No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

No Country for Old Men is a novel of borders. From the standpoint of genre, Cormac McCarthy plants himself at the border of Western and noir and pastoral. The novel also borders explicit violence while being, at times, understatedly reserved—same goes for its sentence structures: the dialogue is terse, brief; the narration provides clause after clause sewn together. All these stylistic choices run parallel to the novel’s setting: the border between Texas and Mexico, where a drug deal has gone horribly wrong.

Our protagonist, Llewellyn Moss, is out in the desert and stumbles across a heroin deal gone bad, one littered with dead bodies and a briefcase left behind full of cold hard cash. Llewellyn claims the case and takes it home to his skeptical wife, whom he keeps in the dark about his situation. To be fair, he’s completely truthful about the bag being full of money, but his dynamic with his wife assures that she will not believe him.

Unfortunately for Llewellyn, he has entered into a network of forces that far exceed his capacities. There are cartel members at war with each other, bounty hunters, and police that are trying to decipher what the heck is happening with all these dead bodies. One of my gripes with the text is that so many of the characters feel interchangeable. The terseness of the characters’ speech, for example, emphasized their wit but not their personalities. Each could be each—that is, except for the novel’s villain.

Bought to life in the film adaptation by Javier Bardem, Anton Chigurh is a truly iconic villain. In the text, his piercing blue eyes reflect a cold universe as he slaughters his way through Texas and beyond. Chigurh tracks down his pray and uses a cattle gun to murder people for as little as needing their car. His calculated and measured approach is sinister, but the text runs the risk of glorifying his ultraviolence by making him the character from whom we get the most insight into the novel’s core themes.

There are a few critical moments with Chigurh that serve the novel’s core themes. There is a moment when Chigurh initiates a gas station attendant into a coin toss game. He flips the coin and asks for the man to call it. The man protests because the stakes have not been made clear to him—he has nothing to gain. McCarthy is masterful in crafting the suspense of the scene, because we know that the man is betting on his life—and I think at some level he understands, too. Chigurh explains the genesis of the coin and the twenty years it took to get to that moment. Essentially, the scene is a reflection on fate. The past latches on and makes the moment inevitable—nearly. The only “choice” is left to chance for the man: a fateful 50/50. One of the reasons Chigurh is so compelling is because he, unlike the other characters in the book, seems to have a clear vision of how the world operates (more on this later). By giving him the chance to articulate his philosophy, he is given special priority in the reader’s mind, despite his horrific violence.

The other stand-out Chigurh murder-spree scene is when he kills Llewellyn’s wife. For a bit of a background, Llewellyn is provided the opportunity to return the money. Chigurh promises to kill him, but to let his wife live. Llewellyn is killed, somewhat randomly, at the hands of the cartel, undermining Chigurh as the agent of fatalism. Nonetheless, Chigurh arrives at Carla Jean’s house and tells her about his promise to kill her. Carla Jean protests, noting that Chigurh himself made the promise and that he could give up his mission. His rigidity assures her: no, the choice was already made.

The title of No Country for Old Men points towards the difference in philosophies at play. Chigurh reflects a precise, specific code for living. The world has rules, standards, and consequences, even if they’re partly determined by chance. What’s strange is that the sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, seems to have an affinity for Chigurh’s philosophy, even if he won’t acknowledge it. There’s a passage where Ed Tom explains how everything is changing and the younger generation no longer subscribes to conventions and so on. It’s as though he longs for the certainty and predictability of Chigurh’s philosophy.

This odd tension helps to explain, perhaps, Ed Tom’s obsession with—and inaction toward—Chigurh. Ed Tom cannot understand the logic of the villain’s chaos. He continually floats towards him but whenever he gets close, he shies away. In a moment of pursuit, Ed Tom seems to pull back, fearing his own death.

No Country for Old Men is unlike most books I read, especially in the realm of literary fiction. There are lengthy action sequences and pages of senseless slaughter. I initially found it a little challenging to get immersed—-there’s a lot of description of the desert and a play-by-play of the action. As the plot advances, I found myself more invested, if still a little confused about the interchangeable cast of characters. I wish there was a little more personality or experimentation with ‘voice’ for the characters, but the random anarchy of McCarthy’s world keeps the story running; there’s a moment when Chigurh is in a car accident and it could be what brings him down—except, he’s too clever. Following Chigurh murdering Carla Jean, I felt the story essentially had done what it needed to, but then Ed Tom provides a lengthy reflection that has the narrative peter out. 

Generally…I liked it! Happy reading!

Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin

  Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin is a novel about two sisters caught between worlds—and replicates that experience for readers. The essential premise of the book is that sisters Lark and Robin (yes, really) have a tumultuous relationship with their mother Marianne, which drives Lark to study in the United States. Later, Robin follows and Lark acts as her substitute mother. Robin is a piano prodigy; Lark is a filmmaker. It does get more complicated than that, but those are the basics to keep in mind.

The novel has some moments that stand out as impactful, but I’ll return to those shortly.

First, I want to address two aspects of the book that I think don’t entirely work. For one, I can’t pinpoint whether it’s Lark’s voice or some other element, but the novel feels rather cold. I found it difficult to connect with the characters, particularly their mother Marianne. Lark offers very little sympathy to her mother and it’s hard to see past Lark’s narration and find the positives in Marianne for ourselves. The same applies for the other characters, too—it’s hard to tell whether they’re just unlikeable or whether Lark’s narration colours them so convincingly that they feel distant.

There are two elements in the dynamic between Lark and Marianne that I found edifying. Partway through the novel, Lark starts filming her mother for a one-on-one interview. The description of the filming sessions and Marianne’s openness show that brief glimmer into her that feels human. Later in the novel, Marianne has dementia and feels compelled to constantly clean. At the end of a tense interaction, Lark narrates, “She gave me a broom and together we swept away invisible dirt, wiped invisible cobwebs. Afterward we shared the pastries and drank the weak, cold tea she had made” (195). There’s something tender in that moment where both attend to an absence and have a shared vision of life that they generally don’t have. That tenderness seems to fade, though, when her mother passes. It lacks fanfare and even feeling, returning to a coldness that chills the novel.

The second issue is that I think the book lacks coherence. The focus of the novel is much harder to pinpoint than I implied in my opening paragraph. The book is a reasonably tight 272 pages in my edition, but it’s so jam-packed that it’s the longest short book I’ve read in a while. The first part reads like a bildungsroman of Lark setting out on her own and going to school. It’s Victorian-ish to start and we get a reasonably lengthy section of her learning about film and dating her first boy. Their relationship is annoying but well-developed; it felt like one of the more authentic and sincere elements of the book. Then there’s also a section about her horrible roommate, Robin arriving, and the roommate’s old cats dying while in the sisters’ care and the roommate’s reaction when she finds out. That, too, was a compelling moment that was reasonably rich in character development. From there, we get another lengthy section about Robin and Lark’s respective studies and dating lives; Robin becomes a piano prodigy that studies at Juilliard and then goes on to tour Europe before leaving her agent in the lurch and sending a postcard to Lark that reads “Don’t try to find me.” Meanwhile, Robin goes back to her studies in film, working on her own, and apprentice-editing for an established artsy filmmaker. The descriptions of the films, I found, were compelling. The images they inspired for me felt rich and I could imagine engaging in film analysis for films of that sort. Later, we see a fraught relationship between the filmmaker and his daughter and his daughter and Lark. The filmmaker and Lark start dating; they stop dating; Lark wants a child; Lark can’t have a child, and there’s lengthy discussion of it. There’s a section where Marianne becomes senile and is clearly in decline—again, there’s a great moment, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. The weirdest thing is that Robin essentially starts a wolf sanctuary and she has a barn where all the stalls house broken pianos—again it feels a little bit Victorian (I think about the wolves peppered throughout Wuthering Heights and the pianos in the barns feels like a Gothic secret). Of course Robin becomes a surrogate for Lark. Oh, and there’s a part about nursing a wolf back to health.

To me, the book is trying to tell too many stories at once. The parts just don’t seem to fit together and instead it feels like a piecemeal approach. To be generous to Ohlin, I’m going to accept that it’s intentionally structured to mirror Lark’s filmic experience. Film distorts time—like in a film, Dual Citizens allows us to jump across years. Like film, we jump cut between topics. Filmmakers splice and juxtapose. The filmmakers in the novel also have an intense focus; one of Lark’s mentors is an ardent feminist whose views are given voice through the characters, and the other has an intense focus on slice-of-life moments and holds an intense zoom. That also felt like Ohlin’s approach. Consider, for example, this description of Lark’s mentor’s film Potato, “which was released two years later, but not widely seen. It’s not hard to understand why. The film is slow, densely composed, exquisite. Every shot shows how he labored over it, and this is perhaps part of the problem: his fingerprints are on every frame, urging the view, Look how beautiful this is” (104). I would argue that the structure of this novel is similar: it is slow and densely composed. It is, in some ways, laborious to read with its intense focus. The passage describing the film continues, “It’s as if you’re not allowed to see anything for yourself” (104), which I think is how Lark’s narration makes me feel: we’re offered judgment and we have to follow her perspective on the other characters in the book. The passage continues as follows: 

The other problem (besides the title, which encouraged bad behaviour among writers, unable to restrain themselves from headlines like Spud Flick a Dud) is the film’s level of abstraction. The tight composition focuses on the threshers, the planters, the rolling escalators in which the trembling potatoes are fed into the gaping maw of the processor, the camera so close to the equipment that it becomes difficult to tell what the machines are doing. The whole experience is aestheticized, and for all the nearness, there is no intimacy. (104)

I think that the novel does very much the same, though not to the level of abstraction. Ohlin does, however, keep intense focus on particular moments and details. The amount of time dedicated to Lark’s first relationship: is it necessary? I’m not sure, but the novel seems unable to look away and, “for all the nearness, there is no intimacy” (104).

Similarly, Lark’s own approach to filmmaking (and indeed life), is that she “gathered tidbits—things I read, a picture that lingered, the memory of an afternoon in a movie theatre, the face of my sister as she laughed—and sometimes my head felt cluttered as an attic with them” (101). Dual Citizens embodies that piecemeal approach to storytelling. For Lark, “stitching a film together satisfied this collector’s itch perfectly, [her] magpie treasures woven and spackled into a nest” (101). The book is a series of moments, but loosely joined.

When the plot does have a “twist,” I feel like it was obvious. For instance, when Robin disappears from her European tour with the note not to find her, I immediately suspected it was an issue with an unplanned pregnancy. Probably a hundred and fifty to two hundred pages later my suspicions were confirmed and rather than it being a moment of shock and pathos, my reaction was more…”well, yeah.” I just hoped for something a little more cohesive and a little more surprising. The book trailed too far into the quotidian without offering the sorts of philosophical explorations of minutiae that I find so compelling in other similar works.

Overall, Dual Citizens had a few charms and a couple of moments that felt like highlights, but as a coherent project it felt a little flat and cold. Ohlin’s writing style is certainly descriptive enough and has flashes of inspiration that elevate its status in the literary world—but I was just hoping for something with a little more force, a little more complete.

Nonetheless, happy reading!

Strange News from Another Star by Herman Hesse

  Herman Hesse was one of my first entry points into philosophical literature and I have fond memories of Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game, and Demian among others. That said, it has been years—decades, even—since I’ve last picked up one of his books. After my lengthy hiatus, I’ve picked up Strange News from Another Star, a collection of short stories that was fine, but not as affecting as his more substantial works.      

        The collection revolves around a few key themes, including outlandish wishes, mystical journeys into the beyond, and the hidden significance of seemingly everyday phenomena. The tone reads very much like a book of fairytales where an objective and factual tone recounts details that are unrealistic. There are some stories that are more introspective in nature and narrated in first person. Whether inward- or outward-focused, the book reaches for the allegorical, the eternal, and the strange.

Two of the stories that were most engaging to me were “Augustus” and “Faldum”, both of which revolve around odd wishes. In the case of “Augustus,” a mother is granted the ability to make a wish for her son (the actual mechanics are thankfully never explained). In a panic, she makes the wish that everyone will love him. Augustus then follows a hedonistic and philandering path similar to that of Dorian Gray. He’s given the opportunity to make a wish of his own and starts to turn his path around. The premise works, even if it’s essentially just a “monkey’s paw” premise. “Faldum,” by contrast, involves wishes fulfilled. Everyone in this strange village is able to make a wish from a wandering merchant—and their wishes are instantly granted. It’s a little mysterious that they don’t all wish for something more ambitious. Most just ask for a modest sum of money and then go about their way. The wishes that matter are for those of two hermits. One wants nothing more than to talk to nobody and play his violin, so he ascends into the sky and is never seen again. The other hermit wishes to become a mountain—and does, literally. He’s a mountain for ages until many generations of people die and he erodes and then is given the chance to reunite with the music, essentially become music, alongside the violinist. It’s a strange, if engaging, concept.

“Faldum” also stands out in the collection due to the richness of its imagery. The whole opening sequence offers a frame narrative replete with description of the main character’s journey to Faldum. Several other stories have lush passages, including “A Dream Sequence” and “Iris.” I was surprised by how focused Hesse was on the details; I typically think of his writing as more broad strokes with more emphasis on philosophical exposition.

“A Dream Sequence” and “Flute Dream” were stories of less impact on me. They’re imagistic, symbolic, and mystical in nature, offering suggestions of deeper meaning. The challenge with stories like this (and dream sequences in general) is that their internal coherence is often lacking. We have to accept that the symbols have significance despite not having the same access to the writer’s inner states.

“Strange News from Another Star” and “Iris” are somewhat more memorable since they have a more clear focus. While maintaining some aspects of the dreamy free association of Hesse’s more esoteric works, there’s a little more narrative development. In “Strange News from Another Star,” the character goes in search of flowers in far and distant lands because nothing is worse than not adorning their dead with flowers—meanwhile, he arrives in lands full of war and death. “Iris,” meanwhile, follows a man who is drawn into the iris flower and falls in love with a woman named Iris, who refuses to marry him because he can’t commit to her spontaneous inclinations, favouring instead a life of the mind.

Hesse’s novels often revolve around duality. To my recollection, Narcissus and Goldmund, Demian, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game all revolve around the idea that the mind and the body exist in a challenging duality. There’s the implication that intellect and hedonism exist at opposite ends of a spectrum that struggle against one another within people. The same exploration happens in stories like “Iris” but the story isn’t quite as developed.

A few of the stories address the great beyond; there’s a common motif of crossing a threshold into the unknown and the conflation of death and open gates to the great beyond pop up as mutual metaphors. 

Overall, it was nice to revisit Hesse’s writing. The short stories are a quick entry point into some of the major themes in Hesse’s oeuvre. The lush descriptions are a delight, and I did find myself thinking as I read, particularly around which wishes I would make, given the opportunity, that would not end in disaster.

If you’re looking for an early entry point to Hesse, or if you’re a completionist of his oeuvre, Strange News from Another Star may be worth your while—but in my humble opinion, it would be better to read at least a few of his novels first.

Happy reading!