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Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 813.54 EAN: 9780679760849 Edition: 1st Vintage International Ed ISBN: 0679760849 Label: Vintage Manufacturer: Vintage Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 432 Publication Date: March 14, 1995 Publisher: Vintage Release Date: March 14, 1995 Studio: Vintage Editorial Review: Amazon.com Review: The opening section of The Crossing, book two of the Border Trilogy, features perhaps the most perfectly realized storytelling of Cormac McCarthy's celebrated career. Like All the Pretty Horses, this volume opens with a teenager's decision to slip away from his family's ranch into Mexico. In this case, the boy is Billy Parham, and the catalyst for his trip is a wolf he and his father have trapped, but that Billy finds himself unwilling to shoot. His plan is to set the animal loose down south instead. This is a McCarthy novel, not Old Yeller, and so Billy's trek inevitably becomes more ominous than sweet. It boasts some chilling meditations on the simple ferocity McCarthy sees as necessary for all creatures who aim to continue living. But Billy is McCarthy's most loving--and therefore damageable--character, and his story has its own haunted melancholy. Billy eventually returns to his ranch. Then, finding himself and his world changed, he returns to Mexico with his younger brother, and the book begins meandering. Though full of hypnotically barren landscapes and McCarthy's trademark western-gothic imagery (like the soldier who sucks eyes from sockets), these latter stages become tedious at times, thanks partly to the female characters, who exist solely as ghosts to haunt the men. But that opening is glorious, and the whole book finally transcends its shortcomings to achieve a grim and poignant grandeur. --Glen Hirshberg Product Description: In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth. In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning--a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there." An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - A difficult novelYou know, reading other reviews makes me realize that my problem is not a unique one; I have now read several of McCarthy's novels, and would not exactly say that I have enjoyed any of them. Yet I keep returning. There are themes running through every one of his novels, that he returns to again and again. A young protagonist, often family-less, or about to be, wandering the desert looking for nothing in particular. McCarthy also seems to have a fascination with Mexico (or, in the ... Read More Rating:  - Highly recommend!!This story has all the elements that draw a reader in and hold them fast: love, tragedy, revenge, hope. Try it, you'll like it! Rating:  - Like Life, Slow and UnexpectedVolume II of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing is McCarthy's follow-up to All the Pretty Horses. The United States-Mexican border is the only recurring character from the previous volume, but the settings and themes are quite similar. However, The Crossing is unlike its predecessor in the fact that while All the Pretty Horses followed a fairly linear story, The Crossing resembles exact life in that one never knows what the next day will bring and sometimes today's conflict has no resolution ... Read More Rating: - A Western Sorrow.This is my third McCarthy novel. Cormac keeps astounding me with each page turned. This second installment of the Border trilogy is one of despair and sorrow. It is one of the most heart-wrenching tales I've ever seen upon a page. Once finished, I literally felt huge waves of melancholy all day. I sat and glared at the last page, mouth agape. Rating: - A Haunting and Beautiful BookI'm really not sure how to describe this book, or that it is necessary to do so. It is an adventure story that has many different sections which, in ways, don't even seem to fit together. Certainly, it is mainly about two brothers and their journey into Mexico to retrieve horses stolen from their father's ranch. There is nothing predictable about what happens and some of it is even confusing. Yet it held me and I know I'll remember it for a long time. I found it to be a very sad book too. Some ... Read More |
