The Crossing (Border Trilogy, Vol 2)
by Cormac McCarthy
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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 co...more
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recommends it for:
anyone
This was definitely a worthy follow-up to All the Pretty Horses. Horses' protagonist, John Grady Cole, isn't featured in this, the second volume of McCarthy's Border Trilogy. In fact, the events depicted here take place years before Horses. Certain overarcing themes are what make the different volumes of a piece: honor, sacred violence as a right of passage, holding to the old ways, et cetera.
The protagonist here, Billy Parham, is a highly complex and flawed character. The motivation behind...more
The protagonist here, Billy Parham, is a highly complex and flawed character. The motivation behind...more
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Read in September, 2007
After finishing All the Pretty Horses, I felt (maybe somewhat unjustly) that the bar of expectation had been set extremely high. I realize that some (most?) people have a particular favorite part of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, but I’d be hard-pressed to choose one after reading The Crossing. However, the change was noticeable and I was relieved that the second book wasn’t just a rehashing of the first in theme and tone. The Crossing does maintain the elegant, sprawli...more
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Read in July, 2008
There are some astonishing, vivid descriptions which have the quality of ultra-realistic paintings with cinematic quality. Images that stay with you. Like the experience of the man who had his eyes sucked out of his head. And the extremely detailed account of the doctor treating Boyd's grave gunshot wound to the chest. It's like a Thomas Eakins medical painting.
Some might enjoy reading the very detailed account of Billy roping up the wolf or the assembling and the loading of guns all of whi...more
Some might enjoy reading the very detailed account of Billy roping up the wolf or the assembling and the loading of guns all of whi...more
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Read in January, 2008
recommended to Jenny by:
Pete and the book club!
This was a fairly bleak read, the story of this boy's life as he journeys in and out of Mexico and New Mexico. But I walked away with a pretty Zen feeling, reminded that life has ups and downs and all sorts of surprise consequences, some good and some bad. It reminded me of my favorite quote from the Tao te Ching, "Things arise and she lets them come, things disappear and she lets them go." As he travels, he listens to older people share their thoughts on life, and here's my favorit...more
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Read in April, 2008
recommended to Ava by:
no one - i found it on a bookshelf on deploymentrecommends it for: people that like westerns or just like simple, uncluttered story-telling
this book has some of my favorite qualities: written in simple prose the way people (in that time and setting) would really think and speak, the characters are multi-layered and complex - like real people (not all good or all bad - so it's an "adult" book - not a children's book), the situations are easy to relate to for the most part (even if your not a white cowboy from the southwest), everything doesn't turn out rosey and happy - there's good and bad, happy and sad and what i like m...more
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Read in March, 2008
When I read the Border Trilogy for the first time several years ago I had a difficult time getting into this second volume and never finished it. This time the opening section sucked me in within a few pages. The ending of Part I made me cry, partly because I was angry at humanity, and I almost wanted to stop there. But I think that's one of McCarthy's great accomplishments in all his books. He's able to not only render the horrible cruelty resident in human nature, but to make readers react emo...more
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Read in January, 1999
recommended to Jesse by:
Tony Cooper
I've read all but two of McCarthy's books, and this is my favorite. Not exactly a sequel to All the Pretty Horses, more the second of two prequels to Cities of the Plain, it begins the story of Billy Parham who, by the time you finish the third book of The Border Trilogy, seems a human being whose fate is to love creatures who are too wild and passionate to live very long. The book is broken into three parts, and the first third is really - and I hate to ever declare anything my "favorite...more
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Read in December, 2007
On par with Coetzee’s Dusklands and Life and Times of Michael K. And that’s about the highest compliment a book can get from me. Although he probably leaves us with as little tangible hope as Coetzee, the sense of gentle desolation McCarthy conveys gives the loss that permeates the book an intangibly beauty. (In fact it’s largely about living with the intangibility of lost beauty.) At the same time it’s nothing less than devastating, all the more so because he never loses his steadfast c...more
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Read in December, 2007
recommends it for:
Bilingue people
Although the two works are quite similar, I liked this one more than "All the Pretty Horses." The writing and the themes are more coherent and the philosophical-stories-told-by-Mexicans are reported in a more likely fashion. The crossing involved me emotionally, and the work overall builds to an apt, albeit painful ending.
PET PEEVE ALERT: a) I'm not sure that I'm up to the third part of the trilogy for a while, though. McCarthy seems determined to express a second calling as a tech...more
PET PEEVE ALERT: a) I'm not sure that I'm up to the third part of the trilogy for a while, though. McCarthy seems determined to express a second calling as a tech...more
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Read in January, 2007
Of the three McCarthy novels I've read so far, this is my favorite. The story is more compelling than in Blood Meridian and there are none of the purple passages that I recall from my reading of All the Pretty Horses years ago. With this book, McCarthy's fictional world becomes more complex in terms of the balance of good and evil. Yes, there are cold-blooded killers and thieves who commit gruesome acts of violence, but there are also numerous characters--many of them poor gypsies and Mexican In...more
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Read in May, 2008
This second volume of McCarthy's border trilogy covers some of the same narrative and thematic ground as All The Pretty Horses, but is definitely its own thing, a sprawling and more meditative book. Each of Billy Parham's crossings into Mexico has a distinct tone, although there is a powerful cumulative effect. The first section, Billy's travels with an injured wolf, is dark, carnivalesque and borders on the supernatural at times. It...more
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Read in October, 2007
recommends it for:
Everyone
If you enjoyed ALL THE PRETTY HORSES which is the first book in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, you will be equally enchanted by THE CROSSING.
The first time I tried this, 10 years ago, I couldn't get into it, but inspired by THE ROAD which I read this summer, I decided to try again and have been amply rewarded.
McCarthy is an eloquent writer. This is the story of a young American boy and his brother, who leave New Mexico after the brutal murder of their parents by horse thieves, and ...more
The first time I tried this, 10 years ago, I couldn't get into it, but inspired by THE ROAD which I read this summer, I decided to try again and have been amply rewarded.
McCarthy is an eloquent writer. This is the story of a young American boy and his brother, who leave New Mexico after the brutal murder of their parents by horse thieves, and ...more
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Read in June, 2008
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 differe...more
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Read in November, 2007
Its hard describing this book. You watch a series of events unfold and see how each alters the course of the main character's life. There is an aimless quality to it but you can always trace everything back to two events described in the very beginning of the book. Two or three times in the course of the story, the plot gets sidetracked by relatively incidental characters relating their life's story. Interesting enough but it definitely adds to the aimless quality of the plot. One other literary...more
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Read in April, 2008
recommends it for:
people who liked "All the Pretty Horses"
In some ways, The Crossing feels like Cormac McCarthy's response to Saul Bellows' epic tale, The Adventures of Augie March. Yet while both Billy Parham and Augie March experience pain and suffering south of the border, Billy Parham's wanderings do not include extended encounters with romance and high society. Like John Grady, the teenage hero from the first volume of the "Border Trilogy", Billy Parham seems something from another time and place, a young soul filled with...more
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Read in March, 1994
there is a scene at the end of this book that has summed up my expectations for life for the last decade or so. the protagonist has become an old man and is living underneath an overpass. he has nothing left. a kind family lets him sleep on an old cot one night but he is still alone and his life is emptied out. i think more than death that this is a picture of the living hell that can await us all at any moment or through slow decline and decay. i see myself under that overpass in my mind's e...more
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Read in November, 2007
My impression of this one mirrors many of the reviews I've read:
The first section with Billy and the wolf is stunning and surely among the best descriptions of man's relationship with the wild in literature.
The middle section meanders. I felt I needed a map to keep track of the brothers' wanderings in and out of Mexico, and many of their encounters with minor characters were unsatisfying. It was difficult to believe Boyd's connection with "the girl" when she wasn't even given...more
The first section with Billy and the wolf is stunning and surely among the best descriptions of man's relationship with the wild in literature.
The middle section meanders. I felt I needed a map to keep track of the brothers' wanderings in and out of Mexico, and many of their encounters with minor characters were unsatisfying. It was difficult to believe Boyd's connection with "the girl" when she wasn't even given...more
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Read in June, 2008
Cormac McCarthy is an exceptional writer. He has a style that is very unique, and very distinct. I enjoyed this book more than the first volume of the trilogy, but so far I've loved both of them. McCarthy's spare, punctuationless prose that frequently moves between Spanish and English without apology seems perfect for writing about the locale of this trilogy, which is the border between the United States and Mexico.
Volume one told the story of one child's journeys into Mexico. Volume two...more
Volume one told the story of one child's journeys into Mexico. Volume two...more
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Read in June, 2007
I find it hard to categorize or express my response to this book (and all the pretty horses as well). I can't flippantly say "it was great" or "I didn't like it." These are the first books I've read that include lots of Spanish, generally untranslated, sometimes I could piece it out from cognantes or other simularities. Overall, I was carried by the narrative--what a fascinating jumble of major happenings and minor asides. There's a lot to recall and revisit in terms of the l...more
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book data (includes all editions)
avg rating (all editions): 4.06 (1697 ratings) avg rating (this edition): 4.08 (1264 ratings) number of reviews: 166popular shelves
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"It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift."
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