| Title | : | The Crossing (The Border Trilogy, #2) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 426 |
| Publication | : | First published June 1, 1994 |
Having trapped a she-wolf he would restore to the mountains of Mexico, he is long gone and returns to find everything he left behind transformed utterly in his absence. Except his kid brother, Boyd, with whom he strikes out yet again to reclaim what is theirs - thus crossing into "that antique gaze from whence there could be no way back forever."
What they find instead, is an extraordinary panoply of fiestas and circuses, dogs, horses and hawks, pilgrims and revolutionaries, grand haciendas and forlorn cantinas, bandits, gypsies and roving tribes, a young girl alone on the road, a mystery in the mountain wilds, and a myth in the making.
And in this wider world they fight a war as rageful as the one neither, in the end, will join up for back home. One brother finds his destiny, while the other arrives only at his fate.
An essential novel by any measure, and the transfixing middle passage of Cormac McCarthy's ongoing trilogy, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops,and starts the heart and mind at once.
The Crossing (The Border Trilogy, #2) Reviews
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Enormously affecting. A boy and his father set out to trap a wolf that is preying on their cattle. The man who had trapped them in the past, who opened the plains for countless thousands of cattle to graze is now dead, and the wolves have begun to return to their old hunting grounds from their retreat in Mexico. The father and son try to take up the trapping in the manner of the past master. The Crossing is about many things: the three journeys over four years into Mexico taken by the young Billy Parham; his own crossing into manhood; the crossing of the dead into ever-lasting life, etc. The series of tests Parham sets himself suggest any number of Old World quest narratives.
He captures the wolf, a pregnant female, whom he clearly comes to love, and decides to take her back to her native mountains in Mexico. It doesn't work out. When he returns to Cloverdale NM he learns his mother and father have been slaughtered by Indians. He collects his brother, Boyd, from a foster home and they set off for Mexico, ostensibly in search of the seven horses that constitute the family patrimony, though this mission is never so baldly stated. Billy and Boyd no longer have a home in the world and it's as if they are simply adrift in the landscape. They have entered a wild land still torn by endless revolution, where there is no law save the law that comes self made from the actions of peasants, banditos, philosophizing gypsies, itinerant carneys, mothering women, and children.
The landscape is beautifully rendered and as active an agent in the narrative as any of the characters Billy and Boyd meet with. I'm leaving a big chunk of the action undescribed, most of it in fact, not because I believe in spoilers (I don't), but because I think that no nimbleness of paraphrase on my part could ever capture the emotional richness, vivid imagery, and sheer narrative power of this fine novel.
I like the way emotional tensions are never directly addressed. Much is left unsaid. It's very stoic, Hemingwayesque. Nietzsche said that one repays a mentor badly when one remains a pupil. Hemingway and Faulkner, it's no surprise, were two of McCarthy's models. (There's probably a touch of Louis L'Amour in the mix too.) Yet I believe he has surpassed them in terms of consistency. Both WF and EH were innovators whose late work became mannered, so taken were they of their own voices and styles. McCarthy may be less of a technical virtuoso, but he is no less the stylist, and he is by far the more consistent writer than either of his models. That said, I am almost positive that one of McCarthy’s models here was Faulkner’s
The Unvanquished. The running down of thieves by teenage boys in both novels seems too strikingly similar.
Of the seven or so McCarthy novels I've read, The Crossing,
Blood Meridian,
The Road and
All The Pretty Horses are my favorites. I must read more of him. -
Beautiful, beautiful book. I am such a fan of Cormac McCarthy. Poetic realism, I would describe his style.
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CHI SIAMO E COSA SIAMO
Il secondo romanzo della celebre trilogia.
Ambientato negli stessi territori del precedente, il confine col Messico: anche se questa volta la parte americana è un po’ più a ovest, il New Mexico, invece del Texas (anche se poi la copertina direi che mostra Zabriskie Point – ma magari all’Einaudi pensano che tutti i deserti sono uguali).
Anche il periodo storico è simile, qualche anno prima di Cavalli selvaggi: dal 1949, questa volta l’azione si sposta a pochi anni prima e durante l’ultima grande guerra.
E direi che il titolo The Crossing non si riferisce solo agli attraversamenti geografici, ma anche, e forse soprattutto, al superamento della linea di confine tra la giovinezza/adolescenza e l’età adulta.
Un altro romanzo di formazione che vedo al centro due ragazzi, due fratelli di 14 e 16 anni.
Diviso in tre parti: nella prima Billy, il maggiore dei due, accompagna suo padre a collocare le trappole per catturare la lupa arrivata dal Messico attraversando il confine sulla neve che ha già ucciso dei capi di bestiame (pecore); quando trova la lupa presa dalla trappola, però, non ha il coraggio di ucciderla, e neppure quello di chiamare suo padre per farlo. Decide invece di liberarla e di riportarla oltre il confine da dove è arrivata. Solo che le cose non vanno lisce: la bestia gli viene rubata e finisce nei combattimenti contro i cani. Quando Bill la ritroverà ferita sanguinante e stremata, troverà alfine il coraggio di spararle per smettere di farla soffrire.
Nella seconda, Billy fa ritorno a casa per trovare la famiglia sterminata dagli indiani. L’unico scampato al massacro è suo fratello Boyd. Insieme partiranno alla ricerca dei cavalli rubati. Di nuovo verso il Messico, di nuovo oltre il confine. E anche questa volta le cose non vanno bene: i ragazzi recuperano sì i cavalli, ma Boyd, il minore rimane ferito. Sarà salvato da una giovane ragazza locale, con la quale decide di restare a vivere. A Billy non resta che tornare a casa da solo.
Nella terza parte, sono passati alcuni anni, è di nuovo Billy protagonista, parte alla ricerca del fratello minore Boyd. Ancora una volta oltre il confine. Ma quello che troverà sono invece…
McCarthy attribuisce grande importanza al paesaggio, allo spazio naturale che circonda i suoi personaggi: sembra quasi far “parlare” più questo che quelli.
Agli uomini sottrae parole, li racconta in maniera silenziosa, sia perché sono sempre umani laconici, sia perché risparmia descrizioni: eppure, lasciando il lettore a intuire, approfondisce più che con l’uso delle parole.
I dialoghi sono secchi e scarni, senza virgolette, senza “disse”, “aggiunse”, “rispose”. Parco e asciutto anche nella punteggiatura. Nei silenzi e nelle pause, nel respiro dei deserti e dei canyon, si costruisce la “grandezza arcaica” della scrittura di Cormac McCarthy.
Sia che la vita di un uomo fosse scritta da qualche parte in un libro, sia che prendesse forma giorno dopo giorno, era sempre quella, perché consisteva di una sola realtà, che era il fatto stesso di viverla. Disse che mentre era vero che gli uomini dànno forma alla loro vita, era anche vero che non potevano avere altra forma, perché quale sarebbe mai stata quest'altra forma?
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Far more melancholic than its predecessor All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing is a beautiful if bleak western full of poetry and philosophical musings. The Billy character is wonderfully drawn and in particular the first part of the book with the wolf was outstanding. McCarthy's sparse Hemmingway-esque style lends an austere and yet often humorous tone to the dialogues - particularly those both spoken and unspoken between Billy and Boyd. I appreciate the author's reluctance to dummy down the story and challenge the reader constantly throughout. Looking forward to completing the trilogy now with Cities of the Plain.
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One decision, as innocent as it may be, can fuck up your life forever. Now, you can live in fear and hide yourself away, or you can keep making those decisions and hope for the best, and if and when the shit hits the fan, you can stand strong and push on.
That's life. That's The Crossing.
Cormac McCarthy's "The Border" trilogy is where you'll find dusty plains, hard living, and a recent past populated by a people still living in an even more distant past. His characters are full of character, their own code and a new version of an old set of morals.
The Crossing is Homeric. There is a hero with a quest. There is a wise man. There are fools. And there are monsters. The hero's journey plays out upon the border between New Mexico and old Mexico, where the line dividing life and death is measured in handfuls of blood.
McCarthy's books are not where you shop for your good times and happy endings. His characters will die and you will feel pain.
I spent a good amount of time in early 2014 in southern Mexico. It was a learning experience and it helped me to appreciate what's in this novel. Not only was I able to follow along with much of the Spanish dialogue (it's basic stuff, trust me, I'm not bragging here), but the portrayal of the life and the people rings true and brings to mind images, scenes and people I saw and met during my time in that parched land.
I'm giving this five stars, not because I think it's perfect and that everyone will love it. In fact, I think many people would not like this. McCarthy occasionally veers from the action-packed path to discuss life and that irks some readers. However, I give it five stars for McCarthy's writing. It's superb. His language usage...ah, those glorious descriptions! It's all too beautiful! -
The Border Trilogy – Part 2 of 3
It is in the early 1940’s when Billy Pelham sets out on his first of three trips from his home to Mexico. He is sixteen and his first trip is to reunite a female wolf about to pup with others of her kind in the mountains where she came from.
When he returns home to New Mexico from his journey, his life as he knew it has changed. The family’s horses have been stolen and he and his 14 year old brother Boyd set out to retrieve them. During this longer journey, Billy turns 17 and his brother turns 15 – and he falls in love and disappears with his young love. Billy makes his way back home again and spends time working on various ranches and other jobs to save up enough to bring his brother home, along with his girl if need be.
Billy also tries several times to join the army once war is declared (WWII) but he can’t pass the medical examination because of a heart murmur. Eventually he accumulates an extra horse to use as a pack animal and has outfitted himself with everything he needs to find his brother. By this time, Billy is 20 years old and has more life experience than he had on his first two journeys south.
Along the way of his third journey, he meets with several other travelers as well as people who give him food and shelter when needed. The people he meets all have stories to tell and their own versions of life they want to share: He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them.
There are some rough scenes in this book: man’s cruelty to man, man’s cruelty to animals, and man’s cruelty to himself. Those are themes that run through this novel, but in the people’s stories and in their actions there are also many acts of kindness, of compassion, and of caring.
Once again, Cormac McCarthy has written a novel that feels real and gritty and harsh. His ability to relate the trials and difficulties of the journeys Billy makes while also holding and lightly weaving in a thread of hope and optimism is nothing short of magical.
Initially I did not intend to read this Border Trilogy back-to-back, yet long before I had finished the first book I knew that I had to continue through all three. The writing is exceptional, the characters authentic and sympathetic, while the adventures are compulsively readable. I am very much looking forward to the concluding “chapter” of this amazing Trilogy. -
I did love this but found it slightly less successful than the first book in this trilogy. For one thing it follows an almost identical formula - innocence going out into the big bad world. The opening when a young boy watches wolves at play in the snow at night is magical. It continues in this gripping fashion when the boy takes pity on the wolf he and his father have caught in a trap and decides to take the injured animal back to the mountains of Mexico. The relationship he creates between the boy and the wolf is a marvel in itself. In Mexico he sees his father's horse and knows something bad has happened at home.
People often speak of the violence in his books but what always gets to me is the deep beautiful bonds he establishes between his characters and often between a character and an animal. This is very much true here where the relationship Billy shares with his brother, the wolf, his horse and his dog are all deeply moving. He gets us to care so much for his characters that the possibility of heartbreak looms forebodingly on every turned page. Another thing I love about his books is the philosophy. As I said he's so good at engaging you on a feeling level; then his characters always meet eccentric individuals on their travels whose philosophising make you think about everything that is happening on a deeper more intellectual level. He engages the intellect as challengingly as the emotions. 4.5 stars. And now onto book three… -
Long before "The Road", which made him known to a broader audience, the great Cormac McCarthy, had already raged. And how. This long road-movie genre novel is pure joy to read. Billy lives with his brother Boyd and his parents on a ranch near the US-Mexico border. One day, he discovers a wolf that is expecting little ones. After mastering her, it decides to bring her back to these Mexican lands. The adventure will take him well beyond what he imagined.
In the second book of The Border Trilogy, McCarthy asks many questions about human nature in magnificent wild settings in a rich, powerful, dry style. Elegantly and abundantly dialogued (moreover, all the dialogues in Spanish are transcribed without translation but easy to understand), we follow Billy's adventures with great pleasure. An epic breath constantly floats in the novel; McCarthy ramifies many stories with the original plot, giving the tale incredible strength and breadth.
McCarthy is considered a significant author; we know why. Vamos amigo. -
The Crossing is an astonishing book, more downbeat than All the Pretty Horses, yet not as bleak as the likes of Blood Meridian, it is a sprawling coming-of-age tale filled with moments of beauty and sorrow. The descriptions are as beautiful as anything Cormac McCarthy writes, the action is sparse but nailbiting when it comes and the characters are brilliantly realised. There are moments when the book lags but whenever this happens you can be assured that within a couple of pages McCarthy will come out with a line or paragraph that is so amazing you'll have to reread several times, possibly out loud, before you can continue with the story. The book never gives you all the information about some aspects of the story which is sometimes frustrating but works within the confines of the world that McCarthy is created, he's never one to end everything neatly and perfectly, the subplot of Billy's brother and the girl leaves you wishing for more though is all the more powerful for the fact that it's heard in rumours and secondhand recollections. Throughout the book there are times when Billy will meet characters who will tell them their own story, these digressions act as stories within the main narrative, both separate from it and integral to it. The story of the blind revolutionary in particular is fantastic, as McCarthy drops his visual mastery to explain the blind man's travels. This book is a journey from youth to adulthood, from hope to despair, along a hard path populated with kind hearts and desperate men. This book is a journey that you never want to end.
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Acts of God
“Before he reached the door the old man called to him again. The boy turned and stood. The matrix will not help you, the old man said. He said to catch the wolf the boy should find that place where the acts of God and those of man are of one piece. Where they cannot be distinguished. The old man said that it was not a question of finding such a place but rather of knowing it when it presented itself. He said that it was at such places that God sits and conspires in the destruction of that which he has been at such pains to create.”
New Mexico. Early 1940s. A wolf had come up from Mexico, killing cattle on a ranch. Billy and his father set out traps to catch it, but the wolf uncovered them all. Then Billy set a trap in the ashes of a cold campfire. The following day when he went alone to check the trap, he had caught the pregnant wolf, her foot badly injured. He took pity on her and tied her up to protect himself from being mauled, even killed. Dragging her on three legs, he headed home. Thinking it over, he took a detour and ended up at a neighboring ranch, where the woman doctored the wolf’s foot, fed the boy, and then the boy went on his way to Mexico, to save the wolf, to release her to others of her kind.
I thought a lot about this: What will McCarthy do with his story? The boy was kind-hearted, but was McCarthy? Had McCarthy softened in his old age? I wanted to believe he had. In time the wolf became almost like a companion to Billy, but Billy was naïve. He fed and watered the wolf, he protected her from vicious dogs and man alike. He even saved her from drowning in a river which they had been crossing. And he grew to love her, but maybe he loved her from the moment he saw her in that trap. Maybe, I thought, we are all trapped in one way or another. But McCarthy, being true to his own nature, couldn’t allow it to be. Even today, it is hard to imagine a wolf surviving in our world, a world that hates the wolf. Then it began happening, and it wouldn’t stop. In the end, do we praise McCarthy for his prose, or do we curse him for his cruelty? I did both. Then I put the book down, but only for the night and part of the following day.
The boy headed back to New Mexico, to his father’s ranch. He was growing up fast at the young age of 17. When he arrived at the ranch, things had changed. He got his brother Boyd, and together they went to Mexico to find the horses that had been stolen from his father’s ranch. Some things should be left alone, forgotten. Maybe even forgiven.
“It had ceased raining in the night and he walked out on the road and called for the dog. He called and called. Standing in that inexplicable darkness when there was no sound anywhere save only the wind. After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and the godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.” -
Magnífica Travessia!
Tem umas passagens árduas, tem. Umas em que se fala de Deus e de Fé, e que facilmente impacientam uma ímpia infiel como eu… Mas o resto deixou-me extasiada.
Cormac consegue expor o Homem no seu estado mais Puro; um Ser absolutamente livre e corajoso e determinado, que se entrega e sacrifica aos outros não por Dever mas por Querer. Não será por acaso, talvez, que a personagem principal tem apenas 16 anos; já é fisicamente um homem mas a alma ainda é de menino…
Estou viciada em Cormac McCarthy. Como o ser humano apenas se vicia no que dá prazer, tirem as vossas conclusões… eu não digo mais nada. Vou até às Cidades da Planície encontrar-me com os meus adoráveis meninos/homens – o John dos Belos Cavalos e o Billy da Travessia… -
"He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live-with men and not simply pass among them," (135).
And then there was one — Cities of the Plain. When I've read that, I'll have read all of McCarthy's published novels ahead of this fall's double-header. And I've started it. But I think it'll be hard for Book 3 in the Trilogy to surpass this one, which exceeded Book 1 through its sheer tragic grandeur. But we'll see.
This one ranks very high for me among McCarthy's works. Of course, Cormac isn't really one for plots. Sure, things happen, mostly repetitive things, people go here and there and back again. They ride their horses across the plains towards distant mountains, they talk on the porch and in taverns and at deathbeds, they cross improbable paths in the wilderness, they brood around camp fires. Plotwise, though, it's pretty boring.
But when it comes to McCarthy, plot isn't what it's about for me. In fact, he's the only author I've read so far who makes me not care at all about the uneventfulness of the narrative, its slowgoingness. For me, it's all about the sublime feeling he inspires, his tragic interior worlds, which are the world itself — a searing aesthetic vision of a doomed world inside and out, imbued with darkness and silence.
The crux of it is his mighty prose. And it's on full blast in this book. It contains for me some of the most striking and magnificent and macabre images in all his writing, and one of the most grisly and haunting, Blood Meridian included. Part I is utterly devastating, and yet Billy Parham's tale goes on for three more parts so that at the end you feel like weeping with him in the road. This is also McCarthy at his most "philosophical" and brooding. He allows himself several pages at a time multiple times to expound his hard and labyrinthine metaphysical visions.
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"He had not known that you could see yourself in others’ eyes nor see therein such things as suns. He stood twinned in those dark wells with hair so pale, so thin and strange, the selfsame child. As if it were some cognate child to him that had been lost who now stood windowed away in another world where the red sun sank eternally. As if it were a maze where these orphans of his heart had miswandered in their journey in life and so arrived at last beyond the wall of that antique gaze from whence there could be no way back forever," (6).
"The last thing he saw on that windblown waste was the white bandaged leg of the wolf moving random and staccato like some pale djinn out there antic in the growing cold and dark. Then it too vanished and he closed the gate and turned toward the house," (72).
"They rode up off the plain in the final dying light man and wolf and horse over a terraceland of low hills much eroded by the wind and they crossed through a fenceline or crossed where a fenceline once had been, the wires long down and rolled and carried off and the little naked mesquite posts wandering singlefile away into the night like an enfilade of bent and twisted pensioners," (73).
"The small sands in that waste was all there was for the wind to move and it moved with a constant migratory seething upon itself. As if in its ultimate granulation the world sought some stay against its own eternal wheeling," (112).
"To God every man is a heretic," (158).
"Above all else he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. As if he harbored news of some horrendous loss that no one else had heard of yet. Some vast tragedy not of fact or incident or event but of the way the world was," (177).
"In any event our graves make no claims outside their own simple coordinates," (186).
"Who steals one’s eyes steals a world and himself remains thereby forever hidden," (291).
"He studied those worlds sprawled in their pale ignitions upon the nameless night and he tried to speak to God about his brother and after a while he slept," (295).
"The few red coals that turned up in the fire’s black heart seemed secret and improbable. Like the eyes of things disturbed that had best been left alone... The wind had died and the water lay black and still. It lay like a hole in that high desert world down into which the stars were drowning., (325).
"The black eyes in their redrimmed cups were sullen and depthless. Like lead slag poured into borings to seal away something virulent or predacious," (357). -
“Él y la loba se sentaron juntos a oscuras y vieron como las sombras emergían en el prado y trotaban y se desvanecían y volvían a emerger. La loba miraba con las orejas apuntando hacia delante y olisqueaba el aire, primero en una dirección, luego en otra, como si quisiera instigar la vida del mundo. Él se sentó arrebujado con la manta y contempló las sombras en movimiento mientras la luna se elevaba sobre las montañas que se erguían a su espalda, y a lo lejos, a orillas del Bavispe, las luces parpadearon una a una hasta extinguirse por completo.”
Bill Parham sale a cazar una loba, y cuando vuelve a casa, semanas o meses después, el mundo que él conocía como tal, está hecho trizas. Éste es quizá un resumen exagerado de todo lo que acontece en una novela como ésta, totalmente desbordante y antológica, donde ocurren muchas más situaciones límite, pero es este principio entre la loba y Bill, el que sentará las bases de todo lo que tendrá que vivir este chico a lo largo de la novela.
"Dónde está el lobo? El lobo es como un copo de nieve.
Un copo de nieve.
Un copo de nieve. Tú atrapas un copo de nieve pero cuando te miras la mano ya no está. Puede que veas este dechado. Pero antes de que puedas verlo ha desaparecidog. Si quieres verlo tienes que verlo en tu propio terreno. Si lo atrapas lo pierdes. Y a donde va no hay camino de vuelta."
Bill Parham tiene dieciséis años y sale de casa para atrapar una loba que ha estado acechando los rebaños de su familia. La captura pero en lugar de matarla decide cruzar la frontera y llevarla de vuelta a la tierra de donde procede, a las montañas de México. Ésta será la primera vez que Bill cruzará la frontera y es en este viaje, donde aprenderá que el mundo en el que vive no tiene un orden marcado o quizá sí, el orden marcado por la violencia y la muerte. La odisea iniciática de Bill en compañía de la loba, que ocupa el primer tercio de la novela, se convierte en una travesía casi suspendida en el limbo, fuera del tiempo, donde el paisaje y la violencia más salvaje confluyen continuamente una con otra, la naturaleza en todo su esplendor enfrentada a la violencia que marca el hombre cuando aparece. Incluso se podría decir que este primer tercio de la novela donde se relata la conexión entre Bill y la loba, podrían funcionar como un relato independiente, una experiencia que marcará a Bill y que le enseñará que el mundo es oscuro e impenetrable allí donde el hombre campa a sus anchas.
"Uno nunca sabe que cosas pone en marcha, dijo. Nadie puede saberlo. No hay profeta capaz de predecirlo. Las consecuencias de una acción son a menudo bastante distintas de lo que uno pensaba. Asegúrese de que lo que le mueve en el fondo del corazón es lo bastante grande como para contener todos los virajes equivocados, todas las decepciones."
Bill cruzará la frontera con México dos veces más a lo largo de la novela en el transcurso de varios años hasta cumplir los veinte, le acompañará su hermano Boyd, dos años menor, y en ambas travesías en la que van a la búsqueda de algo con un espiritú inquebrantable, se irán dando cuenta de que las cosas, las situaciones, que se irán encontrando en su camino, irán disminuyendo su fe en los hombres, aunque no todo es desolación pura y dura, porque en los respectivos encuentros con otros seres humanos, descubrirán que todos tendrán algo nuevo que aportar a su experiencia... en todos y cada uno de los hombres y mujeres que Cormac McCarthy pondrá en el camino de estos dos hermanos, hay una filosofía de vida, una manera de concebir el mundo aunque la desolación quizá esté en el hecho de que la mayoría son como figuras fantasmagóricas en una tierra de devastada por la desesperanza.
“Alzó los ojos. De tan pálido su pelo parecía blanco. Por el aspecto parecía tener catorce años camino de una edad que nunca alcanzaría. Era como si hubiera estado allí sentado y Dios hubiese hecho los árboles y las rocas alrededor de él. Por encima de todo parecía estar lleno de una tristeza terrible. Como si albergara noticias de cierta pérdida horrenda que solo había llegado a oídos de él. Una inmensa tragedia, pero no debido a un hecho, un incidente o un acontecimiento, sino por el modo de ser del mundo.”
“En la frontera” es la segunda novela de una trilogia donde la primera novela “Todos los hermosos caballos” tambien tenía como protagonista a un adolescente a punto de descubrir el mundo a través de la violencia. El nexo común entre Bill y Grady está en el hecho de que ambos son dos vaqueros atrapados entre dos eras: el salvaje oeste a punto de desintegrarse y el nuevo marcado por la era tecnológica y los inventos del hombre. El simbolismo que puede significar el lobo (desapareciendo) o el caballo (siendo sustituido por los vehículos), a los que se aferran continuamente Bill o su hermano Boyd en esta novela, no dejan de ser la consciencia de que sabían que estaban viviendo en un mundo a punto de extinguirse y es la forma en que Cormac nos está haciendo ver que para él, para su concepción del mundo, el ser humano lo es todo, así que cuando crea un personaje como Bill Parham continuamente luchando contra personas/situaciones que se le enfrentan por su desacuerdo con sus valores, totalmente aferrada a sus convicciones, está narrando hasta qué punto el mundo está marcado por el caos. La novela está ambientada en en el fina de la década de los años 30 justo un poco antes de que comenzara la Segunda Guerra Mudial, pero se siente como una novela atemporal, y en momentos en los que Cormac McCarthy sorprende en una frase con palabras como parquímetro o aeroplano, es cuando somos conscientes de que no está situada en en la era dorada del salvaje oeste sino en pleno s.XX.
"El secreto, dijo, es que en este mundo lo verdadero es la máscara."
Aunque la primera novela de la trilogía me pareció estupenda, es ésta la que de verdad me ha impactado, casi en la misma medida que me impactó "Meridiano de Sangre" porque aquí más que en la primera, Cormac McCarthy tira por la borda la narrativa más conservadora y aunque construye una atmósfera elaborada a través de párrafos continuados en relación al paisaje y a la naturaleza en comunión con el hombre, llega un punto en el que el lector no está preparado para un cierto momento, un zarpazo con el cual McCarthy sorprende al lector, ya sea un momento de auténtica brutalidad, un abandono o incluso unas lágrimas inesperadas. Hay momentos absolutamente devastadores en esta novela, inolvidables, momentos que se quedan ya grabados para siempre. Una joya con uno de esos finales perfectos que hacen a Cormac McCarthy uno de los grandes. Maravilla.
“En realidad el mundo sigue un camino que no está fijado en ningún lugar. ¿Cómo iba a estarlo? Nosotros mismos somos nuestro propio viaje. Y por eso también somos el tiempo. Somos como el tiempo. Huidizos. Inescrutables. Despiadados.”
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2022... -
Cormac Mccarthy The crossing. The second installment of McCarthy's border trilogy. Not as good as All the Pretty Horses, but still a great read.
Action-packed...it is not. Full of life lessons, observations, sadness, depression, and beautiful writing... it is.
We follow young Billy Parham on his coming-of-age journey from New Mexico to Mexico and back again and again and again. We see him go from a wide-eyed farm kid to a calloused adult. A boy with a life and a family to a grown man with nothing left. A kid full of hope and wonder to a broken man beat down by life.
Don't expect to garnish any happiness out of this book. Billy gets to learn firsthand how life can kick your ass and leave you with nothing.
You tried to do something good and decent billy, and life took a shit on you, and I'm sorry, you didn't deserve that. -
È il dolore ad addolcire ogni dono.
Grazie, Cormac McCarthy. Grazie all'infinito. Hai scritto il libro della mia vita. E ti chiedo scusa se lo chiamo libro. Ti chiedo scusa per quelli che lo hanno disprezzato e lo disprezzeranno. Perdonali, perché non sanno quello che fanno. Io non posso fare altro che inchinarmi davanti a tanta capacità letteraria. Non posso far altro che piangere sapendo che un autore ancora vivente ha prodotto questo libro. Sapendo che ha scritto queste pagine, che non è stato un dio a farlo.
Scusatemi, sto cercando di razionalizzare un po'. Sono sconvolto, davvero sconvolto. Sono arrivato all'ultima riga con gli occhi pieni di lacrime senza sapere neanche bene il perché. So solo che dentro ero completamente scosso. Ancora adesso faccio una fatica immensa a ragionare, a restare lucido. Le parole, di fronte a certe pagine, vengono meno.
Ci troviamo di fronte a un libro di livello superiore. Non so cos'altro leggerò, nei prossimi anni, ma qui la letteratura - e parlo della letteratura di tutti i tempi - tocca vette altissime. La maggior parte degli scrittori, io per primo, possono solo trascorrere la vita sognando di avere anche solo la metà della bravura di McCarthy, ma la verità è che non l'avranno mai. La verità è che Cormac McCarthy è il miglior scrittore che io abbia mai letto. La verità è che "The Crossing" (Oltre il confine) è talmente immenso che necessita sicuramente decine di riletture prima di poterlo comprendere a pieno. Prima di comprendere ogni riga, ogni parola. Prima di rendersi conto di star leggendo un "miracolo in prosa", come dice il retrocopertina. Prima di accorgersi che sono 370 pagine di poesia, non una di meno.
Le quattro parti in cui è suddiviso il libro sono una più bella dell'altra. La prima, quella che descrive il rapporto tra il protagonista e la lupa, credo comprenda le pagine più belle mai scritte sulla relazione che si può instaurare tra un essere umano e la natura. Le altre tre parti parlano d'altro, e non ho intenzione di accennarvi nemmeno una parola a riguardo.
McCarthy, quando scrive, lo fa scrivendo del lato umano più triste, più cupo, più nero. Lo fa di proposito, perché alla fine la vita è questo. Leggere questo libro è stato come guardare dentro un abisso e rimanere a fissarlo per tutta la durata della lettura. Un abisso che affonda le sue radici in te, come i tuoi occhi affondano le loro in lui. E da quell'abisso è impossibile uscirne. O forse ne esci, ma ne esci con una consapevolezza del mondo da togliere il fiato. Non guarderai più nemmeno un sasso allo stesso modo con cui lo guardavi pieno. McCarthy ha questo potere. Il potere di illuminare di una luce triste tutta la realtà. E poi non c'è nient'altro da fare se non piangere. E piangi per sfinimento, non perché il libro vuole commuovere. Non è quello il suo intento. A dire il vero il libro è così crudo e reale che commuovere è l'ultima delle sue intenzioni. Ma tu piangi perché alla fine non ce la fai più. Piangi perché i personaggi non ti dicono i loro pensieri. Tranne che nei dialoghi, McCarthy non te li dice. Tu lo capisci dai gesti cosa pensano. Tu lo capisci da come vedono il mondo. E il mondo che vedono è un mondo triste, triste, triste.
Ho sottolineato quasi tutto il libro. Ci sono intere pagine sottolineate di seguito. Molti passi li ho già trascritti, ma non li ripoterò nella recensione. Non ha senso, sono talmente belli che stonano con le mie parole.
Ho ancora qualcosa da dire. Vorrei dirvi leggetelo, ma sarebbe banale. Non ha senso leggerlo. Vi renderà solo persone più tristi. Vi renderà ancora più estranei a questo mondo che viviamo tutti i giorni. Vi farà credere che niente ha senso, che tutto quello che facciamo è inutile. Ed è terribile. Io credo che amare un libro così sia semplice. È facile che piaccia. Sia perché è scritto in modo sublime, sia perché McCarthy ha la miglior prosa che io abbia mai conosciuto, sia perché è poesia pura. Ma che lo capiate, che capiate quello che McCarthy vuole dire, be', quella è un'altra storia. Il fatto è che un libro di tale portata letteraria è presente nella maggior parte delle librerie italiane eppure nessuno che conosco l'aveva mai letto o sentito nominare. Toglietevi dalla testa "La strada", l'ultimo lavoro del Maestro. È un bel libro, è bello anche il film, ma qui siamo a livelli inconcepibili per noi comuni mortali. Qui tocchiamto l'apice dell'abilità letteraria che un uomo può raggiungere.
Quando ho detto che avevo ancora qualcosa da dire, intendevo qualcosa di lungo. Se siete stanchi, fermatevi qui. Seguiranno solo inutili soliloqui sulla bellezza di questo libro. Sto già pensando a come costruire l'altare a McCarthy in casa mia.
Billy è un ragazzo incredibile. Incredibile nella sua realtà di uomo, di essere umano. Incredibile nelle sue domande, nei racconti che ascolta durante il suo vagabondare. Ed è reso incredibile soprattutto dalle parole degli altri, da chi parla a lui di cose sconosciute, di ragionamenti sul mondo e sulla vita. Le storie che apprende nel suo viaggio sono molteplici. Le più importanti sono quelle del confronto tra il vecchio e il prete e quella del cieco. Quest'ultima è di una bellezza sconvolgente. Toccante a tal punto che non mi ritenevo degno di leggere. A tal punto da smettere e dirmi: tu non meriti di leggere parole così belle. Tu non meriti di leggere questo libro. Perché io sono nato e ho vissuto diciassette anni della mia vita aspettando di leggere il libro pubblicato l'anno della mia nascita. Ormai lo credo per certo. Ancora grazie, Cormac McCarthy. Mi sembra di deturpare il tuo genio solo parlandone. Anche io non so quello che faccio, perdonami, e io ti perdonerò di avere 78 anni e ti perdonerò il fatto che non saranno molti i libri che ti restano da pubblicare. Ma io mi accontento lo stesso. Io mi accontento del fatto che tu abbia donato al mondo "The Crossing". Tutti dovremmo accontentarcene. Cosa si può chiedere di più dalla vita se non la lettura di un romanzo di questa portata? Davvero, cosa si può chiedere dui più? La felicità, forse? La felicità non è niente.
Un'altra cosa che ho capito, e spero di averla capita nel modo giusto, è che il mondo è una storia. Che tutte le storie fanno parte di un'unica storia, e quella storia è il mondo. E che noi stiamo vivendo una storia, né più né meno. Piango di fronte a questa consapevolezza. Piango di fronte all'illusione del mondo, alla sua inconsistenza, alla sua leggerezza. Come dice Mccarthy, non si può tenerlo in una mano, perché è inconsistente. È una storia. È un'illusione.
Alla fine ho deciso che qualche cosa dovevo pur riportarla. È lunga, ma non può essere altrimenti:
Sono venuto come un eretico che fugge da una vita precedente. Stavo fuggendo.
È venuto a nascondersi?
Sono venuto per via del disastro.
Scusi?
Il disastro. Il terremoto.
Il terremoto, certo.
Stavo cercando prove dell'intervento di Dio nel mondo. Ero arrivato a credere che quell'intervento fosse dettato dall'ira e credevo che gli uomini non si fossero mai interrogati a sufficienza sui miracoli della distruzione. Sui disastri di una certa grandezza. Credevo vi fossero prove del fatto che tutto ciò era stato tenuto in scarsa considerazione. Pensavo che Lui non si sarebbe dato premura di cancellare tutti i segni del proprio intervento. Avevo molta voglia di sapere. Pensavo che magari Lui si divertisse addirittura a lasciare degli indizi.
Che genere di indizi?
Non so. Qualcosa. Qualcosa di imprevisto. Qualcosa fuori posto. Qualcosa non vero o improbabile. Una traccia nella polvere. Un gingillo caduto a terra. Non una causa. No di certo. Non una causa. Le cause non fanno altro che moltiplicarsi e conducono al caos. Volevo sapere cos'aveva in mente. Non potevo credere che distruggesse la propria chiesa senza alcuna ragione.
Crede forse che la gente di qui avesse fatto qualcosa di simile?
L'uomo fumò pensieroso. Sì, credevo che fosse possibile. Possibile. Come nelle città in pianura. Pensavo ci fossero prove di qualcosa di indicibile che l'avesse sollecitato a intervenire. Qualcosa tra le macerie. Tra la polvere. Sotto le vigas. Qualcosa di oscuro. Chi potrebbe dirlo?
Che cosa ha trovato?
Nulla. Una bambola. Un piatto. Un osso.
Si chinò e spense la sigaretta in una coppa di terracotta sul tavolo.
Sono qui a causa di una certa persona. Sono venuto a ricostruirne i passi. Forse a vedere se per caso vi fosse un percorso alternativo. Ma qui non si trova niente. Le cose separate dalle loro storie non hanno senso. Sono semplici forme. Di una certa dimensione e di un certo colore. Di un certo peso. Quando ne abbiamo perso il significato, non hanno più neppure un nome. La storia, d'altro canto, non può mai venir separata dal luogo al quale appartiene, perché essa è quel luogo. Ecco che cosa si poteva trovare qui. Il corrido. La storia. E come tutti i corridos, in fin dei conti raccontava soltanto una storia, perché ce n'è solo una da raccontare.
I gatti si muovevano, il fuoco scoppiettava nella stufa. Fuori, nel villaggio abbandonato, il silenzio più profondo.
Che storia è? domandò il ragazzo.
Nella città di Caborca, sul fiume Altar, visse un uomo, un vecchio. A Caborca era nato e a Caborca morì. Però visse per un certo periodo in questa città, a Huisiachepic.
Che cosa sa Caborca di Huisiachepic e che cosa sa Huisiachepic di Caborca? Sono mondi diversi, dovrai convenire con me. Eppure anche così c'è solo un mondo e qualsiasi cosa tu possa immaginare è un suo elemento necessario. Perché questo mondo che ci pare una cosa fatta di pietra, vegetazione e sangue non è affatto una cosa ma è semplicemente una storia. E tutto ciò che esso contiene è una storia e ciascuna storia è la somma di tutte le storie minori, eppure queste sono la medesima storia e contengono in esse tutto il resto. Quindi tutto è necessario. Ogni minimo particolare. È questa in fondo la lezione. Non si può fare a meno di nulla. Nulla può venire disprezzato. Perché, vedi, non sappiamo dove stanno i fili. I collegamenti. Il modo in cui è fatto il mondo. Non abbiamo modo di sapere quali sono le cose di cui si può fare a meno. Ciò che può venire omesso. Non abbiamo modo di sapere che cosa può stare in piedi e che cosa può cadere. E quei fili che ci sono ignoti fanno naturalmente parte anch'essi della storia e la storia non ha dimora né luogo d'essere se non nel racconto, è lì che vive e dimora e quindi non possiamo mai aver finito di raccontare. Non c'è mai fine al raccontare. E, ripeto, sia a Caborca che a Huisiachepic che in qualsiasi altro posto con qualsiasi altro nome o senza nome alcuno, tutte le storie sono una cosa sola. Se ascolti come si deve, sono una unica storia.
Voi cosa dite? Voi che parole pronunciate di fronte a un foglio e dell'inchiostro? Che potere avete voi, che potere abbiamo noi, davanti a un libro scritto in questo modo?
Io nessuno. Io sono un poveraccio, una nullità. Sto seriamente pensando di esauire tutti i caratteri a disposizione. Ma poi chi la legge, questa recensione? Ancora due cose, solo due.
Voglio solamente dire a chi è arrivato fino in fondo, che questi libri vi distruggono. Non vi cambiano la vita, non vi salvano. Vi distruggono. La bellezza ha quest'effetto.
L'ultima cosa che vi dico è di regalarlo a tutti coloro che conoscete. Non per distruggerli, ma per farli diventare come voi. Per farli rendere conto della vita e del mondo. Regalatelo e piangete pensando alle persone che amate che piangono leggendolo. Che piangono arrivando all'ultima parola. Arrivando al punto. Ci sono arrivato anch'io. Basta. -
Alice Munro said in an interview that our lives begin as straightforward stories with the typical arc of fiction, but that as we go on living they become strange, experimental narratives, convoluted and difficult to interpret. It seems to me that's what's happening in this second volume of the Border Trilogy. Volume One was pretty straightforward, taut and clear in its construction. It told a story of a young man's searing introduction to the adult world. Volume Two does the same--with a different young man--yet its structure defies the conventions of fiction. After a relatively focused (and actually quite wonderful) first 125 pages, the novel circles and digresses for another 300. It tried my patience. I pressed on, though, in the hopes that Volume Three will make good on the promise of the first book and redeem the disappointment of this one.
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The way Cormac McCarthy can compose a story so rich with aesthetics, tragedy, philosophical musings and eclectic language reaches a majestic level in The Crossing. The balance and competition between nature and man, life and death, and the journey within are all personified in a raw, yet beautiful way. Another amazing read from McCarthy that feeds the reader’s subconscious and continues to create a world in The Border Trilogy that becomes your hypnotic reality, your heartache and your journey alongside unforgettable characters.
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It was not long after I joined Goodreads when he messaged me for the first time. He did not even have a profile picture; all that was to be seen were his books and his name. He explained that he just joined the site, and we began to talk; soon we arranged to read our first book together.
I was his first friend here - I'm still happy about it -but soon he became a regular in our community of readers, and a popular one. Goodreads seemed to be a little more close-knit back then; I certainly was more active and interacted more regularly with people I met here, many of whom became and remain my friends. I'm happy to say that he was one of them; we began exchanging messages and he always had a kind word to say to me.
One of his favorite writers was Cormac McCarthy, and it was he who introduced me to his works. I remember us arguing endlessly whether The Road was a good novel; he pointed me in the direction of his earlier works, which I liked more. One of my favorite things to do was to tease him about McCarthy's dislike of punctuation. It became a running gag for us, and I did it for years, even after I grew to appreciate McCarthy and his style, and even find beauty in his writing.
The Crossing is the second book of McCarthy's trilogy of novels, and like its predecessor it takes place along the American-Mexican border. I read the first novel,
All the Pretty Horses years ago, but only now got around to reading the second; I thought that there was all the time in the world for reading, talking and reminiscing. I took my time to read this book; I read it slowly, only a few pages every day, because it felt right. The Crossing is not a book to be rushed through; it is a book that benefits being read not on a page, but on a sentence level - bit by bit, word by word, letter by letter.
Storywise, The Crossing is a similar book All the Pretty Horses, but is a much slower, more somber and melancholic work. Even though All The Pretty Horses was also pretty bleak, it contained moments of humor and excitement, which are largely absent from The Crossing. What it does contain in multitudes are philosophical musings on the nature of life and man, a lot of untranslated Spanish (I think there was some in its predecessor, but here entire conversations are left untranslated - realism, I guess), and plenty of really emotional and beautiful descriptions of the American southwest, throughout which our protagonist, Billy Parham, travels on his three crossings across the border - between the U.S. and Mexico, but also between that what we can explain and that what we cannot.
With each of these three crossings Billy will change, and so will his relationship with the land and those who inhabit it. He begins the book as a boy; he will end it as a man, with all the burdens and sorrows associated with it. I felt kinship with Billy because I too have changed since I've read All the Pretty Horses all these years ago. In many ways I still am the person I was then, but in many others I'm not; it feels strange reading the words I wrote to review that book and observe how much time has passed.
In many ways - most notably in the vividness of its lyricism and deep affection for the land it describes - The Crossing is a beautiful book, but it can also be cruel and unforgiving, reminding us of our own mistakes and the fact that we cannot turn back time, and that the Earth turns on its axis irregardless of us and how we feel about it, and will continue to do so long after we'll be gone.
"Life is a memory, and then it is nothing."
I miss you, Mike. -
This was very depressing, and that's just how life goes which is the point I think McCarthy was trying to make.
-
I’m sorry. I just have not had time to write a review until now. Life has been extremely hectic. I like writing reviews. I like recording the impact a book has left on me. I read so many books. If I don’t write a review my memories fade and get muddled. I hope by explain the impression a book has left on me other readers can decide if the book will or will not fit them.
It is McCarthy’s writing style that is the most memorable about the book. Thereafter follows the story which is gripping and excruciatingly difficult at times. Despair colors the telling. The difficult sections are balanced by tongue in cheek humor and the stark beauty so stunningly drawn in the writing.
This is the second of McCarthy’s Border trilogy. The central protagonists of the first and second books meet up in the third. While it is of little consequence which of the first two books you read first, both should be read before going on to the third.
Richard Poe narrates the audiobook. The narration works better if you lower the speed. In this way, the strength of the prose cones through stronger and better matches the tone, the weight of the events as they unfold. What is said is simple to hear. Four stars for the narration.
Please read below my thoughts as I progressed through the book. They illustrate without giving spoilers how the reading influences both one’s emotions and thoughts.
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Fate exists, but it is also possible to shape it. We are not left without some control. In this there is implied a smidgen of hope.
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Parts are excruciatingly difficult to read. .....but this is as it should be. Excellent writing.
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Here’s now what’s going through my head. McCarthy could be classified as one of the American Naturalist school. I am reminded of
Theodore Dreiser. The prose is clear, crisp, exact and spare. The simplicity of the lines relay strength and beauty. The simplicity gives emphasis to the message conveyed. Less says more.
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The Border Trilogy
*
All the Pretty Horses 4 stars
*
The Crossing 4 stars
*
Cities of the Plain TBR
*
Suttree 1 star -
I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a book less. I was all the more disappointed because I have liked everything else I've read of McCarthy. This felt like paint by numbers McCarthy to me: male characters laconic to the point of absurdity, but stopping often to listen to portentous theological soliloquies. Wandering through desert landscape, and experiencing sudden senseless violence. It is devoid of feeling until the final page--practically an autistic novel--and ultimately offers nothing to counter, redeem, or justify, its unrelenting bleakness.
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Second Reading: June 2021
This second time trough, I was amazed at the countless details I had forgotten since my first reading. I think this is due to the overshadowing effect of All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain. Both of these books are human-focused in a brutally honest way. The Crossing, however, is something a bit different. While it’s certainly human focused, it attempts at times to live in that mystic place that exists between what we know and what we cannot explain. If humans are spiritual creatures (and we are), McCarthy tries to explain that spirituality in a universal way, in terms that are fundamentally part of the world that we know.
This spiritual aspect to the novel creates a sense of depth. The instinctive behaviors of wolves, the unexplainable cruelty of man, and the peaceful nature of people unencumbered by modernity are periodically explored. It’s this exploration, however, that is drawn out a bit more than necessary at various points throughout the novel.
Beyond this slight fault, the vast balance of the book is everything that its prequel and sequel are. The Story of Billy Parham is one of honesty and one of reality. While other writers have also achieved the depiction of reality through words, McCarthy manages to do it in a way that is uniquely and relishingly his own.
A Few Comments on the Map
Because an adventure without mapping it is not worth the journey, I attempted to plot Billy’s path through his three journeys into Mexico and the large-area search he performed while in Mexico.
The Map: Billy Parham's Journeys
The process involved using base maps of Sonora and Chihuahua, Mexico from 1922 as well as a Texaco Road Map of Arizona and New Mexico from 1935. The road map was surprisingly inclusive of geological features. These maps, especially the Mexican maps, were supplemented with detailed searches of Google Maps for villages of the mentioned names. I was surprised to see that the Mexican Maps mentioned places such as El Tigre in Sonora, Mexico and San Diego in Chihuahua, Mexico.
On Billy Parham’s second journey into Mexico, where he spends most of his time between the northern town of Casas Grandes and the southern town of Santa Ana de Babícora, these two relatively large towns have remained constant and verifiable between 1922 and the present. The smaller villages (or pueblos) had to be hunted down on Google Maps by "flying" close to the ground along the indicated route. Through this means, the pueblos of Mata Ortiz, San Jose (judged to be the existing pueblo of San Jose de Ermita), and La Pinta were located.
The location of other mentioned towns, however, were probably fictionalized by McCarthy and possibly placed at the location of other mapped towns that existed at the time. Las Varas was stated by McCarthy to be on the road south from Mata Ortiz and near the river. The one place that met this geographic location on the 1922 map was the plotted location of El Rucio, a train stop in 1922. Boquilla was depicted as being at the end of a road segment aligned in an east-west direction, near a lake, and needing to be passed through in order to reach Santa Ana de Babícora. The town of San Jose de Babícora fit this description on the 1922 map. While these two towns are actually included on the Mexcan map, they are further south making them inconsistent with the narrated journey.
Billy’s furthest trek south was to the town of Cuauhtemoc, which was verified as once being called San Antonio. San Antonio is plotted on the 1922 map. Billy’s path to Cuauhtemoc and subsequently to La Nortena, however, are speculative.
On Billy’s third and final journey into Mexico, the route is fairly well defined by McCarthy. Therefore, it is confusing that upon departure from Mexico, he passes Dog Springs and then he travels relatively far to the east to Hermanas, New Mexico (presumably without re-crossing the border). Billy then turns in the opposite direction to head west to Hatchita. It’s a long circuitous route that seems intuitively incorrect. However, Dog Springs, Hermanas, and Hatchita are all verifiable locations.
The novel mentions other locations in the US where Billy visits. However, these locations were primarily used to establish a sense of time between his second and Third Mexican journeys. Other places in the US are also mentioned during the end of the book, but again, these mentions are more to set the mood rather than serve as an actual part of the plot. As such, these extraneous locations are not shown on the map.
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First Reading: June 2013
The Crossing is a novel that succeeds in giving meaning to an existence that typically goes unnoticed as we move through our scheduled lives. We may, on occasion, sense this way of life as we force our presence on the physical world. It’s life as it always was but humanity has pushed it aside into a part of the world that now only exists between our beliefs and our actions. It is within this part of the world that life exists, for the sake of life itself. This is where we began, during the time that preceded our understanding of things, before things had names.
The Crossing serves as a guidebook to the remnants of this pre-conscious world that still surrounds us. Notions of it can be found in the actions of animals, in both predators and prey. It also lives in the unspoken understanding that exists between those closest to us; the unspoken bond between brothers that allows for actions without words. It can be seen in the swaying tops of trees on a breezy day and in the thunderstorms that momentarily cool the oppressive heat of the desert. But the truth of this world lies in its unmitigated reality. Hate lives on equal terms with love, pleasure is savored and pain is endured, kindness and greed are always at hand; and death is merely one more step in life. -
Some novels are never over, this is one. It's always going to be exquisite and cruel in the reading, it will be a book to read and love, to read and be devastated by: 'Some vast tragedy not of fact or incident or event but of the way the world was'. -
Video review
The first handful of chapters alone would be worth the read, even if they wasn't a masterpiece attached to them. -
I'm not sure what I expected going into this read, but I certainly didn't expect such a radiant, brutal, multi-faceted experience. For me, it succeeded on so many levels. Often spartan with his language, McCarthy is exacting with its impact. A spur-of-the-moment decision sends young Billy into Mexico and creates a kind of Bildungsroman-as-lamentation. Every stranger he encounters is like an oracle in disguise. Some deliver advice. Some wish to deliver death. A world where hospitality and danger intermingle continuously.
And the prose floats between stark reality and the sublime:“The movement of figures in the room slowed, the low mutterings of the condolent died to a whisper. The mourners wished one another that they profit from their meal and then all of it ground away in the history of its own repetition and he could hear those antecedent ceremonies dropping somewhere like wooden blocks into their slots. Like tumblers in a lock or like the wooden gearteeth in old machinery slipping one by one into the mortices cut in the cogwheel rolling up to meet them.”
Grounded in reality, it's like a Western elevated to allegory. An ode to lost ways, lost lives, and the perpetual grind of history. The characters resonate with an abundance of depth by way of a few short lines breathing life through facial expression, postures, terse dialogue.
Damn.
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THIS IS PROBABLY 2/3 OF THE WORDS I DIDN'T KNOW IN THIS BOOK
fumarole | vaqueros | la almohada | siéntate | contumacious | alcahest | ocotillo | bosal | lechuguilla | arrieros | kiacks | esclarajo | serranos | pozole | bier | mozo | alguacil | cobarde | agárrala | chozas | wickiups | huérfano | majoneras | celadon | terremoto | vigas | moren | consanguinity | quoined | jinete | canebrake | remuda | scaup | selvedge | demiculverin | ciborium | indenominate | ejiditarios | latifundio | gorgios | caliche | preterite
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HANDY READING RESOURCE
Translations of all the Spanish in this book:
http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/wp-content/uploads/CrossingTrans.pdf -
Billy Parham, hunted a wolf that was being a nuisance on his family's ranch. After he catches the wolf in a trap he takes it into the mountains of Mexico. It was not a happy ending for the wolf.
When he traveled home to New Mexico there was more heart aches and disappointments.
Indians had stolen horses from the ranch.
He and his brother Boyd,travel back to Mexico to find the horses and the Indians. Nothing goes right.
Billy and Boyd go their separate ways. Boyd was hunted and killed.
Billy got away, with many scrapes.
It was as though he who hunted, became the hunted.
An interesting read. -
The Crossing is a coming of age story set in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s near the US-Mexican border. It is the second book in McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy,” but may be read as a standalone. It is broken into three sections, with each correlated to one of Billy’s three quests.
As the book opens, teenage protagonist Billy lives with his parents and brother on the family’s isolated ranch in the New Mexican desert. He makes three trips across the border, involving a wolf, the family’s horses, and a missing person. None of these quests turns out as planned. During his travels, he gains wisdom through his experiences and discussions with local sages. Themes include guilt, fate, heroism, and the desire to live an honorable life (which he finds to be harder than it sounds).
The tone is dark. Billy suffers many hardships. His motivations are not always apparent. Sometimes he just “decides to do something” without thinking it through, and the consequences are dire.
McCarthy leaves many Spanish words and phrases (and a few paragraphs) untranslated, so passable knowledge of Spanish is helpful. If you are not a Spanish reader, you may want to keep a translation tool handy. I feel this book is a worthy follow-up to the first book in this series, All the Pretty Horses, which I also enjoyed and recommend. -
Chupacabras, Duendes y Putas, Oh Mi
Bajada a los Infiernos al Sur de la Frontera
{revised 9/16/16, in honor of Mexican Independence Day}
"Life is a memory, and then it is nothing." The Crossing, C. McCarthy
This novel starts out well enough. The action gets started with teenage brothers setting out into the mountains of Mexico to retrieve the horses stolen from their small family ranch when their parents were murdered, while the brothers were away. Pretty much everything thereafter I detested almost as thoroughly as I appreciated #1 in The Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses.
Chupacabra Mexicana
The boys' purpose for journeying deep into the Mexican mountains quickly devolves into a succession of hazy, haphazard jaunts here and there. This wouldn't be negative in itself, but McCarthy splotches this novel with soporific soliloquies told by ancient hombres at various pits stops on the odyssey to nowhere in particular. The boys encounter savagery enough to salt the hide, men who lived like animals and monsters, and women who are mostly no more than toothless, grotesque objects and the few who aren't are either whores or a means to a raping.
Duende Mexicana
Toward the end I felt like my reading had been hijacked por una Hacienda de Horrores. I had a couple of nightmares over this book, which gives me chills even now when thinking about it.
Puta Mexicana -
Part II of The Border Trilogy. This wasn't nearly as good as 'All The Pretty Horses', but it was still a powerful novel... then again, why wouldn't it be? It's Cormack!
From his home in New Mexico, young Billy Parham decides to take a wild wolf that has been trapped and set it free in its faraway home in Mexico. Billy succeeds in setting the lobo free, but not like he intended. Because at that juncture there was an unseen obstacle in his path... there was 'A Crossing'.
I think the title is fitting for the story. In the gritty style that McCarthy is so famous for, he takes Billy and his brother Boyd on a journey, where just as in real life, there are hurtles, bridges and rivers to cross, forks in the road where a decision to go left or right could be the difference in the outcome of your entire life.
Billy makes this particular journey, imprinting a lifetime of memories and unforgettable experiences while he is still in his teens. And in the end... well, there is no end here. There is no dramatic flair, no unexpected twists, no blooming romance. It's just another place in his life... it just is. Another crossing. -
4.5 ⭐️
