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    No Country for Old Men
    No Country for Old Men
    No Country for Old Men
    Audiobook7 hours

    No Country for Old Men

    Written by Cormac McCarthy

    Narrated by Tom Stechschulte

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim's burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes how desperately Moss and his young wife need protection. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex-Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular violence and mayhem. The pursuit stretches up and down and across the border, each participant seemingly determined to answer what one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life? A harrowing story of a war that society is waging on itself, and an enduring meditation on the ties of love and blood and duty that inform lives and shape destinies, No Country for Old Men is a novel of extraordinary resonance and power.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJul 22, 2005
    ISBN9781436101813
    No Country for Old Men
    Author

    Cormac McCarthy

    Cormac McCarthy was the author of many acclaimed novels, including Blood Meridian, Child of God and The Passenger. Among his honours are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country for Old Men – the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture. McCarthy died in 2023 in Santa Fe, NM at the age of 89.

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    Reviews for No Country for Old Men

    4/5

    3,785 ratings165 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Terrific read. Spare, poetic, action-driven prose from one of the greats. McCarthy neither dumbs down the story nor wastes time in moving it forward.

      If you enjoyed the movie, you should be happy to find that it closely follows the book, with only a few deviations. I highly recommend reading.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyed this book and like the simple way it was written, I got the impression that the narrator of the audiobook had seen the film before reading and used accents and tones from it .
    • 5/5
      Mystical, wonderful reading, just not quite the ending i was expecting
    • 3/5
      This is how as good as The Road. There's a lot of killing, but not much of a point.
    • 5/5
      I've listened to this book because of the movie and wanted to see what some of the differences were a few minor ones here there but overall the very good listen also they add some great detail to some of the better scenes in the movie
    • 5/5
      Absolutely stunning. A masterpiece. The narration was fantastic and added a ton to the experience.
    • 2/5
      Not my type of book... too many redundant dialogues of people asking each other if they understood the question or if they know what they mean.
    • 5/5
      Good book and the voices are perfect. Not quite like the movie but close.
    • 3/5
      And a scant three at that. It felt stitched together and incomplete.
    • 3/5
      Interesting characters. In the audio version, the speaker can be difficult to detect / keep track of.
    • 4/5
      Great read, better than the movie,raw edges.
    • 5/5
      Oh-la-la. I saved this book so that I would have something to look forward to reading. And it turns out I had a lot to look forward to.The violence that I knew was in this story had been off-putting to me. There are a lot of people getting shot in the head, it seems. But the simplicity in which the events are described allow the coldness of the killers characters to come through, and also let us off the hook in terms of being on the receiving end of graphic descriptions of it all. There is not a lot of mercy shown by the main perpetrator, he is a man who sets very high standards for himself in being thorough in his retribution. The story starts in the chance discovery of a crime scene. A lot of money, drugs, guns and dead people. Moss, the man who chanced upon this scene and is very tempted by the money, makes a decision. This decision starts off a string of events that results in the deaths of many and a cat and mouse type situation involving the man who has the money, the men who want the money and the sheriff who wants the whole mess over and done with. As usual, for me, the story is secondary to the way it is told. I love McCarthy's writing, I love the way his dialogue flows without the use of speech marks or "he said/she said" type fillers. The story itself, also happens to be quick, gripping is cast with people we can see ourselves talking to. People who are struggling with past decisions, and the repercussions these have on their current situation.
    • 5/5
      77. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy 2005, 309 page trade paperbackread Dec 3-6Rating: 4.5 stars McCarthy's version of a thriller. A Vietnam veteran stumbles on drug deal gone wrong, circa 1980, with no survivors. He walks away with $2.4 million in cash and a violent world pours in on him. I bet it made quite a movie. It feels like a 1990's era Tarantino movie, along the lines of Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and True Romance, with meditations on violence and execution and with violence so intense it becomes almost humorous...except here in this book where it doesn't. All of that is a shot on the unoriginal aspects of this 2005 book, and a deserved one. But still, what an intense book which I could not put down and what a cold as steel feeling it left me with, even if it doesn't last. This is an interesting look at McCarthy's style applied to a more modern setting, a rural world no longer isolated, but infiltrated by the urban culture and technology. But it doesn't have the weight of his other works.
    • 4/5
      Very good narrator! I really enjoyed it even though westerns arent my cuppatea.
    • 5/5
      loved it. great story. makes you think. narrator is appropriate and easy to listen to
    • 5/5
      Great narration of characters in book
      Wonderful writing and unpredictable ending.
    • 4/5
      Sehr stimmungsvoll, aber der Film war sogar besser. Es gibt eine Aussage, aber welche?
      Eine böse Welt. Ich bin froh, dass ich dort nicht leben muss.
    • 5/5
      Incredible book. I love the movies and the Coen Brothers and reading the book was enlightening. There’s a wonderful scene with Moss and a Hitchhiker that I wish was in the film.
    • 3/5
      Fans of thrillers will be disappointed by Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. In fact, they are likely to take it as an affront. I believe that's what McCarthy intended. His message seems to have been, "I know the rules for writing a thriller. Here, let me show you how it's done. And once I've lured you in, I'll change gears and disappoint your expectations, because in the end I don't want to write a thriller."The first 240 pages (roughly) read like a great thriller in which McCarthy artfully builds up the tension. He carefully stokes the reader's expectations, sweeping one along towards what must surely be a climactic showdown between good and evil. But then McCarthy deliberately smashes it all up. After so many pages of buildup, carefully building the tension and anticipation, he cuts straight from the buildup to approximately 60 pages of anti-climax.This will leave some readers feeling that they've been misled or tricked. For McCarthy exploits the formulas of this genre to feed the expectation of a classic 'good vs. evil' confrontation. There's the bad-a$# special forces guy (Wells), the hardworking 'nam vet (Moss), the virtuous old sheriff (Bell, a member of the 'Greatest Generation'). But none of these guys get to face off against the arch villain in any satisfying way. They're all cast aside, shown up as being no match for the great evil, the man without a history, Anton Chigurh, who sweeps past them like they're just so many yapping dogs. The climactic fight between good and evil never happens.The author's message is one of hopelessness and desolation. By the end, all the Sheriff can feel is defeat. There's a Biblical allusion in the penultimate sentence, where Bell dreams of his father making a fire "out there in all that dark and all that cold." I think this alludes to a line in the gospel of John (ch. 1, v. 5: "The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not"). However, this image of hope is crumpled up and discarded by McCarthy. It's just an illusion, part of a dream from which Bell wakes up.I've heard some people complain that McCarthy is too 'preachy' in this novel, but that's true only if you identify his views with those of Bell. Bell keeps criticizing the times he's living in, contrasting Texas in 1980 unfavourably with how things used to be. However, I don't take McCarthy to share that outlook; if anything, he subverts it with his references to past wars. E.g., Moss and Wells are Vietnam vets and Bell is a WWII vet. While talking to his uncle near the end of the book, Bell discusses a deceased relative who fought in WWI, and another relative who fought against, and was killed by, native Indians in the previous century. There's also a mention in that conversation of 'Coffee Jack', a 19th-Century Texas Ranger who fought against the Indians and the Mexicans. Indeed, that old war against the Mexicans seems to have continued in the form of the drug wars. Earlier in the book, another sheriff tells Bell that he'd just as soon give all this land back to the Mexicans.In terms of the plot, there's no need for all these references to past wars. McCarthy throws them in to undermine Bell's nostalgia, the point being that violence and destruction are the way of the world, and that's how it's always been.I gave the book three stars because I don't see anything profound or interesting in this message.
    • 5/5
      Loved the audio voice and book. It was definitely not what I expected ... much deeper in thought and perspective. I would say this is the best book I've read/heard in a long time.
    • 3/5
      The narration of the audio version of this book is so irritating that I had to quit listening - and I adore Cormac McCarthy. Sometimes a narrator heaves a little too much expression into his or her delivery, and that's what happened here. McCarthy's text is really sufficient, no acting necessary.
    • 5/5
      Great story! The recording skipped around about three times and I had to stop and and go back to where I was. Otherwise, it was GREAT!
    • 5/5
      So good, so good, so good, so good, so good, so good. Perfect narration too!
    • 1/5
      No Country for Old Men is one of the most disappointingly overrated books I have encountered. The ONLY point to the book is a few nostalgic and slightly poignant thoughts that Sheriff Bell has when narrating the book. The main plot just details a bunch of utterly meaningless violence -- which is the main issue disturbing Bell's view of the world. Unfortunately for the reader there's no mystery, only a little bit of predictable suspense, and absolutely nothing entertaining or enjoyable, even to a reader who loves suspense and mystery novels.Since this book is presumably indicative of McCarthy's writing style this reader was left scratching his head as to how he could have won the Pulitzer Prize or any other major writing prizes. McCarthy's prose is pointlessly confusing in many areas because of his refusal to use quotation marks around any spoken words, and secondly because several chapters start with multiple paragraphs referring to "he" or "him" with no antecedent defined. Since there are multiple viewpoint characters and locations, you'll have to slog through such narrations with no sense of character attachment, hoping it doesn't last too long each time.Several of the characters including our narrative protagonist Sheriff Bell are nearly illiterate. As just one example, ignorant phrases containing "should of" instead of "should have" litters so many pages and so many characters' speech it raises the question whether McCarthy himself speaks this way. There are also many other repetitive phrases in the author's narration (not the unquoted speech) that show little attempt to edit this book for stylistic problems.There should have been some sort of redemption or purpose in the story and the life of at least one of the protagonists, but ultimately the book feels like an utterly depressing waste of time and energy.
    • 4/5
      Ken Watson once told me that "As I Lay Dying" was Faulkner Light. And I think he'd agree with me that this book is McCarthy Light. The plotting is stupendous though. The final scene of the falling action is perfect.
    • 5/5
      A wild journey which was kind of hard to put down as I wanted to figure out if there was any redemption or justice at all. Well you can find out for yourself.
    • 1/5
      Not a fan. In Cormac McCarthy’s world, there is nothing more real, and nothing as irresistible, as evil. God is present as a faint whisper in this book, but He is largely irrelevant. God may wish us well, but He certainly can’t do anything about the predicament we find ourselves in.

      I finished this book on Good Friday. In the real world, evil is very real, and it is very terrible. But on Good Friday, God swallowed up evil, and He showed us that there is something more irresistible than evil: love.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I found this book gritty, raw, violent, bleak, and pessimistic. It’s about stealing drug money and running from the consequences, about a sheriff trying to do his best to protect people in an increasingly violent world, and about a psychopathic killer who appears to be the embodiment of evil. It’s also about the choices we make and the consequences that inevitably follow.

      It’s not really my type book since I try to avoid books that feature psychopaths. After a page-turning beginning, it grinds to a screeching halt about three-fourths of the way in, leaving the reader to ponder what may have happened. It is thought-provoking in a grim way. This is my third of McCarthy’s works and I much preferred All the Pretty Horses and The Road.
    • 5/5
      I haven't ever read a western novel before but I can see one a mile away if you hand me the text. What makes No Country For Old Men so excellent is that it's not your typical western. Hell, it's not even categorized as one. There are no cowboys, no horse back riding through history. No 'how the west was won' theme. There are no stereotypes, no iconic characters and what not. If you were to read it, though - oh, you'd know what you had in your hands.

      It's hidden around poetic paragraphs, sullen words. But it's there. You have yourself a western novel. You have the good guy and you have the bad guy, the desperado and the woman in distress. You have the horses and you have your shoot outs. Your rangers and your sheriffs and your outlaws.

      But you won't find the novel in the western section at your local bookstore. Clearly, Llewelyn Moss, Anton Chigurh and Sheriff Bell don't have a place in the conventional western shelf. Their harrowing tale of a society changing before their very eyes deserves a place with the literary works of the greats. Because that's where author Cormac McCarthy belongs, amongst the greats.
    • 4/5
      Really good up until the end. I can see why the movie left some parts out. I didn't really get the last few chapters but maybe that was because I was listening to it instead of reading and had been driving all day.