I thought my first Cormac McCarthy book would probably be The Road, considering the length of time it's been hanging out on my "to be read" list and its shorter length. But No Country for Old Men has come first, and I sense I now have a pretty good taste and feel for the rest of McCarthy's uniquely told narratives. My short review for this book is as follows: "this book was like a puzzle with all the pieces scattered and labeled in plain sight. but i still wrote 'what?' 'who?' and 'wow.' all over every page." I'm really rocking with this idea of a puzzle because McCarthy's writing style requires readers to do some moderately heavy lifting to keep track of everything that's going on. From a flippant use of pronouns, to sections within chapters acting as if they're completely separate from other sections in content and focus, to time jumps that imply things that happened in between without them ever being explicitly stated, it's, in one word, thrilling. Another word could be "frustrating," which I'd be lying if I said I didn't resonate with more than once. But I have to admire McCarthy's ability to create and sustain a story that stays manages to stay afloat without explaining everything to the reader. I had plenty of moments where I felt the satisfaction of being a "smart reader" for putting a few of the puzzle pieces together. And, in terms of the plot itself, I feel like I became the most invested in the overlapping storylines that focused on Chigurh chasing Moss and Bell chasing them both. Bell strikes me as the most fascinating character. He's aware that he's getting old and past his prime in the police force (hint hint, title significance!), but still invested enough in his perception of what it means to fight against evil to try to find and get Chigurh back in handcuffs. Precisely because he fails, with Chigurh roaming free and Moss dead (which was a major turning event that happened earlier in the story than I expected it to, wow), is where true emotion lies: the state of America is plummeting toward an evil that past generations can't "defeat" and future generations must learn to live with. The book's female characters make me equal parts fascinated and uncomfortable with McCarthy after the recent publishing of the very timely Vanity Fair article about his long-time, underage lover. That's a wild sentence. But yeah---Moss' wife and the hitchhiker Moss picks up on the road and ends up getting killed are the only two female characters of note. And guess what---they both end up dead. Larger commentary on how they relate to the women (or more like "woman") in McCarthy's own life has to be acknowledged here, that no one is safe from the evil Chigurh embodies, save for those he doesn't see as being a threat, like Bell. People like Bell would be dead if they and their power in law enforcement were actually a threat to someone like Chigurh and his connections. There's a lot more I could say, but I'm still processing most of it and feel like the Vanity Fair article is clouding most of my opinion of this novel's author right now.



Some of my favorite quotes from No Country for Old Men:

"How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?"

"It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it."

"If there's one thing on this planet you don't look like it's a bunch of good luck walkin around."

The amount of content and craft moves pushed into each and every one of the essays in this collection makes approaching a book review feel nearly impossible, if I'm being honest. I want to feel like I'm covering all the bases of my thoughts, but my thoughts feel jumbled because each piece left me with a different impression of either awe or confusion. Over the entire collection, I was able to make clear connections back to the title and felt like I was therefore able to grasp themes of cultural identity, violence in Colombia, violence in America, and the author's multilayered relationships with multiple family members and their family history. I think my main point of contention is every essay's plethora of names. There's too many to keep track of, to be frank, which made the skim reading I was already doing even more difficult. But, to be fair, I understand how the author had to hold all of the names of these people and places to be able to write about her family and some of the more researched elements that intersect with her family history and history in Bogota, Colombia. I'm also aware I could've been a better reader and sat with each piece for longer, but I just didn't have the time. In connection to that, I think there's just one too many things going on in each essay. After learning that Cabeza-Vanegas' style of essay-writing is heavily inspired by Montaigne's rambling, digressing influence, I feel a lot more accepting of her maximalist style. Because that's clearly what's going on here: an attempt at approaching a variety of ideas, impressions, and images with a lot of language and repetition. Each essay is filled to the brim with similes and metaphors (my nonfiction class made jokes about counting how many we could find across the book, but that we didn't have that kind of time). Truthfully, this sense of maximized figurative language really only demonstrated to me that she's a talented, eloquent author. At times, I started to get annoyed at what seemed like a stretch of word choice or a rambling metaphor spanning across two or three sentences. There's a lot of digression going on on the sentence-level as well as the macro paragraph-level, which makes it really hard to focus on one thing at a time and reach the end of each essay with a sense of what its aboutness was. A few essays stand out to me particularly for very specific images and physical sensations, but aboutness-wise? They're mostly shaky. I know I'm the type of reader who appreciates a good flow of figurative language, but also the writer's ability to get me to the conclusion with a vague idea of what I should be feeling or taking away from the content. So, to wrap things up, this book and its emphasis on lofty prose and maximalism isn't ultimately for me, though I really appreciated the element of translation that can be found at the beginning of each essay. None of the translated idioms seemed to really connect to the content of the essay it was affiliated with, but I was kind of okay with that. Each part of the collection begins with a retold Colombian creation story as well, and these didn't clearly connect to other parts of the essays in a way I was also okay with. But I'm here for anything mythology related. :)



One of my favorite quotes from Don't Come Back:

"This is what we do, impose narratives on the unfurled darkness, try to steer heavens and countries for the greater good and the greater truth."

I'm so impressed with all the moving parts of this novel. The influence of several Greek myths, mainly the legend of Demeter and Persephone, combined with the poignant and literary setting of Cambridge, really gave this book a distinct atmospheric feel. Listening to it as an audiobook only helped add to this sense of atmosphere, of a campus riddled with death, potential suspects, and reminders of a past the main character, Marianna, won't ever be able to get back. Having read Michaelides' The Silent Patient only recently, I picked up on his preference for melding new storylines with the patterns of classic Greek narrative and the intrigue of a good old fashioned murder mystery. The crossovers to The Silent Patient, which in this literary universe occurs after the events of this book, were so so cool for a knowing reader to pick up on (aka, I thought it was really cool and gasped out loud when I realized Theo Faber was entering onto this book's scene). Like The Silent Patient, this novel's narrator is also a psychotherapist, spurred to pursue the particular profession from her own set of intense daddy issues, among other childhood abuses. I think from what I've seen of this author so far, they're clearly capable of crafting unique and believable characters in settings that enhance their characteristics rather than turn them cliche. So much of what we learn about Marianna becomes so important for the delayed reveals in the story later. The comparison of Tennyson and Marianna's own experience of looking just past the veil to the people they've loved and lost really resonated with me. I didn't think to question Marianna's opinion of her late husband, Sebastian, who tragically drowned in the ocean on a trip Marianna urged them to take for the sake of their marriage, until I realized that we only had her opinion of him to go off of. Since she's clearly biased, how farfetched is it to discover that he was a murderous, disturbed man who manipulated a naive young woman, Zoe, into committing horrendous acts of murder that would not only wreak havoc but ultimately cause a brutal betrayal for Marianna, a wife he clearly didn't truly love? I was truly shocked when this plot twist unfolded, not only because I never suspected Zoe, but because I was very nearly convinced that Edward Fosca, Marianna's prime suspect upon starting her unofficial investigation, was guilty of killing his own students---particularly a set group of young women self-titled The Maidens. Fosca is such an interesting character in his own right, since we find out he was sleeping with these female students of his, but not actively killing them. He really comes off incredibly guilty at times, but perhaps that's just Marianna's clear lack of complete mental stability and desperation for a way to explain the horrific stabbings and have a sense of closure for the loss she's suffering in her own life. I also must sing Fred's praises for a moment---he is just the sweetest, most romantic, clumsiest thing. The way he pursues and cares about Marianna, and actually helps her productively move forward with her investigation, is precious. His belief in premonitions added to the element of the book's atmosphere that felt supernatural, too, what with Marianna's hunch that her prayer to Demeter and Persephone on the island of Naxos may have started all of her misfortune and followed her to Cambridge. I definitely had some points of confusion upon finishing the book, though. I can tell the ending was supposed to be ambiguous for the sake of what I assume will be another book. That's cool, but caused me to say, "What? No, c'mon! There's gotta be another book out already." to myself in the car as the audiobook wrapped up. I think the logistics of how Zoe pulled off the murders are a little cloudy to me, as well as why Sebastian was so motivated to have these murders be orchestrated in the first place. Could it be that Marianna was really too jaded to see any red flags, and we, therefore, as readers don't get to see them either? I'm not sure. The beginning section of each new part was clearly meant to imply we were reading from Fosca's perspetive, but I think it's actually supposed to be interpreted as Sebastian's perspective once we know his true intentions. I also wanted to see Marianna speak to Fosca at least one more time, since I ended up convinced pretty early on of Marianna's theory that Fosca was guilty. I'm very glad there was a plot twist in this regard, though. This is definitely a book I'd reread a year or a few years down the line with the intent of closely reading for details I wouldn't have thought to focus on for a first read. I also need to keep tabs on Michaelides to make sure I'm aware of when his next book comes out.



Some of my favorite quotes from The Maidens:

"That was the horror of it. We all secretly hope that tragedy will only ever happen to other people... sooner or later, it happens to you."

"She sometimes felt she had been cursed, as if by some malevolent goddess in a Greek myth, to lose everyone she ever loved."

I've never read a short story collection quite like this one, or a collection I liked as much as this one from start to finish. I made jokes to my peers who read this book with me, as well as in my Goodreads review, that I'd like to have whatever Saunders was having when he wrote these stories. But in all seriousness, he as a writer has the kind of tone that makes readers even remotely familiar with his work go, "Oh, that's Saunders for sure." He has such control over each of the narratives, even when things seem completely wacky or abstract. I've since learned that a lot of post-postmodernism elements are at work in these stories. Postmodernism can be understood as traditionally cynical and focused on the idea that nothing really matters. Post-postmodernism, then, decides to go beyond this irony to find some hope. I really see this happening in the first and last stories in this collection (which happen to be my two favorites): "Victory Lap" and "Tenth of December." Just when all seems truly lost, that some one or other is gonna die and the ending might leave you in tears, something turns around and bam---there's just a little bit of hope or redemption in the midst of the sadness and postmodern foundation. All of these stories take place in pretty average places, at a first glance. I was fascinated by how Saunders tells readers what they need to know about the setting and society of a story without directly telling them at all. I mainly saw this happening in "The Semplica Girl Diaries" and "My Chivalric Fiasco." Like, c'mon, the language is hilarious in "My Chivalric Fiasco" and does the necessary work to orient readers in the setting. This is one of several stories that also hints at there being technological advancements and miracles of medicine that we haven't quite reached yet in our own society. From "My Chivalric Fiasco's" KnightLyfe drug to the morbid reality of what's happening to the Semplica Girls, to nearly all of "Escape from Spiderhead," we're thrown into the deep end of stories that Saunders makes believable enough to track with in the midst of things that make it very clear we're not quite situated in a society where everything's normal. If I ever happen to master post-postmodernism, I hope I'm able to at least mimic Saunders' mastery of delayed reveals sorta well. I'll be thinking about these stories for a good long while and definitely want to check out more of his work soon.



Some of my favorite quotes from Tenth of December:

"Why was she dancing? No reason. Just alive, I guess."

"Which maybe that’s what love was: liking someone how he was and doing things to help him get even better."