No country for old men: W.B. Yeats, Murray Gell-Mann, Cormac McCarthy and Ottoline

In the spirit of reading book whose author is still living I read Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men this week.  He was recommended to me by Janice last year.  I regret I cannot sing my high praise.  Knowing who McCarthy is; I wonder the problem probably lies in me.  Either I have to re-read or better yet try his “All the Pretty Horses”.

I have to say he writes well; the style reminiscent to Hemingway’s, using subject and verb only, let out adjective.  The plots are good in the first three-quarters, but the end disappoints me.  He leaves the psychopath Chigurh still at large and Sheriff Bell retires, sort of a symbol of “defeat”.

The plots and endings in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms are much more intrigue and powerful.

The book title of “No Country for Old Men” comes from W.B. Yeats’s famous poem, Sailing to Byzantium (by the way, Yeats—another Nobel laureate in Literature also frequented Ottoline Morrell’s house).  Nothing in plot, theme or ending fits the line of “No country for old men”—the opening line for the poem.  Philip Roth’s “The Dying Animal” also comes from the line of this poem, as does a book called “The young in one another’s arms”.

Cormac McCarthy and particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann are longtime friends, so he must be a man of something.  Gell-Mann was awarded Germany’s most prestigious Helmholtz Medal in September 2014.  Following the presentation at Santa Fe Institute, the toast was led by Cormack McCarthy.  Reading my post about Gell-Mann will be worth your while.

“Quark and Murray Gell-Mann, a Renaissance man in science”

http://doctorjytsai.blogspot.com/2012/01/quark-and-murray-gell-mann-renaissance.html

Murray Gell-Mann on 9/26/2014