Peter's review
The Crossing (Border Trilogy, Vol 2) by Cormac McCarthy
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 commitment to the integrity of the story. In that sense it is a brutally honest novel. Though I don’t give much long-term value to broad generalizations, it’s hard not to come away from The Crossing feeling that other genres whose stories follow a more fanciful arc, provide more closure, or which inject magical realism into their novels’ internal history, are somehow taking the easy way out. Their authors inject a sort of artificial hope (which we readers complicity welcome). McCarthy in co...more
