Waste Books

In this episode we talk about Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, relating it to the Coen Brothers' film rendition and existentialism. Overview The highway that is No Country for Old Men gets you lost even though the two-lane blacktop never deviates in direction. It’s just that that first wrong turn screwed everything up and turning back now is as impossible as turning back time itself. For those who’ve seen the Coen Brothers film, the novel No Country for Old Men is just as blood-soaked and cerebral as the silver screen ever portrayed it. Only a novelist as commanding as Cormac McCarthy can juxtapose sobering meditations on determinism and entropic decay with brutal tableaus of grisly violence along with their lurid aftermath on the body and soul. Because McCarthy is such a deliberate writer, aiming for palpable precision over entertainment, the violence he depicts is rendered all the more visual, all the more real in its considerations to weighing each word in measurements of time and mass. Violenc