The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form

by Cormac McCarthy

Book Overview

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road - A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made.

In that small apartment, "Black" and "White," as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307278360
• ISBN13: 9780307278364
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Starts Your Mental Engine

This dialogue between two people discussing the meaning of life, in the hands of a master such as McCarthy, is thought-provoking and surprisingly fascinating. The author's incredible use of language makes this spare drama succeed. It's the language which creates and holds the tension. Two diametrically opposed men arguing the meaning of life. I don't know that either changed my views, but for me, it made me do a lot of thinking. I'm fast becoming a McCarthy fanatic. I didn't like his Border Trilogy books much but after reading "The Road" and "No Country..." I have become mesmerized by his ability to grab my attention and hold it ruthlessly until he turns loose of me at the end. McCarthy is a master and this little book is another of his masterpieces.

Think: it's a wonderful life.

This first appears to be a lite, spare work, but it is delightfully deep. It presents a koan, the human conundrum. It poses life's most persistant question: the meaning of it all. This one-act play is part MY DINNER WITH ANDRE and part the bridge scene from IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. It provokes thought in the reader, and different readers will resolve the debate in different ways, just as reviewers here will see it differently. Perhaps, like the choice ending of Yann Martel's LIFE OF PI, it will depend upon whether you see this life as a gift or as simply suffering, a glass half-full argument. It will grab you where you live. I see it as positive and life-affirming. I can also see a human face on the cover, and the lights in the darkness. Perhaps you can too.

The Mac Daddy

Another classic from Mac McCarthy... A quick, substantive read regarding the dilemma of perception versus reality.

This is for me one of the finest books I have read, even if it was a play.

Although very brief, Mccarthy's play took me twice the time it should have because I had to stop and savor the dialogue. I was loving the comments of "Black." I found them profound, witty, gentle and loving, and often very moving. "White", too, had terrific witty lines.This play reminded me of an Edward Albee type of verbal exchange--one that was so rich and brilliantly composed that I was genually thrilled to be reading it. However, I felt that the final few pages jumped ship. Suddenly The characters were worn out, not able to keep going. I could imagine Black saying and doing so much more. He, earlier, vowed to go home with White, yet inexplicably he gave up. The character built by McCarthy would not have suddenly folded. That part did not seem to fit. I wish I knew what McCarthy was feeling at that point. I have read most of McCarthy's works, and found this and The Road to be my favorates. We are blessed to have a writer as fine as McCarthy. The only other living author I treasure as much is Haruki Murakami.

Another trophy for McCarthy

The man never ceases to amaze me. In this short play with two characters [Black and White] and in just one room McCarthy exposes us to a vain attempt by an uneducated black with a love of the bible and a heart as big as Texas to save an educated white professoer full of useless, or wasted, education on his way to death. Ending tragically, as most McCarthy books do, it none-the less shows the power of determination: one in himself and the task at hand and the other in a belief in a higher power and a hope for His ability to intervene.