A few evenings ago, I closed the cover on an astonishingly enjoyable book. I blazed through
No Country for Old
Men in a day and a half. I honestly couldn’t put it down (seriously, my wife spilled super glue on the cover…ha ha
jk). Seriously, though. If you are a fan of Cormac McCarthy…if you’ve
read and enjoyed any of the Border Trilogy books (I’ve read two of them)..then you’ll dig No Country for Old Men.
The book is a modern-day western. Set in 1980 southwest Texas, a young guy named Llewelyn Moss is hunting antelope
near the Rio Grande when he comes across a couple dead guys, all shot up and bloody (lots of blood in the book, so it
will undoubtedly make a good
film). While wandering among the corpses, he find a bag with $2.4 million in cash and like any sensible person, he
takes it. What ensues is a simple, but heart-pumping plot about how Moss tries to take the money and run while he is
being vigorously pursued by a maniacal, sadistic, blue-eyed psycho named Chigurh (whose name, we are told in an
off-hand way, sounds like “sugar”…ah, so sweet).
Anyway, there are some divine passages in the book, deep, frontier-minded lamentations by a character named Sheriff
Bell who wonders in italics about the nature of things and the ever-changing world. Like almost all good stories, it’s
largely a tale about good and evil, and the choices we make in life that can lead to our success or demise. I
give it a hearty thumbs up.
*?’@??