No Country for Old Men - The First 100 Pages
Let me begin by assuring you that I have not seen the recent movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. And now, after reading the first 100 pages, I have my reservations about watching it at all.
This is not to say that I dislike the book - I like it immensely, in fact. It reminds me of a cross between Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Capote's In Cold Blood. Like Faulkner, McCarthy is sparing in punctuation - particularly quotation marks. This can make his dialogue difficult to follow, and takes some time to get used too. However he does not have Faulkner's infamous rambling sentences. McCarthy keeps his narrative to short, clipped sentences full of precise description. Where some authors may glide over the names of plants or the state of a bullet wound, McCarthy delves into an exact, detached, almost methodical description.
While No Country for Old Men may resemble The Sound and the Fury in syntax, it is more akin to In Cold Blood in its story. The reader is introduced to the novel with a gruesome scene of bodies massacred on the Texas-Mexico border, and thus begins the wild chase of Llewellyn Moss by Chigurh, with a team of law enforcement led by the Sheriff Bell scrambling behind.
To read about violence and to watch it occur are two very different things. McCarthy's descriptions of carnage in No Country for Old Men are enough to make me shiver, despite the summer heat. I don't know how I would take the senseless violence if I were to watch the movie adaptation. To see the bloated, decaying bodies of the dope runners in the desert, to watch as Chigurh disposed of the men in Llewellyn's abandoned motel room - these are scenes I don't know if I could stand to watch. Regardless of my squeamishness, I will wait to watch No Country for Old Men the movie, until after I have finished the book.
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