The Sunset Limited

ByCormac McCarthy

Release Date: 2006-10-24
Genre: Fiction & Literature

Score: 4.5

4.5

From 103 Ratings

Description

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 opposing world views. 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 desperate 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 is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deceptively intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time.

Reviews

Welcoming the train
5
By Hamchild
This work is atypical of Cormac McCarthy's format, but maintains every bit of his trademark bleak style. A play written in very accessible language between a man at the end of his rope and his unwanted savior, the entire story is set in the apartment of black, a man who prevents a suicide seemingly by accident or divine intervention, and white, a professor devoid of hope. The work is very short and can be read in a single sitting, but what it lacks in content is more than made up for in the internal dialogue it is sure to catalyze in nearly every reader. For some this will be an uncomfortable read, and it might even be unhealthy to some more inclined to white's way of thinking, but I found it to be a great window into the mind of depression. Too often we view the suicidal as selfish, brash, and short-sighted, but McCarthy gives us a man who has given painstaking and expansive effort in the formation of his worldview. And his counterpart, black, is a perfect mirror image of white in more ways than just name. He is a man that has seen far deeper into the darkness of life than white, surviving violence, crime, and prison, and gives the perspective of a selfless and caring salesman of salvation desperately peddling his goods to the most needy of customers. But in the end the debate is not what black is expecting. It is not whether hope exists, but whether it has any value or appeal. A great read, and one I won't soon forget.
Sunset limited
1
By Mrpiggypoo
I really like this author...this however is depressing and a bit suicidal.

I recommend his other works, pass on this one.
Amazing
5
By Dubious Dave
Great read
Review
5
By Russian-1
Incredible, from beginning to end.