I thought it was an artfully written, mildly interesting story with prose that is sometimes hard to follow.

McCarthy used the English language like an artist uses paint—to create a landscape that to me was often dreamlike with touches of realism. The dreamlike quality came from his use of polysyndeton while the realism came from conversation, including conversation in Spanish. Both choices were important to the portrait his words painted, but they also required work on my part: sometimes doubling back during long, winding sentences to rejoin the flow of words and sometimes taking pictures of Spanish conversations and uploading them to AI for translation.

As I neared the end, I started skipping the translations and caught myself dreaming in polysyndeton.

I finished this book while on vacation in Las Vegas with its neon lights and loud music and sometimes untalented karaoke singers and girls dressed like showgirls but they werent showgirls and they stopped unsuspecting tourists offering themselves for pictures and they scammed the tourists for large sums of money by demanding loudly if the tourists did not give in easily and men passed out cards with pictures of topless women and the smell of marijuana floated in the air and the police stood back in yellow shirts next to their bicycles talking and smiling and watching it all because nothing was amiss for Las Vegas.

Nada fuera de lo común, one of them said.

Era un día más.

But I did not read the book on the streets. I read it by the pool or in my hotel room.

It’s a highly acclaimed book by an author who is said to be one of the finest writers of our time. Still—no es para todos.

There is a spiritual question at the heart of the book, one I’m not sure it attempts to answer. Do our decisions set future events in motion, or are we puppets whose strings lead only to other puppets, with no first hand—not even God’s—at the top?