No country for girls either

(photo by Eric Ogden for Time)

Reading No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy before the film comes and wipes everything out. Supposed to be one of the great Americans along with Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, I didn't find this book to be more than a very well written western/thriller that sent me back to voracious hours of John Sandford. The setting and characters come from a long tradition of bad seeds and frontier country, Americans still trying to justify their nationhood. The land remains dangerous and alluring, an eternal Eldorado.

"He stood there looking out across the desert. So quiet. Low hum of wind in the wires. High bloodweeds along the road. Windgrass and sacahuista. Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons. The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant. That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. He walked back to the cruiser and got in and pulled away."
No Country for Old MenCormac McCarthy

A conversation between author Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers, about the new movie No Country for Old Men