Sheriff Bell.
The reliance on dialogue and the sketchbook revelation of plot details lends a subtly mystical air to the piece. For example,
"...when you encounter certain things in the world, the evidence for certain things, you realize that you have come upon somethin that you may not very well be equal to... When you've said that it's real and not just in your head, I'm not all that sure what it is you have said."
[edit] Characters in "No Country for Old Men"
- Llewellyn Moss – main character a hunter
- Sheriff Ed Tom Bell – also narrator at some points
- Anton Chigurh – a sociopath/"corporate warrior"
[edit] Major themes
As is typical of Cormac McCarthy, the book is endowed with allusions to deep themes such as:
- nihilism: "I don't have some way to put it, that's the way it is"
- existentialism: "Suppose you was someplace that you didn't know where it was. The real thing you wouldn't know was where somplace else was... It wouldn't change nothin about where you was at."
- transcendentalism: "Its about thinkin you got there without taking anything with you."
- semiotics: "You don't know what you're talking about, do you?"
- anti-war/anti-triumphalism: "You can say that the country is just a country, it don't actively do nothin ... This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it."
[edit] Literary significance & criticism
William J. Cobb, in a review published in the Houston Chronicle (July 15, 2005), characterizes McCarthy as "our greatest living writer" and describes the book as "a heated story that brands the reader's mind as if seared by a knife heated upon campfire flames." On the other hand, in the July 24, 2005, issue of the New York Times Book Review, the critic and fiction writer Walter Kirn suggests that the novel's plot is "sinister high hokum," but writes admiringly of the prose, describing the author as "a whiz with the joystick, a master-level gamer who changes screens and situations every few pages."
[edit] Film or TV Adaptations
Joel and Ethan Coen are scheduled to write, direct, and produce a film adaptation set for release in 2007. See No Country For Old Men for the film.
