Friday, November 16, 2007

No Country For Old Men

This had been on my reading list for some time but when the trailers for the movie came out, I bumped it up.

I started it two days ago and couldn't put it down. I had to get use to Cormac McCarthy's unusual way of writing. He's not a fan of punctuation and doesn't put quotations around the dialogue so I'd have to go back sometimes and reread something not realizing for a moment that a character was actually speaking.

He spelled things the way they were pronounced by his characters, all obviously huge Texas hicks.
Except. I live in Texas. And while it was cute and quaint at first, I noticed that all his Texas characters spoke that way. The problem is that I know many Texas characters (I'm related to a lot of them) and the majority of them can say "knew" instead of "knowed".
At first, I thought maybe it was a West Texas thing since it takes place out there but then a girl showed up from Port Arthur and she spoke the same way.

Ok...vernacular aside....

I loved this book in the beginning. I raced from page to page wondering how our main character was going to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.

Then...well I don't want to give anything away but I was disappointed.

Suddenly, the excitement ended without fanfare and without much explanation. Then the character of the Sheriff took over the end of the book and rambled on for pages and pages. Suddenly, I was uninterested and I felt cheated.

Maybe there is some symbolism or some shit that I'm not getting but No Country For Old Men was like one good book and one boring book bound together.

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