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Summary: LYRICAL,POetic, beautiful
Review: C0rmac Mccarthy has stuck to himself in his writings. he has avoided the common tendency to wite the same novel again and again, and to write happy endings. Life inevitably may end up happy, though for most folks, not here, at least. Mccarthy knows this ,and writes it on a visceral level. The Crossing is revisiting familiar territory , the desert landscape of the southwest.A wolf is killing the family livestock, and is caught . The conventions end here. At times extremely allergorical,McCarthy wites such lush poetry"..out here God doesnt whisper, He shouts..." A story of longing, grwoing up, sons and Fatherts, dreams and finding yourself, wrapped up in pure,lean prose. If Cormac McCarthy is not our greatest prose stylist, he is damn close.
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Summary: Mesmerizing and tragic
Review: Life doesn't promise us any rewards, even if we live good and virtuously. For most of us, life is "filled with quiet desperation," and such is the case for Billy Parham, the protagonist in The Crossing.Divided into two parts, in the first Billy tracks down a wolf that has been killing his family's cattle. Yet when he succeeds, he cannot kill the animal, recognizing in the mammal no animosity or maliciousness. So the boy takes the wolf down into Mexico where he plans to release it. His attempt is challenged by the motives and caprice of humans, and eventually foiled. When he returns to his home in southwestern New Mexico, he finds his parents murdered, their horses stolen. Billy retrieves his younger brother who was taken in by a town family, and the duo go back into Mexico to seek their family's horses. Again, their objective is continually challenged, and despite Billy's virtuous intentions, he loses everything and returns to a lonely and parapetetic life. The story includes allegorical encounters with other characters who reveal the cruelty of life to Billy. They remind us that life owes us nothing. And that for some of us, no matter how deserving, life brings us only failure. You will need to be familiar with Spanish, as some of the characters, as well as Billy, speak it in the book and no translation is provided. This book is extremely strong on character, while the plot line is considerably weaker. If you enjoy such books, in which the conflicts are just as dynamic internally as externally, then The Crossing will reward you. However, if you prefer books that are strong with plots that propel characters forward, you will be disappointed.
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Summary: Depressing, pointless narrative
Review: ...A book about random acts of random people. Prose is asoverblown as in ALL THE PRETTY HORSES. Too much geographical detail -the ennui and angst might have been better without the detail - we might have begun to view this in an "everyman" light. Part of the story may have been ruled too upsetting, too subversive or too stupid by the editors, who have set it in Spanish so we don't need to pay attention to whatever is happening or whatever the characters are saying. This is better written than ALL THE PRETTY HORSES and slightly riveting, mostly because there is only one point of view. Sadly, the point of view doesn't open on any vista worth seeing or investigating.
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Summary: A Crossing into a Poetic, Tragic Vision
Review: "All the Pretty Horses" is so terrific that this next work in the trilogy is greatly anticipated. But, marvelous as "Horses" is, it does not prepare the reader for the greatness of "The Crossing". This is a powerful, draining, fascinating, infuriating, poetic, tragic masterpiece. McCarthy is in full form here in his command of language. Most of his novels have numerous passages that are strongly lyric, but the entirety of "The Crossing" is a deep, poetic vision. While experiencing it, one is constantly tempted to read out loud, for the sound of the words and for the vividness of the imagery. The narrative has an inevitability that is typical of this author. It is as though McCarthy were in touch with some genius of fate that guides the characters through the gloomy, often frightening landscape. McCarthy's command of extended metaphor is equally impressive. In the virtual transformation of a wolf from the novel's beginning into a dog at its conclusion, the author creates a psychological and emotional arc that spans the whole work. This is McCarthy's strongest statement on the basic sadness and evanescence of all living things. Surely one of the great novels of the 20th century.
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Summary: Desert tales
Review: I have been a fan of Cormac McCarthy's since All the Pretty Horses, which, unfortunately, Hollywood plans to ruin. I think he is perhaps the greatest living American writer. The Crossing, like All the Pretty Horses, diverges from his earlier writing, which was more stream of consciousness type prose (every bit as beautiful, but disregarding of plot). The writing of the Crossing is more minimalistic, and I think this style works for McCarthy and his heroes, who are usually soft-spoken and reveal little about their inner thoughts. It is only through their actions that we really get to know McCarthy's characters. I agree with other reviewers that the wolf scene was very powerful-it established the theme of a time that was slipping away into a time that is-and we see that with the juxtapposition of boys riding horses with men riding pick-ups. Modernization is destroying what has connected man to animals like the wolf. But I think there are other powerful scenes as well--the preacher who learns about the true meaning of God from a godless man, the mexican girl who falls in love with Boyd and who seems so in tune with nature. To some of the Mexican bad guys, and the ones you think are bad but are actually just expressing their culture, which is different from Americans, holds different things to be of value. I like the way McCarthy writes about different cultures from his own; with a sense of wonder and respect--and sometimes brutal honesty. I think his writing is like poetry, and I bet he would make a hell of a poet, too. Anyway, I recommend The Crossing along with everything else of his I've read. I'm sorry they put his passages on a high school English test, but I doubt he had any control over that.
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Summary: Beauty in Hollowness?
Review: I first came upon Cormac McCarthy during my AP English Test in the Spring of 1999 when I had to do a style analysis of the prose from "The Crossing" where Billy had the dream of the she-wolf and how he imagined her running free with the dears and voles and so on. Well I after the test I hated Cormac McCarthy and after receiving my test score I hated him even more. (You do not want to know my score.) But for some unknown reasons I was fascinated with his writing style. It was so beautiful and yet hollow, like a meandering river leading to nowhere. So I bought the "The Crossing." I did not read it immediately. I read it about six months later. At first it was slow but afterward the text became hypnotic and it coerced my mind into a world of haunting beauty and wanton loneliness. It revealed loneliness in you. Is that possible? Coming to the part near the end of Part I and also to where I had to do a style analysis of I found that part to be the most beautiful and incredible moving text I have ever read because the text was rich and it made you like you were Billy and that the someplace you have been or dreamed of before you cannot revisit again. It was simple heart breaking to hear how the words describe how Billy imagined, "Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel." The she-wolf to me then seems to be symbolic of the mankind lost or forgotten or dying in certain time and a certain place (remember what Billy thought when he tasted her blood). After reading this desolately beautiful novel, I read "All the Pretty Houses" and then "Cities of the Plain." However "The Crossing" is in my opinion the best in the trilogy because. . . . .I cannot say since there exist words out there that express my praise and admiration and love for "The Crossing" but that I cannot pinpoint them. The book is beauty in hollowness. "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."
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Summary: McCarthy touches the soul.
Review: Wow. This book touches some emotional chords that resonate long after the book is done. McCarthy gleans beauty and mystery out of sere uninhabited landscape, and presents complex philosophical musings from taciturn characters. The first part of the book, about Billy's capture of a wolf and his journey to return it to the mountains of its origins, will stay with me for a long time. The inherent intelligence of creatures - even "savage" creatures - is juxtaposed neatly against the cruel "developed" mind of man and his pastimes. And Billy's resolute belief in what is right and wrong rings true. Even in the face of teriffic odds and incredible hardship, Billy doesn't lose sight of his moral center. A center McCarthy mines with beauty and precision. Read this book.
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Summary: My Opinion of Cormac McCarthy
Review: As I wrote to a cousin of mine (and this applies to the entire Border Trilogy), Cormac McCarthy makes Hemingway sound like Percy Dovetonsils!
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Summary: It rocks
Review: My math teacher at skewl is reading the book and instead of teachin' us square roots he tells from the book, what he has read in the past weeks, it really is a great book!
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Summary: Beyond mere storytelling.
Review: Once again Cormac McCarthy uses simple people and events to tell a story of all mankind and the world we take for granted. The protagonist, Billy, hearing the echoes from long dead wolves that once roamed free, decides after capturing the she wolf that has been killing his father's cattle, that he will not add one more to the dead. So he decides to return her to her homeland and supposedly, safety. But that land has vanished. As all lands and creations, natural and man made, eventually must. That sense of vanishing lands, and lives, is the heart of this story. Look at the way the fates of the wolf, then Billy's parents, then the Indians Billy and Boyd discover on their journey, then finally Boyd are all mirrors of what has gone before. The story of the wolf, trying to scratch out a living in a confusing world where nothing that is here today will be the same tomorrow, is beautifully echoed in Boyd's story. The three forms that Boyd takes in the narrative, ending with his poignant return from Mexico, hint that man's fate and the fate of the nature that he destroys - without thinking - every day, are ultimately the same. McCarthy, like other great American writers, (Melville, Faulker, Toni Morrison) is not merely a writer but a prophet. A reminder that in a world of false realities there is still room for the purest (and rarest) of all blessings. The truth.
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