What an intense read. I guess I felt that way after The Road, too, but this was pretty exhausting.

I tend to read pretty closely and literally, which was the wrong strategy for this book (and maybe for McCarthy more generally, and maybe just more generally). So many words that I had never seen and wanted to look up! But that got in the way. Once I decided to just zoom out a little bit and let the writing flow over me, my pace and enjoyment picked up.

Bleak, violent, unforgiving, remorseless, relentless, opaque, and so much more. I don't know what the point is, if there is one. I lack the vocabulary to describe this, but it's one of those books that, in the reading of it, inflicts on the reader a small taste of the things that it seeks to describe or narrate. The darkness of the prose, the odd rhythms, unsettle the mind in much the way that the violence and human indifference of the story do. Again: intense.

McCarthy's West is Tex-Mex and southwest, more south than I know personally, and certainly a grimmer portrait of the West than I am used to. But I probably see it through rose-colored glasses, and I am happy to get more insight into the dark underbelly (as usual).

I think I am going to tackle some more McCarthy on the basis of this book.