Journal Entry 1 by Tintti from Jyväskylä, Keski-Suomi Finland on Friday, March 21, 2008

From the back cover:
Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles upon a transaction gone horribly wrong. Finding bullet-ridden bodies, several kilos of heroin, and a caseload of cash, he faces a choice - leave the scene as he found it, or cut the money and run. Choosing the latter, he knows, will change everything. And so begins a terrifying chain of events, in which each participant seems determined to answer the question that one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

Actually Llewelyn Moss is not the main character of the book, and the blurb doesn't describe the book very well. What the book is really about is the old sheriff (played in the movie version by Tommy Lee Jones) and his thoughts about the world, how it has changed during his life (not always for the better).

I saw the movie first, before reading the book. The film is excellent (as is the book), but I think it disturbed my reading a little because I remembered the film scenes too clearly. But the longer I read the more I got absorbed by the atmosphere of the book, and ended up enjoying the read enormously.

I love the way McCarthy describes his characters by so few words - the dialog is just amazing. No Country for old men is translated into Finnish, too, but I'm happy I read it in English. I can't imagine these characters speaking Finnish; their Southern dialect is so strong and important part of them. It'd be interesting to see how the translator has made them speak.

Chigurh is one of the scariest villains ever, and Javier Bardem definitely deserved the Academy Award for his role in the movie.
Because he's not somebody you really want to know. The people he meets tend to have very short futures. Nonexistent, in fact.