Rating: 
Summary: A River of Sepia Skulls
Review: As I rumaged through the discount table at a bookstore, a hardback book with a striking cover caught my eye. It featured a sepia monochrome photograph. Two bucks. Can't make much of a mistake for two bucks. I had never heard the name Cormac McCarthy. The image, which presented a mass of animal skulls arranged as if a flowing stream, was both stark and beautiful. That likewise characterizes the words within. McCarthy's writing has power, texture, and lyricism. It is intensely masculine. Billy Parham, the main character, embarks on a personal odyssey to return a captured wolf to the distant mountains of Mexico, to an unpopulated wilderness which no longer exists. The story cascades into a visceral tale of loss and his futile struggle to reclaim a fragment of what has been taken away. This heartbreaking novel is probably the best of the Border Trilogy.
Rating:
Summary: Stark, substantial...Exotic, familiar
Review: Cormac McCarthy is a national treasure. The Crossing begins with a long section where the protagonist, Billy Parham, is tracking a she-wolf, setting traps which she fails to get caught in, finally catching her, then being unable to kill her. So he sets off to Mexico from his home in NM, planning to return her to the mountains where from which she surely came. Things don't quite work out the way he'd planned.
And when he returns home, he finds his world forever changed. He and his brother, Boyd, return to Mexico to try to find his father's stolen horses and the men who stole them. Again, things don't quite work out as planned.
Without saying too much that would reveal the plot line, I'll mention that Billy eventually sets out to Mexico a third time on a mission of reclamation and redemption. And yet again, all does not go according to plan.
Along the way, there are long stretches of other travelers or characters Billy meets who tell their stories: a priest, a blind man, a gypsy, among others. The overall effect is one of melancholy, and of course, having been written by such a consummate master of the art, the eloquence of the language shines through everywhere. As a side benefit, you'll learn or re-learn quite a bit of Spanish along the way. I began by rewinding the tape and doing word for word translations from my rusty memory. By about tape #6 I became aware that I was understanding the Spanish perfectly, scarcely aware he'd shifted into it.
Spectacular book on tape.
Rating:
Summary: The best book I have read in many years
Review: First: I read the Border Trilogy this week. I haven't read any other McCarthy literature. I was told that if I liked Larry McMurtry, Steinbeck, and Salinger then I would love McCarthy. The first thing I bought was The Crossing. Upon realizing it was part of a trilogy with All The Pretty Horses as the first installment, I was very disappointed. I had no intrest in a Hollywood western novel. But, I grudgingly purchased All The Pretty Horses and read it. (Have not watched movie). That said...Cormac McCarthy far surpasses any living writer with which I have come in contact. If I had the masterful ability with language that he does, I could express that in a much more emphatic manner. Any reviewer who complains about things such as puncuation, grammer, or spanish-I feel compelled to respond with this:
1. Would you prefer that all painters created exact duplicates of their subject matter? Are we not better, as a society and as a species, for taking our interpretations further and showing those things we are already intimate with in a fresh or different way? Would you say 'cubism', for instance, is too complicated for you?
2. Are you 25 years old or less? Do you have any true ability to surive in a harsh world without parental aide? The struggles depicted in this novel would, of course, be difficult to fathom in that scenario, especially when teamed with non-traditional grammar and punctuation and a lack of a personal translator.
3. If neither of the two applies to a negative reviewer, perhaps your solution would be ritalin. It is supposed to assist in 'focus'. On to the review: The Crossing's main character is just the opposite of the first installment of this triogy's main character. Billy Parnham will never get anything he for which he fights. He will always align himself most closely with a losing cause. It seems that he is completely a-sexual, and the closest bonds he forms almost always precede the demise of said character/animal. There is something striking in the fact that the moral stance, character, sense of justice are nearly identical for John Grady Cole (the main character in All the Pretty Horses) and Billy. Yet John wins, and Billy loses. Repeatedly. Yet it is Billy who survives all contests, all tragedies, all of his closest bonds. Billy's 'heart' is never joined with any group or idea or convention larger than land and animals. At some points his 'heart' is rejected; but is his survival possibly attributed to his lack of truly 'giving' his 'heart' to any passionate cause? The passion Billy gives us in the final scene of The Crossing, the self-realization and anger and utter despairing are so exceedingly rare that your tears are nearly required after finishing this book. The wolf's climax was another section that makes this book stunning and irresistable.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece by a master writer.
Review: I eagerly read The Crossing, having thoroughlyenjoyed All the Pretty Horses (by the way, I stayed away from All the Pretty Horses for quite some time, just because the title reminded me of the movie Pretty Woman, and so I thought the book would be trite - Wrong!). In The Crossing, Mr. McCarthy truly unleashes his mastery of the English language, writing in poem-prose throughout. The sequence of the dying wolf is the best description of death's ultimate relation to life that I've ever read. My feeling after reading the book was that I'd just become part of the anguish that any displaced species or people feels, in this case the wolf representing Mexico's loss of 2/3 of its country to the US and Mexico representing the loss of innocence of the protagonist and thus the loss of innocence of both the US and Mexico - both guilty of the death that must follow life, yet both still neighbors, although now Mexico is much poorer and dangerous, or is it?
Rating:
Summary: The Wolf
Review: I found all the reviews missing one essential element in this powerfully moving work. I sat in the chair and wept at the end, even the last paragraphs projecting the fate of the wolf which began Billy's quest.
The Wolf, Billy, and the disfunctional dog in the very last page represent eloquently the disappearance from our pre-packaged and sterile society a raw emotion and freedom represented by the disappearance of the wolf from our landscape and the struggles of Billy, his brother, Boyd, and other characters in old Mexico and the Southwest of America to find traction in a society increasingly predictable and unreal. Billy's tragic rejection of the broken dog in the last paragraphs and the morning attempt to find her are wrenching.
In this sense, I found Cormac's adventure tale the opposite of An American Tragedy by Dreiser in its reality relative to a way of life that is essential to our American character: devotion to family, independance, persistance, and raw simple frontier intelligence. To anyone who wishes to be challenged by a poetic and emotionally moving tribute to the Southwest contribution to our National character..read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Another McCarthy Masterpiece
Review: I loved "All the Pretty Horses" and came to "The Crossing" with high expectations, yet I wasn't disappointed. "The Crossing" begins with teenage Billy Parham attempting to return a wolf, trapped on his New Mexico ranch, to its native home in Mexico. Along the way, the wolf is killed and Billy gets in trouble, and upon his return home he finds it abandoned, his horses stolen and evidence that his family was murdered. It is a violent and dramatic introduction to the book, but the action and description is phenomenal. After this section, Billy finds his younger brother unharmed and they decide to return to Mexico in search of their family's horses. Once they have made their crossing, they face several trials and adventures and they experience everything from love to betrayal to death. All of this is expertly described by McCarthy, who is simply and incredible story teller and writer. This is a superb sequel to "All the Pretty Horses" and again makes the reader long for the days of the open frontier. This is a great book for any reader.
Rating:
Summary: Another McCarthy Masterpiece
Review: I loved "All the Pretty Horses" and came to "The Crossing" with high expectations, yet I wasn't disappointed. "The Crossing" begins with teenage Billy Parham attempting to return a wolf, trapped on his New Mexico ranch, to its native home in Mexico. Along the way, the wolf is killed and Billy gets in trouble, and upon his return home he finds it abandoned, his horses stolen and evidence that his family was murdered. It is a violent and dramatic introduction to the book, but the action and description is phenomenal. After this section, Billy finds his younger brother unharmed and they decide to return to Mexico in search of their family's horses. Once they have made their crossing, they face several trials and adventures and they experience everything from love to betrayal to death. All of this is expertly described by McCarthy, who is simply and incredible story teller and writer. This is a superb sequel to "All the Pretty Horses" and again makes the reader long for the days of the open frontier. This is a great book for any reader.
Rating:
Summary: One of McCarthy's best
Review: I would place this book with Blood Meridian and Suttree as one of McCarthy's best books. I liked it better than his commercial breakthrough, All the Pretty Horses, which, though written as beautifully as his other books, lacked the inspiration of McCarthy's finest books.
One of the aspects I found most moving was that Billy's seemingly casual, willful decision to return the wolf to it's home in the Mexican mountains leads indirectly to the death of his entire family and his own life as a rootless wanderer.
One of the dangers inherent in McCarthy's style is pretentiousness, both in the language and in the sometimes heavy handed symbolism of some of the encounters. I think he avoids that danger because I am swept away by the beauty of his language, but I can see how someone else who is not as swept away as I am might feel that way. Like poetry you either fall under its spell or you don't. I do.
Rating: 
Summary: Gussied-up Louis L'Amour
Review: I wouldn't normally be bothered to write a review of a book like __The Crossing__, but since so many people seem to have convinced themselves that Cormac McCarthy is the second coming of Will Shakespeare, I thought it my duty to try to set them right. I mean, c'mon, just take one whiff of the overwrought prose of this book! And that's not the half of it!
Indeed, there's much more: Billy and Boyd--I was halfway through the dang book before I could keep them straight--rescue a damsel in distress. That sort of rescue was fodder for parody four hundred years ago. But with McCarthy there's not a hint of irony or parody anywhere about the episode. (For a while, when Billy--or Boyd, I can never remember which--sleeps all night with his shotgun in his arms and wakes up to ask the rescued damsel, in Spanish, if she knows how to ride bareback, it looked like things might get interesting. But they didn't.)
And by the way, while McCarthy may have good Spanish, he also makes lots of mistakes. Minor ones, but if he's going to make a show of using a foreign language he ought to get it perfect. And he doesn't come close.
There's almost no humor in the book either. And what little there is is mostly inadvertent: the laughable philosophical dialogues with aging Indians, sextons of abandoned churches, former revolutionaries with gouged-out eyes. Or howlers like this one, from the end of chapter one: "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."
Still, the book has some things going for it. The first section about the wolf is good storytelling; it's clichéd and manipulative but effective even so, much, I fear, like the westerns of good old Louis L'Amour and his ilk. And besides, today's Friday and I don't have to get up quite so early tomorrow morning. So I'm feeling generous enough to award that third star.
Rating:
Summary: keen poetic novel, digs into your soul to leave a mark
Review: In this breath-taking coming-of-age story set on the Mexican border early in the twentieth century, Billy Parham's faith in a Godly natural order of things brings him head-to-head with fate when a pregnant wolf is caught on his family's ranch. Returning from the desolate south after repatriating the wolf to her native mountains, he finds his young brother orphaned and their ranch destroyed. Crossing again into Mexico for refuge, Billy and his brother enter nightmares haunted by a mystical love steeped in blood and drowned in the dust of a landscape that offers them nothing but further loss. Told in spare prose poetry that glitters with an all-observant love of life so tenacious that it cannot recoil from overwhelming grief or resist the blind tug of insane hope, this story is sure to become a lodestar to the souls of readers who have loved the bare expanses of the great southwest and that wild icon of hunted innocence, the lone wolf.
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