Cormac_mccarthy

Summary Llewelyn Moss, a small town welder, stumbles on a briefcase full of cash in the middle of the desert. Taking the briefcase triggers a series of events that forever links the fates of him, an aging sheriff, and a hitman. Thoughts This is the third Cormac McCarthy book I’ve read this year and it may be my favorite. He wrote it a year before The Road, you can see the two stories as connected in an interesting way, but more on that later. This book is one of McCarthy’s least “fancy” book, you aren’t going to get much of his unique pacing or Hemingway-esque prose that was prominent in his border trilogy. For some, this is a loss; for others, it’s a welcome relief. Llewelyn Moss, quickly revealed to be out of his depth, knows this yet persistently tries to convince himself and others of his capability. Sheriff Bell is of course, one of the men that are too old for this country, whenever the book switches to his perspective we are usually met with a memory or utter consternation at the direction the world seems to be heading. Bell is a sheriff that everyone would consider to be an “old timer”, but he secretly knows he is not. He’s got all the common sense of the older generation but can’t manage to have the same beliefs, and this bothers him to no end. Bell’s wife acts like Dante’s Beatrice, a guide and anchor to life that he would be completely lost without. The antagonist, Anton Chigurh, a representation of fate, the unyielding code, and the inevitable end, seamlessly weaves in and out of the narrative. He embodies the universe, one that defies reasoning through its own inexorable logic. ...

Summary A nameless father with his nameless boy tries to survive in a world that has been destroyed by a nameless catastrophe. Whatever it was that destroyed the earth left its surface coated in ashes and its skies so perpetually cloudy that nothing can survive. There is no life save a few scattered bands of humans slowly dying off by starvation or violence. Thoughts McCarthy does a great job of world building, or I should say withering. It turns out he can describe dilapidated cityscapes just as well as western prairies. This book has been lauded as being a champion for climate change, but I think that is incidental. The main question is as Camus says, “why not commit suicide?”. McCarthy destroys the world and all the creeping things that crawl along its face just to put this question in sharper relief. This book also made me realize that all post-apocalyptic stories are actually just visions of who humans are without society. There are many mini apocalypses in history we can use for inspiration, like the siege of Leningrad or countless other sieges that remove the mask of society to expose the truth that lies beneath, the earth is not a symphony of symbiosis, but a network of mouths and teeth. Even your own body will eat itself if you can’t find something else to sacrifice. ...

Summary All the Pretty Horses follows the story of John Grady Cole and his best friend Lacey Rawlins. Cole, sixteen years old, was raised on a ranch his entire life. His grandfather has just died and he discovers the ranch is about to be sold. He convinces Rawlins to join him and they both take off to Mexico hoping to find cowboy work. Thoughts My initial summation of this book was going to be “Hemmingway meets Coen brother’s No Country for Old Men”, but then I found out that Cormac McCarthy wrote No Country for Old Men. So now I guess the summation should be “Hemmingway meets McCarthy”. Sidebar This impression is created by a writing style called Polysyndeton. Going down this rabbit hole a little, it turns out that this is the style that gives the King James Bible and Shakespeare their distinctive cadence. From what I can tell it is a fancy name for run on sentences that would get red lined on English exams. ...