No Country For Old Men / Cormac McCarthy

   By page nine of No Country For Old Men, the body count has already begun to grow, and a few pages later I decided not to keep count. It climbs quickly and steadily, so if that's not your thing, then perhaps don't bother with this book (or many books by Cormac McCarthy, for that matter). That being said: oh wow do I ever love Cormac McCarthy.

   Not one to be held back by things like punctuation, McCarthy tells his tale with almost tedious descriptions of physical action and an amazing ear for Southern dialect and accent. By "almost tedious descriptions of physical action" I mean that instead of saying "he drove through a gate" McCarthy says

"The white marks at the side of the road when he found them looked like surveyor's marks but there were no numbers, just the chevrons. He marked the mileage on the odometer and drove another mile and slowed and turned off the highway. He shut off the lights and left the motor running and got out and walked down and opened the gate and came back. He drove across the bars of the cattleguard and got out and closed the gate again and stood there listening. Then he got in the car and drove down the rutted track."

    There are several times when various characters drive through that self-same gate, and it is the same every time. Stop the car, get out of the car, open the gate, get into the car, drive over the bars, stop the car, get out of the car, close the gate, get into the car, drive on. Basically all of the action is described in this way, and while it can take some effort to read, I still love it. I don't know if I understand you, Cormac McCarthy, but keep on keeping on. The Road is written in a similar style. (Have you read The Road yet? WHY NOT???)

   I finished reading this while I was camping for a weekend, and for the rest of my time in Banff I had a running commentary in my head "she got out of the tent and zipped the flap shut and went to the camp chair and sat down and looked at the empty fire pit and, and, and, and, and..." I don't know if other people do this, so welcome to a window into my psyche. It involves a weird amount of self-narration, especially after reading books like this one.

   The ending of the book is strange and somewhat difficult to deal with, but it is exactly what needed to happen.

   Fun fact: Nicholas Sparks once claimed to be a waaaay better author than Cormac McCarthy in and interview where he also compared himself to Shakespeare, Hemingway, and the Greek playwrights and stated that A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks was his favorite coming of age story, topping books like The Catcher in the Rye. OH BOY.