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No Country for Old Men Paperback – July 11, 2006
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The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell—can contain.
As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives—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.
No Country for Old Men is a triumph.
Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
- Print length309 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJuly 11, 2006
- Dimensions5.15 x 0.65 x 7.99 inches
- ISBN-100375706674
- ISBN-13978-0375706677
- Lexile measureHL610L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A narrative that rips along like hell on wheels [in a] race with the devil [on] a stage as big as Texas.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Expertly staged and pitilessly lighted. It feels like a genuine diagnosis of the postmillennial malady, a scary illumination of the oncoming darkness.” —Time
“A cause for celebration. He is nothing less than our greatest living writer, and this is a novel that must be read and remembered.” —Houston Chronicle
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville. One and only one. My arrest and my testimony. I went up there and visited with him two or three times. Three times. The last time was the day of his execution. I didnt have to go but I did. I sure didnt want to. He’d killed a fourteen year old girl and I can tell you right now I never did have no great desire to visit with him let alone go to his execution but I done it. The papers said it was a crime of passion and he told me there wasnt no passion to it. He’d been datin this girl, young as she was. He was nineteen. And he told me that he had been plannin to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again. Said he knew he was goin to hell. Told it to me out of his own mouth. I dont know what to make of that. I surely dont. I thought I’d never seen a person like that and it got me to wonderin if maybe he was some new kind. I watched them strap him into the seat and shut the door. He might of looked a bit nervous about it but that was about all. I really believe that he knew he was goin to be in hell in fifteen minutes. I believe that. And I’ve thought about that a lot. He was not hard to talk to. Called me Sheriff. But I didnt know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything? I’ve thought about it a good deal. But he wasnt nothin compared to what was comin down the pike.
They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. I dont know what them eyes was the windows to and I guess I’d as soon not know. But there is another view of the world out there and other eyes to see it and that’s where this is goin. It has done brought me to a place in my life I would not of thought I’d of come to. Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I wont do it again. I wont push my chips forward and stand up and go out to meet him. It aint just bein older. I wish that it was. I cant say that it’s even what you are willin to do. Because I always knew that you had to be willin to die to even do this job. That was always true. Not to sound glorious about it or nothin but you do. If you aint they’ll know it. They’ll see it in a heartbeat. I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that. I think now that maybe I never would.
The deputy left Chigurh standing in the corner of the office with his hands cuffed behind him while he sat in the swivelchair and took off his hat and put his feet up and called Lamar on the mobile.
Just walked in the door. Sheriff he had some sort of thing on him like one of them oxygen tanks for emphysema or whatever. Then he had a hose that run down the inside of his sleeve and went to one of them stunguns like they use at the slaughterhouse. Yessir. Well that’s what it looks like. You can see it when you get in. Yessir. I got it covered. Yessir.
When he stood up out of the chair he swung the keys off his belt and opened the locked desk drawer to get the keys to the jail. He was slightly bent over when Chigurh squatted and scooted his manacled hands beneath him to the back of his knees. In the same motion he sat and rocked backward and passed the chain under his feet and then stood instantly and effortlessly. If it looked like a thing he’d practiced many times it was. He dropped his cuffed hands over the deputy’s head and leaped into the air and slammed both knees against the back of the deputy’s neck and hauled back on the chain.
They went to the floor. The deputy was trying to get his hands inside the chain but he could not. Chigurh lay there pulling back on the bracelets with his knees between his arms and his face averted. The deputy was flailing wildly and he’d begun to walk sideways over the floor in a circle, kicking over the wastebasket, kicking the chair across the room. He kicked shut the door and he wrapped the throwrug in a wad about them. He was gurgling and bleeding from the mouth. He was strangling on his own blood. Chigurh only hauled the harder. The nickelplated cuffs bit to the bone. The deputy’s right carotid artery burst and a jet of blood shot across the room and hit the wall and ran down it. The deputy’s legs slowed and then stopped. He lay jerking. Then he stopped moving altogether. Chigurh lay breathing quietly, holding him. When he got up he took the keys from the deputy’s belt and released himself and put the deputy’s revolver in the waistband of his trousers and went into the bathroom.
He ran cold water over his wrists until they stopped bleeding and he tore strips from a handtowel with his teeth and wrapped his wrists and went back into the office. He sat on the desk and fastened the toweling with tape from a dispenser, studying the dead man gaping up from the floor. When he was done he got the deputy’s wallet out of his pocket and took the money and put it in the pocket of his shirt and dropped the wallet to the floor. Then he picked up his airtank and the stungun and walked out the door and got into the deputy’s car and started the engine and backed around and pulled out and headed up the road.
On the interstate he picked out a late model Ford sedan with a single driver and turned on the lights and hit the siren briefly. The car pulled onto the shoulder. Chigurh pulled in behind him and shut off the engine and slung the tank across his shoulder and stepped out. The man was watching him in the rearview mirror as he walked up.
What’s the problem, officer? he said.
Sir would you mind stepping out of the vehicle?
The man opened the door and stepped out. What’s this about? he said.
Would you step away from the vehicle please.
The man stepped away from the vehicle. Chigurh could see the doubt come into his eyes at this bloodstained figure before him but it came too late. He placed his hand on the man’s head like a faith healer. The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sounded like a door closing. The man slid soundlessly to the ground, a round hole in his forehead from which the blood bubbled and ran down into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see. Chigurh wiped his hand with his handkerchief. I just didnt want you to get blood on the car, he said.
Moss sat with the heels of his boots dug into the volcanic gravel of the ridge and glassed the desert below him with a pair of twelve power german binoculars. His hat pushed back on his head. Elbows propped on his knees. The rifle strapped over his shoulder with a harnessleather sling was a heavybarreled .270 on a ’98 Mauser action with a laminated stock of maple and walnut. It carried a Unertl telescopic sight of the same power as the binoculars. The antelope were a little under a mile away. The sun was up less than an hour and the shadow of the ridge and the datilla and the rocks fell far out across the floodplain below him. Somewhere out there was the shadow of Moss himself. He lowered the binoculars and sat studying the land. Far to the south the raw mountains of Mexico. The breaks of the river. To the west the baked terracotta terrain of the run- ning borderlands. He spat dryly and wiped his mouth on the shoulder of his cotton workshirt.
The rifle would shoot half minute of angle groups. Five inch groups at one thousand yards. The spot he’d picked to shoot from lay just below a long talus of lava scree and it would put him well within that distance. Except that it would take the better part of an hour to get there and the antelope were grazing away from him. The best he could say about any of it was that there was no wind.
When he got to the foot of the talus he raised himself slowly and looked for the antelope. They’d not moved far from where he last saw them but the shot was still a good seven hundred yards. He studied the animals through the binoculars. In the compressed air motes and heat distortion. A low haze of shimmering dust and pollen. There was no other cover and there wasnt going to be any other shot.
He wallowed down in the scree and pulled off one boot and laid it over the rocks and lowered the forearm of the rifle down into the leather and pushed off the safety with his thumb and sighted through the scope.
They stood with their heads up, all of them, looking at him.
Damn, he whispered. The sun was behind him so they couldnt very well have seen light reflect off the glass of the scope. They had just flat seen him.
The rifle had a Canjar trigger set to nine ounces and he pulled the rifle and the boot toward him with great care and sighted again and jacked the crosshairs slightly up the back of the animal standing most broadly to him. He knew the exact drop of the bullet in hundred yard increments. It was the distance that was uncertain. He laid his finger in the curve of the trigger. The boar’s tooth he wore on a gold chain spooled onto the rocks inside his elbow.
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (July 11, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 309 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0375706674
- ISBN-13 : 978-0375706677
- Lexile measure : HL610L
- Item Weight : 8.3 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.15 x 0.65 x 7.99 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #27 in Westerns (Books)
- #30 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #276 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He later went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy's editor there was Albert Erskine, William Faulkner's long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a travelling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of his next novel, Outer Dark. In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was published in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press. In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon thereafter, the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing, was published with the third volume, Cities of the Plain, following in 1998. McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men, was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago. McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was published in 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize.
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I came to McCarthy by way of The Road (Oprah's Book Club) , which was one of the most profoundly moving things I've read in fifteen years; I find myself thinking of that book and its setting, questions and issues almost daily. Through it I became aware of McCarthy's other work, and was eager to get to it. Then came the Coen brothers' brilliant No Country for Old Men , and I had to move this up in the reading queue. I did save the film until after I was done with the book, and I'm glad I did; this is better.
As in The Road, there are many unanswered questions about aspects of the story off the main narrative line--who did what, where characters and events came from, where they go, what happens next, etc. They are tantalizing, an aspect I have found that keeps McCarthy's work in my head, sorting through the unexplained, wondering in which way these superfluous stories could have gone. They are a great hook, providing tangential snippets of context to a circuitous, unpredictable yet headlong single story line.
This story is deceptive, beginning as a very west Texas noir tale of adventure. I was reminded of James Dickey's magnificent DELIVERANCE (BLOOMSBURY FILM CLASSICS S.) . But while Deliverance was Dickey's rumination on what exactly it means to be a man in the age of the office job, Lay Z Boy recliners and strip malls, McCarthy posits a much more simple question: are you ready to be a man when the time comes?
When Life--with that capital L--comes at you and delivers unbidden the horrific, tragic or sublimely blissful, will you be ready? Can you make yourself ready; is there any way to prepare? And if you think you're ready, are you really? McCarthy asks: what have you done, and in the same breath, what have you not done? What have you overlooked, and what--this is crucial--happens to you and others depending on how ready you are? What are you prepared to do? How far will you go?
Being ready means being prepared to act instantly, outside of cultural and societal norms, against your upbringing and your education, at the most basic level, not unthinkingly, but unflinchingly and uncompromisingly. Can you strip it all away, and if you do what does that make you? Can you come back?
This is where a man can lose his soul. Both The Road and this work make it clear that there is a point where a man chooses to keep or forfeit his humanity, his dignity, when he chooses decency over barbarism. McCarthy's exploration shows that when the choice--made consciously--is for dignity and righteousness, ultimately it is self-destructive.
McCarthy's work has a place for those who hold on to that uniquely human core of decency, who see what really needs to be done, the ugly and brutal which may need to be done for survival, and in essence condemn themselves, usually wittingly, by remaining true to decency and the care/service of others. Death is coming for us all, only a matter of time, so why not take a stand and choose your time and place, and do it with a self-determined honor, with a clean slate? There may be a reckoning--that's really as far as I see McCarthy going down that road of Good v. Evil, God v. Satan--but if there is, these decisions will tip that scale, and for those that remain behind you live on as an example of the right choice.
The book's style is sparse, matching the desert and scrubland the story inhabits. McCarthy's narrative convention of not using quotations is here, but is neither a distraction nor does it lend to confusion. The narrative structure is essentially cinematic, with the sheriff-narrator providing a voiceover context, the real depth of the story, and the chapters often moving in parallel. The dialog flows as easily and effortlessly as Elmore Leonard's best, and there is no question as to what is happening in the narrative.
Surprisingly, the "action," the main story, was done well before the book was. The bulk of the book and the story of money, guns and blood exists as the extended setup for one man's rumination on life's purpose, the existence of God, and what it means to be true to yourself, those you love, and those you serve. This is the last 40-odd pages of the book, and where the deepest contemplation lies. There is a lot going on here, with a lot of to my reading earnest exploration of a man's purpose, his honor, his character, and ultimately his identity. Is God out there? And if he is, and if he's the kind of guy we've all been told he is, how is it that life plays out in these ways?
Bottom line: This is no happy, light and frothy, stereotypically inane TV-style read of a luckless loner who makes good after some minor tribulation. The story is stark and dark, violent and unflinching, just as life is. McCarthy poses a pessimistic vision of where we are and where we are headed, and explores whether the noble choice of decency and selflessness is tenable, even though it seems to be suicidal.
`No Country for Old Men' has a lot going for it. McCarthy's writing style is easy to adapt to. He writes in a fashion that's easy to understand, not to wordy, not overly descriptive yet he never fails to leave the reader without a sound sense of what is taking place. One thing I fell in love with was the way he adapted his writing style to the people and places he was introducing. The novel takes place in the dusty plains of Texas and so the sentence structure is that of a Texan, incomplete and grammatically incorrect. This is not an insult; I live in Texas, I know how they talk. It's funny because I read some of this novel aloud to my daughter (not the bloody parts) and my wife noticed that I read in a deep southern accent. The wording is so absorbing you start thinking in a drawl.
That, my friends, is impressive.
Cormac's masterpiece follows a few characters whose lives interconnect thanks to some drug money and an unfortunate decision. Llewelyn Moss is a simple man, a war (Vietnam) vet who lives a simple life with his young wife Carla Jean. His life gets plenty complicated when he stumbles upon some dead bodies and a case full of cash. He takes the money and runs, but soon realizes that he can't stop running; he's being hunted by two parties, both after the money. Psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh is hot on Moss' tail, breathing down his neck so-to-speak, while Sheriff Bell is desperately trying to locate Moss before it is too late. Caught in the middle of it all is Moss' wife, an emotionally moving casualty of this `war'.
Each chapter of `No Country for Old Men' is opened with Sheriff Bell's thoughts on the current state of affairs. As the body count rises and the reasoning behind it all fades into a dark blur he contemplates why things have gotten so bad. He reasons on the way things were growing up and how much worse they have gotten and he sheds so much light on the purpose behind these pages. He comes to the realization that he is just too old for this; that his morals are so different from the morals crowding society today and that to try and understand it will only drag you down. He realizes first hand that this is no country for old men.
Each character though adds layers to McCarthy's prose, not just Bell. One profound character is that of Chigurh whose sense of justice and loyalty is tainted by his savage lust for blood. The dialog within this novel is so strong in it's subtlety that it carries his characters to levels beyond them. When Anton first explains the significance of his coin toss we are captivated by his logic; and his final, devastating scene with Moss' wife Carla Jean we are moved so deeply by the entire encounter. Scenes of these conversations permeate the novel and take on lives of their own. A particular scene with Llewelyn and a young hitchhiker bring similar feelings of warmth and sympathy.
Each blood-soaked page leads us to a further understanding of Cormac's message and as the novel comes to a dramatic close we feel as though we can relate to Bell and his longer for yesteryear. Times have certainly changed and definitely not for the better. Soon, very soon, this will be no country for young men, for any man for that matter.
Soon, very soon, all hope will be lost.
Most people either love or hate McCarthy's abandonment of punctuation and his run-on sentences. I'm somewhere in the middle on it. This novel would gain a lot from breaking up some long descriptions of actions strung together by "and...and...and...", and from clearing up some pointlessly confusing pronouns (such as two male characters struggling and both being referred to only as "he", which obfuscates the action), and from adding some dialogue tags to throw readers a bone about who is talking in lengthy conversations. There's a reason we punctuate: clarity and ease of reading.
I've read this novel twice, and it's one of the rare cases where I prefer the movie to the book. The movie cut out or shortened some conversations and cut out a good chunk of scenes from the book's ending, and those were solid choices that improved the narrative's momentum. In the novel, I felt like we spent a little too much time hanging around after the main story was over.
Still, this novel thoroughly absorbed me into the conflict between Llewelyn Moss and Anton Chigurh, kept the tension high throughout the story, and impressed with detailed prose that is at once both simply direct and poetic. Though I have some problems with the style, I also found a lot to emulate and learn from as a writer.
Top reviews from other countries
Cormac McCarthy dringt in diesem Roman in ein Gebiet vor, das bisher nur Größen wie William Faulkner und John Steinbeck vorenthalten war. Nichts ist, wie es scheint. Das offene Ende wirkt auf den ersten Blick enttäuschend (wir erfahren nicht, wie es mit Anton Chigurh weitergeht) weist aber darauf hin, dass dieser Aspekt möglicherweise nicht der wichtigste im Roman ist. Hier ist der Leser gefordert. Fünf Punkte für ein ungewöhnliches Buch-auf den Film bin ich gespannt.
The only thing I disliked was the way it was packaged by the seller.
Reviewed in India on March 29, 2022
The only thing I disliked was the way it was packaged by the seller.