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4.15 AVERAGE
4.15 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
emotional
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The follow-up to "All the Pretty Horses" has similar characters (laconic American men coming up from hard poverty who are semi-cosmopolitan in their interactions with Mexicans), takes place in the same milieu (Southwest America and northern Mexico, in the 1940s), and is written in a similar sparse style. The narrative in this book is much harder to follow, as Billy Parham's motives for traversing Mexico become more and more opaque, whereas John Grady Cole's journey was relatively more straight-forward. The amount of animal cruelty in the novel was hard to take, although that's not meant as a critique.
And all that was seen was told and all that was told was remembered.
- page 197
If I had been perusing a bookstore and come across this book, I would have read the back, put it back, and pretty promptly forgotten about it, as it is not something I would normally spring for. However, this is assigned reading for my literature class, and so I read it. And I can’t say that I regret or miss the time I spent reading all 440-odd pages of it, either.
The Crossing is definitely much different of a novel than what I am used to: while it hits some very philosophical notes which I love to find in a novel, at the same time, there is very little introspection by the main character. The introspection and reflection is left to the reader to interpret based on what Billy Parham experiences and how he reacts and keeps moving forward. There are numerous “wise men” figures scattered throughout who Billy encounters, and who really run home the philosophical bents present in the novel, as well as providing some of the most poignant quotes I found (selected quotes below).
This is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story for young Billy, which starts out when he decides to take a wild wolf back to Mexico from whence it came, without consulting his father first – it is the first time Billy leaves home, and the first time he will go further than a day’s journey away from home. He learns as he goes, he is innocent and naïve, he is as unaware of the boundaries he crosses as the wolf was in her journey from Mexico to the United States. And how many boundaries he will cross over the next several years of his life, and with varying degrees of awareness.
In all, Billy crosses over into Mexico on three separate occasions, each time in quest of something different, and each journey changes him in a different way. He is much the loner, relying on his own survival skills for the most part, but often being welcomed with open arms by complete strangers who help him out, give him food and shelter, periodically along his journey. One moment that stuck out to me as a time when we see how far Billy has come is at one point, later on in the story, it is he who offers food and drink to a traveler; there is a sense that Billy has made a circle, or at least one, where he has taken his experiences and is able to give to others what he had. Generally, I marked quotes that offered some life wisdom to Billy and hence the reader, some that showed Billy’s naivety, and some that struck a chord with me as far as how youths can understand a strange, often violent, world and survive the trials they undergo.
As for the writing style, I found some of the punctuation choices curious even as they served to create a tone or a mood for the novel, to reflect to the reader more about Billy, such as the lack of apostrophes in contracted words, no font changes to the ever-present Spanish sentences, largely a simple vocabulary level but with the occasional and out-of-place-yet-not-quite higher-level vocabulary terms, and sometimes strange sentence constructions, most of which occurred in descriptive passages where one lost the subject or the object while reading, and would have to go back over it to sort it out. Basically, the writing almost keeps the reader just slightly off-balance, which is possibly a reflection of Billy’s comfort level in the world. One could say that McCarthy styled this novel so that just as Billy felt as much out of place as comfortable, so too did he want the reader to share this strange balancing act.
All in all, it was worth the read, and I am eager to dig into analyzing it in class with regard to borders – human/animal, US/Mexico, Spanish/English, civilization/wilderness, and cultural borders, to name a few. This novel is rich in material, all it will take is to dig in a little deeper to explore what it all means, what conclusions we can draw from it.
Favorite short quotes:
He said the wolf knew nothing of boundaries. – page 122
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 even have a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place. And that is what was to be found here. The corridor. The tale. And like all corridos it ultimately told one story only, for there is only one to tell. – page 146
The particulars of his life are strange particulars. This is a story of misfortune. Or so it would seem. The end is not yet told. – page 147
Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed. – page 148
The flesh is but a memento, yet it tells the true. Ultimately every man’s path is every other’s. There are no separate journeys for there are no separate men to make them. All men are one and there is no other tale to tell. – page 160
The man said that plans were one thing and journeys another. He said it was a mistake to discount the good will inherent in the old man’s desire to guide them for it too must be taken into account and would in itself lend strength and resolution to them in their journey. – page 189
Long voyages often lose themselves. […] You will see. It is difficult even for brothers to travel together on such a voyage. The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all. – page 237
Billy asked him if such men as had stole his eyes were only products of the war but the blind man said that since war itself was their very doing that could hardly be the case. […] He said that who steals one’s eyes steals a world and himself remains thereby forever hidden. – page 299
De versa, the boy said. – page 341
He said that men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny. – page 389
The day is made of what has come before. The world itself must be surprised at the shape of that which appears. Perhaps even God. – page 397
[The gypsy] said that the strategist did not confuse his devices with the reality of the world for then what would become of him? El mentiroso debe primero saber la verdad, he said. De acuerdo? – page 415
One could even say that what endows any thing with significance is solely the history in which it has participated. Yet wherein does that history lie? – page 416
Favorite longer quotes:
[Boyd watched the wolf]. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one. – page 76
[The boy] stood by one of the stone piers and he took off his hat so that those behind could see but then he realized no one else had taken off theirs so he put it back on. – page 118 – I wish people were that courteous all the time…
The square of the light in which he stood drew narrow slowly in the door’s shadow to darkness. – page 124 – While I know what it means, it took me a couple re-reads to sort through the sentence construction to figure it out.
[… he] closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun’s coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it. – page 131
He told the boy that although he was huérfano still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself. 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. He said that while the huérfano might feel that he no longer belonged among men he must set this feeling aside for he contained within him a largeness of spirit which men could see and that men would wish to know him and that the world would need him even as he needed the world for they were one. Lastly he said that while this itself was a good thing like all good things it was also a danger. – page 137
And all in [this world] is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And whether in Caborca or in Huisiachepic or in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one. – page 146-147
The events of the world can have no separate life from the world. And yet the world itself can have no temporal view of things. It can have no cause to favor certain enterprises over others. The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one. There is no favoring, you see. – page 151
It seemed that what he wished, this man, was to strike some colindancia with his Maker. Assess boundaries and metes. See that lines were drawn and respected. Who could think such a reckoning possible? The boundaries of the world are those of God’s devising. With God there can be no reckoning. With what would one bargain? – page 154
He pored over the record not for the honor and glory of his Maker but rather to find against Him. To seek out in nice subtleties some darker nature. False favors. Small deceptions. Promises forsaken or a hand too quickly raised. To make cause against Him, you see. He understood what the priest could not. That what we seek is the worthy adversary. For we strike out to fall flailing through demons of wire and crepe and we long for something of substance to oppose us. Something to contain us or to stay our hand. Otherwise there were no boundaries to our own being and we too must extend our claims until we lose all definition. Until we must be swallowed up at last by the very void to which we wished to stand opposed. – page 156-157
[…] he knows what perhaps you do not. That the past cannot be mended. You think everyone is a fool. But there are not so many. […] Your brother is young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy. […] What remedy can there be? What remedy can there be for what is not? You see? And where is the remedy that has no unforeseen consequence? What act does not assume a future that is itself unknown? – page 207
Dirty and ragged with his hat forward against the sun and his face enshadowed. He looked some new breed of child horseman left in the wake of war or plague or famine in that country. – page 252
You dont want to use common sense. We come too far down here to go back dead.
[…] You think there is a place that far? he said. – page 256
Finally the blind man told him about his conjecture that the blind had already partly quite the world anyway. He said that he had become but a voice to speak in a darkness incommensurable with the motives of life. He said that the world and all in it had become but a rumor. A suspicion. – page 290
[The blind man said that] there was still a further order to the narrative and it was a thing of which men do not speak. He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it. – page 301
[…and Billy] said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it. Not just the coming of war. Anything at all. – page 356
The world has no name, [Quijada] said. The names of the ceros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again. Your brother is in that place which the world has chosen for him. He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised. – page 398
He said that fate might enter into the affairs of men in order to contravene them or set them at naught but to say that fate could deny the true and uphold the false would seem to be a contradictory view of things. To speak of a will in the world that ran counter to one's own was one thing. To speak of such a will that ran counter to the truth was quite another, for then all was rendered senseless. – page 421
Typographical curiosities:
[…] Boyd was awake but he didnt tell him where he’d been nor what he’d seen. – page 5 – I’m finding the selected choices of where to exclude the apostrophe in contracted words interesting, and wondering why the author chose it.
…some other self of wolf that did inhere the earth or wait in every secret place… -- page 81 – Huh, I’d never heard the word “inhere” before, and couldn’t figure out exactly what it means by context alone – thought it was related to “inheritance”. Dictionary.com says: (verb) to exist permanently and inseparably in, as a quality, attribute, or element; belong intrinsically; be inherent
…first in Spanish and then in english. – page 141 – Not sure why Spanish is capitalized here but English is not.
He imagined that in his estate of eternal night he might… -- page 288 – Haven’t heard “estate” used like that before, but I guess it makes sense… deliberate play off of “state” of being, maybe?
Route 666 out of Sulphur Springs Valley through Elfrida in Arizona – page 182 – There is no longer a Route 666, but we could wonder if this Route was fabricated just to make an allusion to “666” and imply that things are not all right.
- page 197
If I had been perusing a bookstore and come across this book, I would have read the back, put it back, and pretty promptly forgotten about it, as it is not something I would normally spring for. However, this is assigned reading for my literature class, and so I read it. And I can’t say that I regret or miss the time I spent reading all 440-odd pages of it, either.
The Crossing is definitely much different of a novel than what I am used to: while it hits some very philosophical notes which I love to find in a novel, at the same time, there is very little introspection by the main character. The introspection and reflection is left to the reader to interpret based on what Billy Parham experiences and how he reacts and keeps moving forward. There are numerous “wise men” figures scattered throughout who Billy encounters, and who really run home the philosophical bents present in the novel, as well as providing some of the most poignant quotes I found (selected quotes below).
This is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story for young Billy, which starts out when he decides to take a wild wolf back to Mexico from whence it came, without consulting his father first – it is the first time Billy leaves home, and the first time he will go further than a day’s journey away from home. He learns as he goes, he is innocent and naïve, he is as unaware of the boundaries he crosses as the wolf was in her journey from Mexico to the United States. And how many boundaries he will cross over the next several years of his life, and with varying degrees of awareness.
In all, Billy crosses over into Mexico on three separate occasions, each time in quest of something different, and each journey changes him in a different way. He is much the loner, relying on his own survival skills for the most part, but often being welcomed with open arms by complete strangers who help him out, give him food and shelter, periodically along his journey. One moment that stuck out to me as a time when we see how far Billy has come is at one point, later on in the story, it is he who offers food and drink to a traveler; there is a sense that Billy has made a circle, or at least one, where he has taken his experiences and is able to give to others what he had. Generally, I marked quotes that offered some life wisdom to Billy and hence the reader, some that showed Billy’s naivety, and some that struck a chord with me as far as how youths can understand a strange, often violent, world and survive the trials they undergo.
As for the writing style, I found some of the punctuation choices curious even as they served to create a tone or a mood for the novel, to reflect to the reader more about Billy, such as the lack of apostrophes in contracted words, no font changes to the ever-present Spanish sentences, largely a simple vocabulary level but with the occasional and out-of-place-yet-not-quite higher-level vocabulary terms, and sometimes strange sentence constructions, most of which occurred in descriptive passages where one lost the subject or the object while reading, and would have to go back over it to sort it out. Basically, the writing almost keeps the reader just slightly off-balance, which is possibly a reflection of Billy’s comfort level in the world. One could say that McCarthy styled this novel so that just as Billy felt as much out of place as comfortable, so too did he want the reader to share this strange balancing act.
All in all, it was worth the read, and I am eager to dig into analyzing it in class with regard to borders – human/animal, US/Mexico, Spanish/English, civilization/wilderness, and cultural borders, to name a few. This novel is rich in material, all it will take is to dig in a little deeper to explore what it all means, what conclusions we can draw from it.
Favorite short quotes:
He said the wolf knew nothing of boundaries. – page 122
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 even have a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place. And that is what was to be found here. The corridor. The tale. And like all corridos it ultimately told one story only, for there is only one to tell. – page 146
The particulars of his life are strange particulars. This is a story of misfortune. Or so it would seem. The end is not yet told. – page 147
Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed. – page 148
The flesh is but a memento, yet it tells the true. Ultimately every man’s path is every other’s. There are no separate journeys for there are no separate men to make them. All men are one and there is no other tale to tell. – page 160
The man said that plans were one thing and journeys another. He said it was a mistake to discount the good will inherent in the old man’s desire to guide them for it too must be taken into account and would in itself lend strength and resolution to them in their journey. – page 189
Long voyages often lose themselves. […] You will see. It is difficult even for brothers to travel together on such a voyage. The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all. – page 237
Billy asked him if such men as had stole his eyes were only products of the war but the blind man said that since war itself was their very doing that could hardly be the case. […] He said that who steals one’s eyes steals a world and himself remains thereby forever hidden. – page 299
Spoiler
Nadie sabe lo que le espera en este mundo, said the mozo.De versa, the boy said. – page 341
He said that men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny. – page 389
The day is made of what has come before. The world itself must be surprised at the shape of that which appears. Perhaps even God. – page 397
[The gypsy] said that the strategist did not confuse his devices with the reality of the world for then what would become of him? El mentiroso debe primero saber la verdad, he said. De acuerdo? – page 415
One could even say that what endows any thing with significance is solely the history in which it has participated. Yet wherein does that history lie? – page 416
Favorite longer quotes:
Spoiler
Finally [the old man] said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them. – page 47[Boyd watched the wolf]. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one. – page 76
[The boy] stood by one of the stone piers and he took off his hat so that those behind could see but then he realized no one else had taken off theirs so he put it back on. – page 118 – I wish people were that courteous all the time…
The square of the light in which he stood drew narrow slowly in the door’s shadow to darkness. – page 124 – While I know what it means, it took me a couple re-reads to sort through the sentence construction to figure it out.
[… he] closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun’s coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it. – page 131
He told the boy that although he was huérfano still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself. 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. He said that while the huérfano might feel that he no longer belonged among men he must set this feeling aside for he contained within him a largeness of spirit which men could see and that men would wish to know him and that the world would need him even as he needed the world for they were one. Lastly he said that while this itself was a good thing like all good things it was also a danger. – page 137
And all in [this world] is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And whether in Caborca or in Huisiachepic or in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one. – page 146-147
The events of the world can have no separate life from the world. And yet the world itself can have no temporal view of things. It can have no cause to favor certain enterprises over others. The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one. There is no favoring, you see. – page 151
It seemed that what he wished, this man, was to strike some colindancia with his Maker. Assess boundaries and metes. See that lines were drawn and respected. Who could think such a reckoning possible? The boundaries of the world are those of God’s devising. With God there can be no reckoning. With what would one bargain? – page 154
He pored over the record not for the honor and glory of his Maker but rather to find against Him. To seek out in nice subtleties some darker nature. False favors. Small deceptions. Promises forsaken or a hand too quickly raised. To make cause against Him, you see. He understood what the priest could not. That what we seek is the worthy adversary. For we strike out to fall flailing through demons of wire and crepe and we long for something of substance to oppose us. Something to contain us or to stay our hand. Otherwise there were no boundaries to our own being and we too must extend our claims until we lose all definition. Until we must be swallowed up at last by the very void to which we wished to stand opposed. – page 156-157
[…] he knows what perhaps you do not. That the past cannot be mended. You think everyone is a fool. But there are not so many. […] Your brother is young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy. […] What remedy can there be? What remedy can there be for what is not? You see? And where is the remedy that has no unforeseen consequence? What act does not assume a future that is itself unknown? – page 207
Dirty and ragged with his hat forward against the sun and his face enshadowed. He looked some new breed of child horseman left in the wake of war or plague or famine in that country. – page 252
You dont want to use common sense. We come too far down here to go back dead.
[…] You think there is a place that far? he said. – page 256
Finally the blind man told him about his conjecture that the blind had already partly quite the world anyway. He said that he had become but a voice to speak in a darkness incommensurable with the motives of life. He said that the world and all in it had become but a rumor. A suspicion. – page 290
[The blind man said that] there was still a further order to the narrative and it was a thing of which men do not speak. He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it. – page 301
[…and Billy] said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it. Not just the coming of war. Anything at all. – page 356
The world has no name, [Quijada] said. The names of the ceros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again. Your brother is in that place which the world has chosen for him. He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised. – page 398
He said that fate might enter into the affairs of men in order to contravene them or set them at naught but to say that fate could deny the true and uphold the false would seem to be a contradictory view of things. To speak of a will in the world that ran counter to one's own was one thing. To speak of such a will that ran counter to the truth was quite another, for then all was rendered senseless. – page 421
Spoiler
He said that journeys involving the company of the dead were notorious for their difficulty but that in truth every journey was so accompanied. He said that in his opinion it was imprudent to suppose that the dead have no power to act in the world, for their power is great and their influence often most weighty with just those who suspect it least. He said that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is also only the picture of the world in men’s hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it. In those faces that shall now be forever nameless among their outworn chattels there is writ a message that can never be spoken because time would always slay the messenger before he could ever arrive. – page 424-425Typographical curiosities:
[…] Boyd was awake but he didnt tell him where he’d been nor what he’d seen. – page 5 – I’m finding the selected choices of where to exclude the apostrophe in contracted words interesting, and wondering why the author chose it.
…some other self of wolf that did inhere the earth or wait in every secret place… -- page 81 – Huh, I’d never heard the word “inhere” before, and couldn’t figure out exactly what it means by context alone – thought it was related to “inheritance”. Dictionary.com says: (verb) to exist permanently and inseparably in, as a quality, attribute, or element; belong intrinsically; be inherent
…first in Spanish and then in english. – page 141 – Not sure why Spanish is capitalized here but English is not.
He imagined that in his estate of eternal night he might… -- page 288 – Haven’t heard “estate” used like that before, but I guess it makes sense… deliberate play off of “state” of being, maybe?
Route 666 out of Sulphur Springs Valley through Elfrida in Arizona – page 182 – There is no longer a Route 666, but we could wonder if this Route was fabricated just to make an allusion to “666” and imply that things are not all right.
adventurous
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Quicker paced than All the Pretty Horses in the beginning. The wolf adds a lot of tension early on. The story is structured around the three crossings and the stories other characters tell Billy. The book becomes a lot slower and philosophical during these times. It's a tragedy about violence and darkness and loss and whether you meet this with hope or despair or cynicism.
The descriptions of him wishing to see the wolf running through a land unspoiled by mankind and him dreaming of Boyd were beautiful and sad. The blind man's story still haunts me. The ending was heartbreaking.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Violence
adventurous
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Slow and meandering. Often feels out of sync and distracted. But the writing of course is spectacular.
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
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:
No
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes