No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

The last speech is a contemplation of hope, a dream about however dark and cold the world might be, however long the ride through it might be. To address that, we need to talk about the film's ending. Gone are large swaths of Bell's italicized thoughts, which prefaced each chapter in the book with what literary critic Harold Bloom called 'apocalyptic moral judgments.' With the way the film subverts audience expectations in its final act, this clearly left some moviegoers (like the woman sitting in front of me at the theater) perplexed as to why the film shifts perspective from Moss to Bell and ends the way it does. The only thing that might have suffered a bit in the transition from page to screen is Bell's role, which is perhaps too greatly reduced at the beginning, so that the laconic lawman's importance does not become clear till the end. In the same way that Cormac McCarthy's austerity had a sobering effect on the Coen Brothers, tempering their occasional overindulgence in quirkiness with some heft, the Coen Brothers' less-is-more approach to the source material may have actually improved on McCarthy's novel, tightening up the dialogue, removing inessential plot elements like the young female hitchhiker, and just generally making the story leaner, meaner, and more effective. Numerous close-ups allow us to the luxuriate in the craggy facial features of Tommy Lee Jones, whose character, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, provides the film's third major perspective. A sharp copy.No Country for Old Men has been called a neo-western, and though he comes riding in late after his initial voiceover, the film does contain something of a cowboy, albeit an aging one, marooned in the modern world among senseless evil.

Signed by McCarthy and numbered 25 to edition page. Original half burgundy leather with marbled boards, gilt lettering to spine. This deluxe edition is highly sought for its beauty, a highlight for any McCarthy collection. A MacArthur Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, and National Book Award-winner, McCarthy's reputation has been extended further with the success of the Coen brothers' Hollywood adaptation of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, which won four Academy Awards including Best Picture. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is a major work of the McCarthy canon, exploring fate and futility in the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong in rural west Texas. Known for his 'brutal and spare' narratives, Cormac McCarthy has been called 'one of the greatest living novelists' (Cowley, THE GUARDIAN). Deluxe signed limited edition of this neo-Western thriller, one of McCarthy's best-known works and the basis for an Oscar-winning film.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy