No Country For Old Men (#36)

Time for the next to last (penultimate!) book review-ish post of 2007.  Finished up my last book of the year last night and while I have two more days/nights to start a new book and add to my page count... the final tally of books will be... 37!  I, for one, am pretty impressed (last year it was 25 books)... though I won't get into how many of those books were on the slim side (okay, 8 of them were approximately/only 200-ish pages).

A big motivation for me to read a particular book is to do so before seeing the movie version of it.  For various reasons, we really don't get out to the movie theater these days.  Nevertheless, I am still anxious to read a book so that I have my own visuals in my head... and also to avoid any plot spoilers.  So when No Country For Old Men, the movie, started winning some critics awards (usually a prelude to Oscar nods), I decided that the original work by Cormac McCarthy needed to be moved up the reading list... and quickly!   

Always intending, but having never read anything by McCarthy prior to this year, I ended up being quite impressed with the Oprah-picked The Road back in April... so in addition to the movie, this gave me another McCarthy reading opportunity... which again I intended, but didn't quite expect to do so soon (that is, read two of his books in the same calendar year).

The spoiler-free, book-in-a-nutshell synopsis... a man stumbles across a bloody massacre, the result of a botched drug deal.  He take a sizable amount of money from the scene... triggering a series of often violent events as he becomes a man on the run... not only the law but a psychopathic killer looking for the cash.

With the exception of books I've read in the horror genre (which hasn't been in the last decade or so... or more), this had to be one of the most violent books I've read... made me think I wasn't too sure if I wanted to see the movie... except, of course, that it is directed by the Coen Brothers, who have proven to be masters of the violence... in the most artistic way... with movies like Blood Simple and Fargo.  While I have read some criticism that this book was basically written as a screenplay (which I find hard to believe given McCarthy's reclusive nature), it couldn't have been in better hands than those of Joel and Ethan Coen. It's no wonder that it is being talked up for awards and has made most of the "best films of the year" lists that I've seen thus far.

It is easy to see why McCarthy is viewed as one of this country's greatest living writers.  As with The Road, his prose is deceptively simple... but it is a complex and challenging read.  It's easy to find yourself reading it quickly... and that pacing-wise, it is a true page turner.... but I will freely admit to getting lost a few times. An Amazon reviewer summed it up perfectly, so I will just quote him (here's a link to the review... but a warning that this review does contain plot spoilers!)

If you like your conflicts fully resolved, you may want to look elsewhere; if you're bothered by unconventional punctuation, you may be irritated by this book; if you despise jump cuts and point of view shifts, you may find yourself rereading sections of this book to catch your bearings. Otherwise, however, you may find this one of the most original books you've read in years.

That pretty much sums it up... and oh, you are not going to get a clue that the novel gets its name from a line of the Yeats poem called Sailing to Byzantium.  I am pretty sure that would not have enhanced my reading experience to any degree if I had known that beforehand... but there you go!   If you haven't figured it out, I don't rate my reading experiences based on use of literary references, symbolism and all that other lit-class exam criteria... so, the above is not meant as a deterrence...

It's a very good read... just with some caveats.

2007 10K Reading Challenge:  + 307 pages (Total Pages: 11730 pages)