Name: The Sunset Limited
Rating: 3.638888888888889 (18 reviews)

Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy's new play packs all the wallop of his gut-wrenching fiction. "The Sunset Limited," though, is not about blood and guts but about the battle for the human soul.

A Novel in Dramatic Form

The Sunset Limited

Willing to bet this'll be my least favorite Cormac book and I'm just happy it was a short one.

This isn't a book but a play, a "novel in dramatic form". I found the conversation between Black and White to be quite boring and actually surprisingly shallow coming from Cormac McCarthy. Being a play, this is entirely void of McCarthy's verbose descriptions and instead just ankle-deep philosophy from a man known for making characters whose entire purpose was to spout such matter.

Thankfully this is short. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, and I was kinda tempted to give this 1 star instead of 2, but I did find it to be an easy read. The back-and-forth was fine, just dull, and it ends on a rather dour note (even for Cormac). Dour, but I don't think I learned anything along the way as I have in his other dour novels. I really was disappointed with the ending, this was not a great ride.

I do not recommend "The Sunset Limited", even for McCarthy fans. I guess if you need to complete your collection, you can breeze through this, thankfully. But for everyone else? This can be avoided.

Evan

Willing to bet this'll be my least favorite Cormac book and I'm just happy it was a short one.

  

This isn't a book but a play, a "novel in dramatic form". I found the conversation between Black and White to be quite boring and actually surprisingly shallow coming from Cormac McCarthy. Being a play, this is entirely void of McCarthy's verbose descriptions and instead just ankle-deep philosophy from a man known for making characters whose entire purpose was to spout such matter.

  

Thankfully this is short. It's not the worst thing I've ever read, and I was kinda tempted to give this 1 star instead of 2, but I did find it to be an easy read. The back-and-forth was fine, just dull, and it ends on a rather dour note (even for Cormac). Dour, but I don't think I learned anything along the way as I have in his other dour novels. I really was disappointed with the ending, this was not a great ride.

  

I do not recommend "The Sunset Limited", even for McCarthy fans. I guess if you need to complete your collection, you can breeze through this, thankfully. But for everyone else? This can be avoided.

Interesting read between two vastly different characters and their respective ideologies. As someone with neither of their views, watching them "battle" it out through conversation was intriguing. 

Isabella Chiara Vicco 

Full of rich dialogue, Cormac McCarthy's insightful and philosophical play, The Sunset Limited, probes the deepest questions of human existence. 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 diametrically opposing world views, they begin a dialectic redolent of the best of Beckett. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men - though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life. Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deeply intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time.

The Sunset Limited A Novel in Dramatic Form

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