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4.15 AVERAGE
4.15 AVERAGE
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I don't know what else to give it but 5 stars. Wow - breathtaking. It just keeps echoing around in my ear and in my guts.
I cried. This one improved on the first. Billy went on quite the journey running into bandits, sherrifs, gypsies, and opera singers. It felt like an odyssey, an adventure with little plot and every reason.
Haunting and engrossing western. Like other McCarthy works, characters ring true and every word has a purpose. A worthy follow-up to All the Pretty Horses.
Really d*mned close to 5 stars. 4.55.
This isn't really a re-telling of All the Pretty Horses, but it does head through the same territory (rural Mexico, post-revolution and early-mid 20th Century), with similar tropes (gringo riding around, sometimes with a purpose, sometimes without, encounters good and evil, and ponders the nature of both).
Where this book stands out for me, beyond even Horses, is how the love of a person for another person can manifest, and how one can come to love someone or something so completely that one's life becomes relatively unimportant. This is a familiar feeling to every parent, and that angle has been written into countless movies and books. Here, though, we see a love that, quite literally, transcends death (I cannot explain without spoilers). Everything that McCarthy writes is lyrical, beautiful. Horses was beautiful. Not as beautiful as No Country, but beautiful. This, interwoven with the tales from the people he meets along the way, and with its long-form discussion of death, the nothingness of the world (what is it, does it exist without us, why is it, etc)...McCarthy spends more time deep in thought than I spend asleep, I imagine. For this reader, at least, someone who has thought about and looked at death and said "yeah, see you sometime, but I'm not going to think or worry about you until then," it was eye-opening.
This book stands on its own and in no way needs to be read as a series. Having realized this, I am putting off reading the third book in the "trilogy" until I need some really good "book drugs" to boost me.
If you have a bond to someone that you know has or will transcend death, or if you have wondered why this world is as it is, then read this. It will not give you many answers, but I think it will help you to formulate your questions.
Will be picking up a copy of this in print sometime soon.
Hopefully I don't oversell it for those who have not read it. And, doubtless, it will get horrible reviews from others, who just see it as interminable wandering in the desert with, at times, only a vague purpose (which it is). This isn't Carlos Castaneda with his Homer-Simpson-on-hot-peppers shamanism. It's straightforward and dirty.
This isn't really a re-telling of All the Pretty Horses, but it does head through the same territory (rural Mexico, post-revolution and early-mid 20th Century), with similar tropes (gringo riding around, sometimes with a purpose, sometimes without, encounters good and evil, and ponders the nature of both).
Where this book stands out for me, beyond even Horses, is how the love of a person for another person can manifest, and how one can come to love someone or something so completely that one's life becomes relatively unimportant. This is a familiar feeling to every parent, and that angle has been written into countless movies and books. Here, though, we see a love that, quite literally, transcends death (I cannot explain without spoilers). Everything that McCarthy writes is lyrical, beautiful. Horses was beautiful. Not as beautiful as No Country, but beautiful. This, interwoven with the tales from the people he meets along the way, and with its long-form discussion of death, the nothingness of the world (what is it, does it exist without us, why is it, etc)...McCarthy spends more time deep in thought than I spend asleep, I imagine. For this reader, at least, someone who has thought about and looked at death and said "yeah, see you sometime, but I'm not going to think or worry about you until then," it was eye-opening.
This book stands on its own and in no way needs to be read as a series. Having realized this, I am putting off reading the third book in the "trilogy" until I need some really good "book drugs" to boost me.
If you have a bond to someone that you know has or will transcend death, or if you have wondered why this world is as it is, then read this. It will not give you many answers, but I think it will help you to formulate your questions.
Will be picking up a copy of this in print sometime soon.
Hopefully I don't oversell it for those who have not read it. And, doubtless, it will get horrible reviews from others, who just see it as interminable wandering in the desert with, at times, only a vague purpose (which it is). This isn't Carlos Castaneda with his Homer-Simpson-on-hot-peppers shamanism. It's straightforward and dirty.
I really enjoyed the first third with the wolf. Then I lost the will to read it in the middle especially the long story told by the priest-like guy in the derelict church...
Then I enjoyed it again until the next overlong story with lots of hidden meaning and deep profound message that I am not literary enough to understand.
Then I enjoyed it again until the next overlong story with lots of hidden meaning and deep profound message that I am not literary enough to understand.
Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and the now.
If ever there was a fitting one sentence self-summary for a book, that'd be it. My second consecutive Mccarthy book and I might need a break before I /wrists.
I don't even really know what to say about these books other than that they're compulsively readable and yet depict the futility and mundanity of life.
Mccarthy loves to pull the rug out from under his readers. There you are, sucked in by the story and characters and, wham, it all goes to shit. I know I shouldn't expect anything else from this author but yet, I still do. Two times during this book, I nearly had to stop reading, but alas, as in life, we trudge on. And that's really what his characters do.
Trudge on.
I think this would have made a great novella. The first section (about 120 pages) was very satisfying, meaningful, and complete. I even took in stride my favorite character dying (the wolf) because it seemed important. But the rest of the book tended to wander, and I could have done without every passing stranger telling their stories. By the end of the book we're back to McCarthy's old saws about the randomness of violence and meaninglessness of everything. Perhaps the most depressing Cormac McCarthy book I've read (but not in a good way).
He held his hands before him and looked at his palms. As if they may have been at some work not of his own doing. The past, he said, is always this argument between counterclaimants. Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this? How live in that world once more?
Easily my favourite McCarthy novel thusfar and I've read quite a few now. The debt to Faulkner is enormous and I loved how events were framed and reframed again and how the prose is so primal and atavistic, communing with the very landscape in which the novel is set. Billy is among McCarthy's most complex and well-conceived characters. He's also deeply relatable and human. He feels far more psychologically fleshed out and nuanced than many of Cormac's protagonists and the fact the reader presented with more interiority is part of what makes The Crossing so good.
It's typically McCarthy in the sense that the novel is deeply fatalistic and pervaded by an overwhelming sense of loss which cannot quite be fully articulated. It sticks with out after you close the book. There's the gradual, creeping realisation that the world is a cruel place, that callousness is central to nature and life and who we are, but the key is to be able to persist through severity and indifference.
One thing I loved about this book in particular was the thematic obsession with stories, mythmaking and journeys:
Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.
McCarthy, like Faulkner before him, understands that mythmaking and narrative are central to identity. We cannot sustain ourselves as a species without stories. Narratives are a compass which allow us to navigate the world around us. They're topographical charts which allow us to negotiate quintessentially human experiences like loss, grief, love, and so on. And this is why, as Faulkner perhaps best articulated, truth is often immaterial. What actually happened is reformulated, recast in history's forge and beaten into new shapes, to sustain individuals, families, even nations. The entire Border Trilogy is an odyssey into the identity of individuals, but also the mythic narratives of both Mexico and the United States. The narratives on which entire political and social orders rest. Part of what makes this book so good is that Billy's story, the stories of Boyd and his Mexican lover, are part of the grander, unfolding story of the infinitely complex relationship between the United States and Mexico.
Starts off slow but picks up by mid-way. Really engaging and I love the descriptions of the surroundings.
adventurous
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes