>Waiting for Cormac

>The current issue of Virginia Quarterly Review includes an excerpt from Cormac McCarthy’s new book, No Country for Old Men, due to be released by Knopf in July. (VQR also has new work by Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, among others.)

From the excerpt:

In the first vehicle there was a man slumped dead over the wheel. Beyond were two more bodies lying in the gaunt yellow grass. Dried blood black on the ground. He stopped and listened. Nothing. The drone of flies. He walked around the end of the truck. There was a large dead dog there of the kind he’d seen crossing the floodplain. The dog was gutshot. Beyond that was a third body lying face down. He looked through the window at the man in the truck. He was shot through the head. Blood everywhere. He walked on to the second vehicle but it was empty. He walked out to where the third body lay. There was a shotgun in the grass. The shotgun had a short barrel and it was fitted with a pistol stock and a twenty round drum magazine. He nudged the man’s book with the toe and studied the law surrounding hills.

Yup. Sounds like McCarthy, all right.

The current BookForum has a review of the book, by Madison Smartt Bell: “Like a lot of great male writers, McCarthy is good at capturing women he doesn’t like, but women he does tend to dissolve into Eternal Feminine Syrup. The romance in All The Pretty Horses, though, is doomed in exactly the same way that all civilizing endeavos are doomed in McCarthy’s work. . . No Country for Old Men has a much sharper, brighter edge than the meandering two volumes of the Border trilogy.”

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