What makes No Country For Old Men a great film?

There’s been much talk and debate ever since this film was released and won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, about its artistic and narrative merit.  Comments from naysayers vary from “It’s a pointless, plotless affair in pretentious filmmaking” to “dafuq did I just watch?”, while accolades from yay-sayers range between carried-away OMFGs and “the Coen brothers have weaved pure cinematic gold...instant classic.” I, under the pretense of having something new to add, will make a vain attempt here to justify why No Country For Old Men is the rightful recepient of the title of not only the best film of the year 2007 but also the best film of the decade 2000s and, at the end of the century, the heir to the title The Godfather held in the 20^th century: the best film of the century.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I usually am not one to analyze and dissect films or other forms of stories, and in fact that is the least of my intentions here. After all, movies I firmly believe should be open to subjective interpretation, not to objective analysis, and each person should be entitled to conceive it in any way they choose. But there is a good deal of backstory and context within which the film makes sense and sheds more light on the characters, their beliefs and motivations, and all the underlying richness of the film. This context is what I wish to explore, not just partially as I will do here but in greater depth in future through other novels of Cormac McCarthy (especially The Sunset Limited, which I need to re-watch).

So, first things first: the protagonist of the film. Most people believe that since the antagonist is Anton Chigurh, the protagonist must be the guy he is chasing, the hunter Llewelyn Moss. He’s not. As uncoventional as it may seem, the protagonist is actually the sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the narrator of the film. Despite him not being physically present in most of the events, the entire film is actually told from his perspective. There is no rule written anywhere that the lead character of a story must be present for a precise number of onscreen minutes, nor that the story must physically revolve around him. What determines whether he is the lead or not, however, is the perspective: is the moral compass of the movie, for the most part anyway, inclined relative to the character in question? It could be very subtle, but perspectives, like assholes, are always present. That’s what makes a film work, even if you can’t verbalize or analyze it.

Secondly, the era. The film is not set in modern-day Texas but in 1980. This is easily deductible through the general setting of the film, including cars, and through Chigurh’s words exchanged with a shop owner he intends to kill:  “You know what date is on this coin? 1958. It's been traveling 22 years to get here. And now it’s here.” 1958 + 22 = 1980. The reason I mention this is because era is one of the most important aspects of the context of this film, the hint to which is in the very title of the movie. As a matter of fact, era is important to the context of any film, even if its moralities are timeless and omnipresent, but I must resist digressing towards unnecessary generalities.

Now, the key to understanding this film lies in the opening monologue by the narrator, Sheriff Bell. I’ll reproduce it here only in its relevance:

I was sheriff of this county when I was 25 years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman. Father too. Me and him was sheriffs at the same time, him up in Plano and me out here. ... Some of the old-time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lot of folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough never carried one. ... Gaston Boykins wouldn’t wear one up in Comanche County. I always liked to hear about the old-timers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can’t help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can’t help but wonder how they’d have operated these times. There’s this boy I sent to the electric chair at Huntsville here a while back. ... He killed a 14-year-old girl. Paper said it was a crime of passion, but he told me there wasn’t any passion to it. Told me he’d been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said if they turned him out, he’d do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. Be there in about 15 minutes. I don’t know what to make of that. I surely don’t. The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."

(Ah, the calm, comforting resignation with which Tommy Lee Jones utters these words is just priceless!)

As I mentioned above, it’s 1980. Richard Nixon had declared War on Drugs in 1971, and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was established in 1973 for this purpose. DEA took its job seriously, as it does to this day, and busted pretty much every single “lab” (the jargon for places, including shady basements, where drugs like cocaine, heroine, etc. are manufactured or “cooked”) and incarcerated most drug dealers, distributors, and users. DEA was only getting stronger and more well-established, and the future for those who depended on home-grown illegal drugs didn’t look very promising. By 1980, the organization had become strong enough that if you cooked within the US, DEA would hunt you down. That was the trend. In such difficult times, the demand for imported illegal drugs rose exponentially. Afterall, DEA couldn’t bust labs situated in countries outside their jurisdiction. Their neighboring country, Mexico, where drug laws hardly existed and crime was a way of life, was the perfect haven to cook and import drugs from. And since Mexico shares her border with Texas, Texas acted as the gateway for illegal drugs into the US, importing not only drugs but also the perils and heinous crimes that go with it – thus breeding the infamous “Mexican drug cartel.” A new wave of crime was beginning to spread through the country – mindless, passionless, cold, brutal, unmotivated, unforgiving – in other words, the embodiment that is Anton Chigurh.

Chigurh is the physical manifestation of a characteristic drug trafficking trade gone wrong and its ensuing chaos – beginning with a killing spree at the location of the exchange and followed by money missing and the pursuit of it involving a range of insensible, incomprehensible murders. The events leading up to the initial massacre are kept as vague as possible to give it the look and feel of generality; to imply that it’s not important specifically what caused the massacre because although causative reasons might vary with each such massacre, the factor they all have in common is deception and betrayal centered around money. That’s how it begins – without a specific beginning. And if you watch the film closely enough, when Moss is killed at the end of the hunt, you are shown neither the act of killing itself, nor the killers and nor the bodies clearly enough, just the sheriff’s perspective from his car as he witnesses things from a distance and approaches the scene of crime to find two floating bodies in the pool. The end of the hunt is also kept as vague as possible, to give it the same feel of generality as the ordeal’s beginning. It’s a film without a beginning or an end.

As the end approaches, it becomes increasingly clear that Chigurh isn’t even pursuing Moss for the money. It appears so initially when he tracks Moss through a tracker hidden inside the case, but even after Moss gets rid of the money, Chigurh continues pursuing him anyway. He was never after the money, only the sadistic thrill of the kill. (In fact, Chigurh kills Moss' wife because "I gave him my word.") The Cartel doesn’t kill Moss for the money either, only to send out the message not to fuck with them, to not put your nose where it doesn’t belong even by chance. And when the sheriff comes face-to-face with the aftermath of all these atrocities he is struggling to comprehend, he is all but nostalgic about a time gone by when crime used to be much simpler to understand, when murder came with motive, when no one killed without reason, when criminals were easier to deal with – the tone with which he utters the opening monologue which if you go back up and read will tell you why he believes he is no longer lives in a country for old men like him but is instead trying to find his place in such a world. His nostalgia isn’t reflected just in the opening voice-over monologue alone but also in the ending monologue where he tells his wife the dream he had the other night about his father.

But the most pivotal and perhaps the best part of the film is the penultimate scene where the sheriff visits his elder wheelchair-bound brother who tell hims the story of how their uncle was killed in 1909, trying to convince him that he isn’t dealing with anything new, that this country has always been hard on people, and that he “can’t stop what’s comin’.”

No Country For Old Men is a film where everything came together to make the perfect symphony.
_______________

Favorite dialogue from the movie:
Moss: "Is he dangerous?"
Carson Wells: "Compared to what? The Bubonic plague?"

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No donut for dear Miss Angela Fine :(

It's been a while since I posted anything and I am still drafting a post, in which I've already lost interest and hence have shelved it forever, but I thought I'd post an excerpt from a hilariously titled, hilarious book, Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere, which was pretty amusing to read:

The second tear was for Angela Fine, because she is beautiful and pure and nice, and staples pictures of kittens to the pay envelopes of the entire IT department every Friday because she believes that little things count. If I were her lover I would be the most dedicated, kind, brave, understanding, sensitive lover any woman ever had. I would give her cunnilingus every morning, and fix her car, and rub her back and change all of the light bulbs in her house on a regular schedule before any of them ever actually burned out, and I would defend her home from thieves and her heart from loneliness and her body from violence and her laptop from viruses and unstable Microsoft updates. Because that is what a beautiful, perfect creature of Angela Fine’s caliber—a caliber of one, a class unto herself—deserves.

But Angela Fine does not get what she deserves. Instead, Angela gets:

1. A new pair of wide-rimmed glasses, slightly tinted—not nearly as flattering or sexy as the small, black-rimmed librarian glasses she used to wear, yet still gorgeous in context and incredibly lucky to be on her face—with which, aided by mascara, she disguises a swollen black eye; and

2. A small, perfectly round scab just beneath and behind her right ear, approximately 8 millimeters in diameter; a kind of scab the Old Me knows well from his awful childhood; the kind of scab you get when your sadistic, abusive boyfriend or stepfather stabs you with a cigarette, as punishment.

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Coincidences

I've been a fan of the two Davids: David Foster Wallace (DFW) for a couple of years now, and David Lynch for longer. In the past year, my admiration for both these guys has escalated exponentially. Generally, I try not to admire the artist himself/herself and instead just constrain my admiration to the work alone. (This keeps me from creating any biases towards the artist or against another artist, the way those idiotic Sharukh Khan and Aamir Khan fanboys squabble over which of the two is the greatest human being ever in all of recorded history). But I'd be lying if I said it's not hard to not admire the Davids, especially when I'm reveling in the works of those artists to the point where I forget I'm having breakfast as I'm reading/watching the piece of work and lose myself in it body and soul until I have no brain space left to even think of the food plate on my table.

Just recently, I was reading an essay by DFW online, and as coincidences do so often happen, the opening sentence of the essay had me hooked like a fish to the bait:

This is not because of anything having to do with me or with the fact that I'm a fanatical David Lynch fan from way back, though I did make my pro-Lynch fanaticism known when the Asymmetrical (studio) people were trying to decide whether to let a writer onto the set.

One of the two artists I fanatically admire himself fanatically admires the other of the two.

It's a small, strange postmodern world.

(The essay, on going back and reading the title which I usually skip, was about DFW's experience of visiting the shooting set of Lynch's Lost Highway, the number 4 film on my all-time favorite films list. Can be accessed here. The subtitle reads: "In which novelist David Foster Wallace visits the set of David Lynch's new movie and finds the director both grandly admirable and sort of nuts.")

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Glimpses of genius

The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it. This is the way of people. Suddenly ask what’s wrong and whether they open up and spill their guts or deny it and pretend you’re off, they’ll think you’re perceptive and understanding. They’ll either be grateful, or they’ll be frightened and avoid you from then on. Both reactions have their uses, as we’ll get to. You can play it either way. This works over 90 percent of the time.

-The Pale King, pages 17-18, David Foster Wallace

Trivia: While googling a sentence from this paragraph to find the rest of it and thus save the effort and time in typing it out for this blog post, I discovered that dozens of other bloggers have blogged this exact same quote! (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3 , and many more...)

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My Latest Pet Peeve

Another in a long line of my pet peeves, the phrase “open to/beyond criticism” has really started to tick me off. I’d first come across the term “beyond criticism” in the context of Oprah endorsing a book into her elite class of Oprah Book Club (does she have anything in her life whose title doesn't contain her name in it, that self-indulgent, narcissistic bitch?), and I didn’t give it much thought back then for reasons I can neither recall nor, if could recall, justify. But with the increasing frequency of this term in print – used often by critics and reviewers of literary, cultural, religious and political phenomena – my peeve detector has finally rung the alarm.

Since I came across this phrase exclusively in literary context, I’ll stick to what I know. Calling a book or some other work of literature as beyond criticism categorically submits that any opinion or point of view that opposes the established awesomeness of the work can be either discredited because the (insecure) majority who pushed it past the unsafe zone of criticism disagree with it, or restricted from being uttered altogether. Now, “open to criticism” can superficially come off as a critically superior term that, as it manifestly suggests, opens the book to criticism and allows novelty and variety of opinions to be expressed unlike the other phrase; but really, it is just an elastic extension of ‘beyond criticism’ that when let free returns back to the intolerant connotations of its base phrase, ‘beyond/above criticism.’ Being ‘open to criticism’ insinuates that it can also, at some time in the future and with sufficient consensus attained, reach the point of being ‘closed to criticism’ – just a fancy way of saying it is now beyond criticism. Well, fuck that! A phrase which fundamentally grants any work of art that privilege is illiberal and despicable in equal measure. At what point, may I ask, does a work go from being ‘open to criticism’ to ‘beyond criticism’? In my book, never. As long as I am alive, no book ever written is above or beyond or closed to criticism!

This pet peeve, however, as I mentioned earlier, is highly context-specific. I have no qualms with this phrase being used in a few other areas of human affairs, such as science. That earth goes around the sun and not the other way around is above and beyond criticism, and that evolution is true hasn’t been open to criticism for well over a century and a half now.

I want to go on about how blinkered we Indians are about other people’s outlook towards something that is different from our own and how closed we make our objects of praise to criticism. But that could, true to our Indian form, make this into a pissing contest and flame war, so I’ll conclude the pet peeve with my original intention of just expressing the peeve, and nothing more.

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Response to a response to my Bicycle Thieves review

So hello again, Alexander. At the outset, sorry for the delay. I'd been going through a rough patch for the past two months (you know, breakup and everything), but I'm done with the grieving stage and am back to form now. Except for a broken right hand middle finger that I broke today morning by stubbing it onto the door, but it shouldn't cause much discomfort in typing this out. I'll try and maintain brevity in this reply.

(For the uninitiated, the quoted parts are Alexander's reply to my previous post.)

Hi there, buddy! Remember me? I actually still check on your rants from time to time. I find it interesting that you write that many considered classics supposed contain: "symptoms of pretentiousness". So, am I right to assume that you dislike much of what is considered 'classic' pre-Kubrick era, because you find many of those films to contain "symptoms of pretentiousness" which takes away story? Or, do you simply mean, that it's just hard to find representative elements in just one film from one particular era, because of mentioned symptoms, which in terms makes it harder to get into, and therefore just not worth the effort?

I think I'm more inclined towards the latter. Cinema evolved over 100 years. Today's directors have a much larger database of "Do's and Don't's" that has in essence accumulated over those 100 years from hundreds of thousands of films, and that gives them an edge over the first half century's directors as to what works and what doesn't. Kubrick had a very significant influence on the following generation of filmmakers, and in my opinion, more so than any other director of the second half of 20th century. Following in Kubrick's footsteps, many filmmakers have mastered the art and craft of filmmaking, most famously including Steven Spielberg who admits it himself. But in my experience of watching films, I hardly come across many films in the pre-Kubrick era that can, in totality, stand up to the post-Kubrick era where such films began to rise in number. That said, however, I will be quick to admit that even with the apparent lack of totality of filmmaking craftmanship, without the pre-Kubrick films there wouldn't have been any influence and ground rules for Kubrick himself to make films and there is no way in hell he could've started everything from scratch all by himself.

I am mostly asking because of this line: "but it’s hard to find much of what is good about cinema in a single film in many films before the 1960s." So, let's get right to the 1960's and forward. Because, I'd say Kubrick's produced some pretentious works, by your logic, if I am to understand you correctly. '2001: A Space Odyssey', is to me, the very same thing I'd interpret you to describe as "pseudoartistic babble". Same goes for, 'Eyes Wide Shut', and 'The Shinning'. Movies that tells a story that really doesn't seem to make sense to me in a conventional way.

The Shining was not meant to be an artistic film. Because of Barry Lyndon's commercial failure (even though artistically it was highly acclaimed and still is one of the "basic references" for period filmmaking), Kubrick's disappointment led him to want to make a film for a larger audience with more entertainment value than artistic, and still having his own creative identity as an experimental filmmaker, at the same time avoiding the conventional way of telling a horror story. Eyes Wide Shut succeeds on many levels for me while failing at many as well. Kubrick tried to capture the tone of A Clockwork Orange into this film with long pauses within and between dialogues, but it just didn't work like it did for ACO. The dream-like tone he intended for the film did not come across as very dream-like but just laborious to watch. It did, however, succeed on its occult imagery - the kind of impeccable craft that makes Kubrick films what they are.

Or perhaps you don't like all Kubrick films? Please correct me if I'm assuming too much.

I don't, mate. In fact, I don't even like to the same degree all the Kubrick films that I do like, and even in the ones I like, with the exception of 2001 which in my opinion is pitch perfect, there are parts I think were not directed to his true potential, especially in his last two films. And Lolita is my least favorite of his work, so much so that I refuse to believe he even directed the film. Assuming they hired some ghost director and used Kubrick's name for branding purposes gives me solace :D

Don't get me wrong, I love those movies. But isn't '2001: A Space Odyssey', something you'd imagine Fellini could've done? Initially, I got that '2001...' is all about telling a story through pictures. But, there is no initial plot, and no depth to any of the characters. There is really nothing at stake. It's highly original for its time, because it breaks away from conventional storytelling. The point of '2001...' to me was the beginning and end of life, and the infinity of the universe. Humans played a smaller part, because the movie's main point to me is how insignificant we really are in the whole of the universe. '2001...' isn't supposed to have an epic assemble of characters with a quest, because the bigger whole is the journey.

To answer your first question, no, I don't think Fellini or any other director could've done 2001, just as I don't think Kubrick could've done 8-1/2. Every director has his own directorial signatures, some which are perhaps unknown even to him, and it is usually that which gives a film the feel that it has. Replacing directors and expecting to get the same feel out of a film would be ridiculous.

I can go on and on about the depth of 2001, but I'll limit it to the points you raise. Even to this day, a large majority of those who have seen 2001 over the span of 40 years think the only commendable thing about the film was its groundbreaking use of visual effects. While that is true, it is only the cult following that the film has generated over 40 years that can truly appreciate the depth of its scope and meaning and how well it incorporates Friedrich Nietzsche's ubermensch philosophy into an unconventional story without losing the essence of the philosophy and maintaining the artistic as well as dramatic merit of the film's own story. It's funny you should say that humans play a small part in the film, because the entire film is about nothing other than humans, the evolution of humans from apes to the quintessential ubermensch (which is referred to in the film as Star Man - the giant black monolith), and the relationship between humans and the universe. There is not a moment - not one tiny fraction of a second - in the film in which humans are not discussed, although not through words but through the subtlety of non-verbal storytelling. HAL is shown to have more human characteristics than Dave Bowman, and Dave is shown to have more mechanical characteristics than HAL - a reference to the futuristic transformation of man into ubermensch.

There are clues all over the film about the meaning of the film, and with each clue discovered, a new layer is uncovered, opening the flood gates to a whole range of possible interpretations. For example, the symphony that is used in the beginning, the end, and when the ape discovers the use of the tool, is Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra, which is a direct reference to Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra - the foundation of the ubermensch philosophy on which the film is based. (You really need to be familiar at least with the gist of that philosophy to get a grasp over the meaning of the film). Or, in the very title of the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the clue to Homer's Odyssey is referenced, which has a great many similarities in major plot points of the story, the most obvious one being Dave Bowman killing HAL with just a screw driver, as the protagonist of Odyssey kills the antagonist with just a bow. The film has as many interpretations as there are people who watch it, which adequately accomplishes Kubrick's aim who, on finishing the film and before its release, said:

"It's not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. 2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to "explain" a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film -- and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level -- but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man's destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001 would, if presented as abstractions, fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one's being."

It is the last sentence, "experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one's being," that truly rings with me and millions of others who can go beyond the superficial visual effects supremacy in their appreciation of the film.

But as far as technique goes, I'd apply that to any Fellini movie, as well.

Fellini's 8-1/2 does this really well, if you ask me. The intro scene in 8-1/2, tells me that the main character is kind of... well... fucked up. Kind of stressed out, as well. His celebrity status is giving him no room to breathe. His stressful everyday life is taking its toll, and he is getting middle-age burn out. Beneath this charming older gentleman, lies a hidden sorrow, which I believe is portrayed pretty well using flashbacks of his childhood, and goofy dreams, etc. And, it is a show. Why not make it a show?

8-1/2 does, perhaps, leave more to our own interpretation than '2001...', but I think it's unfair to label it "pseudoartistic babble". Point is: I think the way 8-1/2 was made is important to tell the story of this character, even if it does skip and trip.

And, I'm only bringing 8-1/2 up because you used it as an example. I like Fellini, but I am way more into Pier Paolo Pasolini & Bernardo Bertolucci movies. I also like all the goofy Giallo flicks directed by Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci.

But hey... that's me.

I know this is your blog, and you are free to form simple, to the point, personal opinions about anything. And, that the point of this post is the review of one particular film, and not your reflection on 'cinema' in general. Having said that, I do find it unfair to dismiss a film, or several films from an era, based solely on some of reasons you've stated.

As for Kurosawa movies... I love Kurosawa movies, but my comment is already too long.

Fellini was actually one of the six directors Kubrick cited as his biggest influence on making films (the other five being David Lean, Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica, François Truffaut, and Max Ophüls); and clearly, without 8-1/2, Kubrick wouldn't have had the inspiration and directions to make 2001. So perhaps I was a little too harsh in judging 8-1/2, and I apologize if I hurt your sentiments towards the film. It's just that I saw 8-1/2 during a time when I was very, umm, anti-sophisticated-artistic-talk in literary, stage or film work, and 8-1/2 does that a lot - with frequent talks about different so-called "movements" of cinematic expression, which I found very intellectually as well as artistically pretentious. I did like the surrealism of the opening sequence and I was hoping that what would follow would be along those lines, but I had my hopes up too high and the film went in a different direction altogether. Maybe, after another watch of 8-1/2, I might have a change in perspective, so I will look into it when I can.

By the way, a brief observation I made on 8-1/2 the first time around: Whenever a writer suffers from writer's block, he ends up writing the story about himself, about his own inability to compose the work. Fellini was going through writer's block back then and ended up making 8-1/2 about his mental state at that time (without, I hear, a definitive script). Charlie Kaufman did the same thing with Adaptation. They perhaps wouldn't even know that they are following this pattern, but they end up with a work that is full of themselves. William Gass, a novelist, made this observation very early on in his career and wrote The Tunnel, his magnus opus which took him 27 years to write, in which a Nazi Germany historian, while writing a piece of work called Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, suffers from writer's block and ends up writing it about himself and his own feelings.

Anyway, that's that. Since you mentioned a few directors, I do think Dario Argento, while certainly being one of the first directors to push the limits of gore allowed in cinema, is a highly overrated filmmaker. Maybe it was good when it was released, in that age, but Suspiria bored the daylights out of me. And even though I can appreciate Kurasowa's contributions to film directing, in the end, I find his films extremely tasteless and boring (yet original, I agree).

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How Alphabetical Is It?

Answer: Very

Walter Abish, author of the critically acclaimed novel How German Is It, had a challenging idea once: to compose an experimental work of fiction that plays with the English alphabet in a constrained manner. And in 1974, he published Alphabetical Africa, a novella that stood as a monument to his idea, built to completion.

It's a one-off work of literature, bold in its ambition, that has never been attempted by anyone else and probably will never be attempted by anyone again. The book consists of 51 chapters of varying lengths. The first chapter is composed entirely and only of words starting with the letter 'a', the second chapter with letters 'a' and 'b', and with each subsequent chapter he adds a letter from the alphabetical series up until, with the 26th, he composes a chapter made of words starting with the entire English alphabet of 26 letters. In the 27th chapter, he subtracts 'z' from the composition and hence it consists of the first 25 letters, and with each subsequent chapter thereafter, one letter is subtracted from the alphabetical series backwards until, at the 51st chapter, he completes the circle and is back to using only 'a'-lettered words.

That idea might intrigue you or it might perhaps even repel you, as some readers distance themselves from disorientating or alienating works of art. But if you belong to the former, rest assured, this is about the most fun literary treats can get. Again, rest assured, all the sentences and sentence structures used in the book conform to the standard English grammar, though they may not as easily be understood as the normal sentences we find in ordinary usage, especially the chapters made of one or a few letters. But that's where the fun lies. An excerpt from first chapter thus goes...

Ages ago, an archeologist, Albert, alias Arthur, ably attended an archaic African armchair affair at Antibes, attracting attention as an archeologist and an atheist. Ahhh, atheism... Anyhow, Albert advocated assisting African ants. Ants? All are astounded. Ants? Absurd.

...and one from the second chapter goes...

Alex and Allen are both bribing a building attendant after building another apartment backstairs, but both also brood after burying a body, brood about Bantu's better beaches and accommodating Alva.

Sentences vary in length, from short and average ones like these to really long ones, and some are quite hard to understand (I've quoted the easy ones above). It's far from being an easy catch in book stores, but thanks to Flipkart, an imported edition is available there for a slightly higher price (considering it is imported and the fact that it is a novella), but then, when the treat is so great, shedding a few extra bucks wouldn't hurt your wallet. A limited sample can be previewed on Google Books if you are curious.

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Bertrand Russell: Three

An autobiographical piece of Bertrand Russell I find interesting. The third one is spot-on.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

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When Clevinger became their scapegoat

Catch-22 is perhaps one of the most original novels of the 20th century, that, while being outrageously hilarious, mirrors human nature with a kind of accuracy not often seen in fictional novels. It mocks and satirizes the evil in people, especially when they are subject to conditions where their raw nature can come out unhindered, not bounded by any limitations. Such as in World War II, the background of this story.

The entire novel is as funny as funny can get, but towards the end of the eighth chapter it takes a serious tone for the first time. And the seriousness of it is so powerfully presented, it gave me an episode of depression after reading it. Depression not just regarding the character in action, but over the harsh truth about humans that is so starkly depicted in those few words. I'll quote them for you.

But before I do that, here's a brief summary of the scene that's happened till the quote: Clevinger, a cadet for the US Army, is brought on trial in front of the US military Action Board in his camp - consisting of three men: "a bloated colonel with big fat mustache", Major Metcalf, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf - for conspiring to overthrow the cadet officers appointed by a paranoid Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who is frantic that if nothing is done about it, Clevinger will one day overthrow the world. After a long and very hilarious trial, Clevinger is found guilty, without any evidence or relevant claims, and is sentenced to walk fifty-seven punishment tours. A punishment tour for Clevinger was fifty minutes of a weekend hour spent pacing back and forth before the provost marshal's building with a ton of an unloaded rifle on his shoulder. (And just for reference, Yossarian, whose name is mentioned below, is the unbelievably stupid and funny protagonist of the novel.)

These two paragraphs follow and conclude the chapter:

It was all very confusing to Clevinger. There were many strange things taking place, but the strangest of all, to Clevinger, was the hatred, the brutal, uncloaked, inexorable hatred of the members of the Action Board, glazing their unforgiving expressions with a hard, vindictive surface, glowing in their narrowed eyes malignantly like inextinguishable coals. Clevinger was stunned to discover it. They would have lynched him if they could. They were three grown men and he was a boy, and they hated him and wished him dead. They had hated him before he came, hated him while he was there, hated him after he left, carried their hatred for him away malignantly like some pampered treasure after they separated from each other and went to their solitude.

Yossarian had done his best to warn him the night before.

"You haven't got a chance, kid," he told him glumly. "They hate Jews."
"But I'm not Jewish," answered Clevinger.
"It will make no difference," Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right. "They're after everybody."

Clevinger recoiled from their hatred as though from a blinding light. These three men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their loveless faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunkers behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more.

That quote, right there, SPEAKS to me!

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The Road - A Novel by Cormac McCarthy: Review

Rating: 8/10

On reading the jacket blurb or synopses of the novel, one would get the impression that The Road is a sci-fi novel centered on the survival of a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic world, where everything is dead or dying save a few humans, some animals that were lucky enough to survive, and hardly anything in the plant world. At the outset of the novel and until a few pages into it, the reader feels this is what he is in for - a mere survival tale akin to the hundreds of others in the post-apocalyptic fiction genre. But very soon they realize it's not so much a story about the father-son survival as it is about the father-son relationship itself and the challenges of fatherhood and the sacrifices it demands.

Emotions run high and higher than tension in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in the near future where an unknown catastrophe - either gradual or sudden, it's difficult to say - has destroyed and burned civilization as we know it and has plunged mankind and indeed life itself to the brink of extinction. Everything is grey and ashy, and hopes of returning the planet back to its pre-apocalyptic state are as bleak as the cold wind that freezes the ground at night. The sun is blocked with the dark ashes that fill the sky, and the brightest light of day makes for only the faintest of vision. There is nothing left to eat except the sparse leftover canned food of yesteryears. Dry, rotting corpses are scattered everywhere. Cannibalism is a commonplace amongst the survivors, and humans, now back to their savage state, have become more skilled at hunting other humans than at hunting animals. And amid all this hellish mess, a man struggles to keep his son alive without losing their humanity in a world he believes god has abandoned a long time ago.

The moral dimensions of the novel, as opposed to McCarthy’s previous works such as No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian, are simple. Everyone is divided into “good guys” or “bad guys,” and actions too are either good or bad. Although some readers cribbed about this being an issue, to me it doesn’t contradict the motivations of characters as the world they are living now is more primitive than the early stone ages had witnessed, and morals in such a world are anything but complex. Throughout the bulk of the novel the author builds for his audience such a subtle and strong bond with the main characters that the readers don’t realize how much they have fallen in love with them till the very end. And let me be quick to admit, and I’m not alone in this, this is the first novel that evoked such an intense emotional response in me that my eyes literally misted up, if not wept, in the final few pages of the novel. The sparkle of love in the backdrop of this gloomy, unforgiving and dismal atmosphere glitters like the last piece of pearl in the abyss of a dead and long abandoned ocean – an ocean which plays a pivotal role in the story.

The road to the coast of the ocean is purported to be a metaphor by many readers – and it may well be if that is what the reader wishes to think of it – but McCarthy in a rare interview said the road is just a road for him, although he wouldn’t deny his readers the freedom of interpretation. His writing style often and intentionally violates many rules of English grammar, such as constructing only sentence fragments instead of complete sentences, omitting apostrophes at many places, avoiding quotation marks entirely, et cetera. But to balance the act, McCarthy is such a master at what he does that his writing gets borderline poetic even in prose (“Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”) and expresses so many thoughts and emotions in so few a words (“I envy the dead; it’s over for them,”) that it’s easy to get lost in the images and the weight of meaning they bear, to the length that we forget it’s words we are looking at. There are a few horrifying scenes, certainly not for the squeamish to read, embedded in the story. Character development is at the core of his creative writing process, and plot too serves as a platform for pushing them to the boundaries of survival and sanity and testing their instincts, especially the man’s paternal instincts. Another oddly interesting thing I noticed was that while I’m a staunch atheist myself, I thoroughly embraced the metaphorical and elegiac use of the concept of “god.” And like in the author’s entire body of work, women play a small role even in this novel, with only two of them appearing and only for a few pages.

All things considered, The Road is a modern literary gem that is as haunting as it is beautiful, and, at 300-odd pages, is not as thick as it is rewarding. Cormac McCarthy has set a benchmark for future authors of this genre and the whole of fiction writing to use as a definitive guide of storytelling and created a world so engulfed in both affection and poignancy that it melts the hearts of even the coldest of readers. This is emotive art the likes of which literature hasn’t seen before, earning McCarthy, among other things, the honor of being one of the great American writers of our age.

Trivia: While I’ve come to dislike comparing books and films, which frankly is like comparing apples with oranges, the film adaptation was lacking one crucial element: the sense of time. The novel has it, and gives the feeling that the story is taking place over a long period of many years, which it is. But the film makes it seem like the story occurs over a two-day period, which is a shame because half the connection between the audience and characters is lost there, with the result being a woefully inept adaptation in terms of sentimentality. I won’t, however, take away from the director the stark imagery he has so skillfully crafted - an important aspect of creating the mood for the action to take place in.

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Pynchon's letter

I just found this awesome letter written by Thomas Pynchon, published in Daily Telegraph, supporting and in defense of Ian McEwan. For the uninitiated, Mr. McEwan was the object of a plagiarism controversy in late 2006 as regards his bestselling and highly acclaimed novel, Atonement. What made the whole charges of plagiarism absurd on its face was that it wasn't plagiarism at all; the author had acknowledged, both in the novel and vocally on many occasions, the source of historical information he is purported to have plagiarized. Nevertheless, some unscrupulous attention whores desperately wanting to muster some attention for themselves accused him anyway.

The controversy was much analogous to a news network filing charges of plagiarism against a filmmaker for having based his story on real events reported only by that network...despite the fact that the filmmaker has acknowledged it.

Thomas Pynchon was quick to speak against such wild accusations, as is seen in this letter (dated December 2006):

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