Customer Reviews

The Crossing

5 star:		(60)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

It begins as an innocent story of two young brothers, Billy Parham, 16 and Boyd Parham, 14 giving food to an Indian. Billy and Boyd live on a ranch with their parents in New Mexico and are required to help with the work there. One of Billies tasks is to trap a wolf who is attacking and killing their cattle. Billy becomes intrigued by the primitive and wild creature, who seems to intelligently elude capture. He attempts to learn about the wolf by asking an old and learned man about the ways of wolves. As Billy begins to feel a kinship with the wolf he discovers it caught in one of his traps. He realizes that he cannot kill it and impulsively sets out for the Mexican border to return the wolf to where it came from. By crossing the border, Billy adventures into an nether world. It is not simply another country, but another reality.

We could easily call The Crossing a coming of age story, an adventure story, a quest or an epic poem, but it is all that and much more. As with any coming of age story, Billy Parham loss of innocence comes with a price of great consequence. Like an adventure story The Crossing is filled with action and unexpected situations. As with tales of quests as the Iliad and Gulliver's Travels we meet strange and interesting creatures along Billy's path. Like an epic poem The Crossing is filled with lyrical prose, both in Spanish and English.

Cormac McCarthy is one of the great American authors of the twentieth century and he proves it in once again in the Crossing the second book of his border trilogy. His prose is beautiful to read, with dialogue devoid of quotation marks and contractions missing apostrophes. He shifts from English to Spanish can be challenging to the non-Spanish reader. His scenes rich with descriptors can be stark and ruthless. The reader should be prepared to be shocked and moved.

Reading McCarthy comes with a price. After reading one of his books the reader feels changed, drained and at a loss. I, like Billy cannot retrieve my innocence. It disappeared when I went south of the border with him. As the Spanish Gypsy tells him

"We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn't fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless."

I cannot helped but be moved by Cormac McCarthy's work and The Crossing was perhaps the favorite, which I have read.

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.

Well what can I say. More brilliant writing by a master AND for the first time I found myself laughing -a lot- while reading a McCarthy book. I know you might not believe me, but truly there are some extremely funny bits in this story. [My husband kept looking at me wondering if perhaps I had slipped the dusk jack for "The Crossing" onto another book. ]

And alas, lest you wonder, McCarthy was just leading me on. Up, up he took me. Wonderful story (expected). Humor (okay, not expected). But I was laughing and soaring and I was beginning to wonder if this book might be wildly different from the others. Certainly neither "The Road", nor "Blood Meridian" had me cackling: those were all grim fare. But rest assured. As high as McCarthy took me, that was where he dropped me from. It was a long plummet but finally I was back on familiar territory... heart torn out... feelings wrenched and twisted.

Five Stars. "The Crossing" is a McCarthy story that should make you laugh and then cry. Simply a wonderful tale with characters to care about. Exquisite prose.

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."

I started The Crossing expecting it to be similar to All The Pretty Horses--a book that could go right up on the movie screen as a Great Western, complete with the hero riding off into the sunset. What I found, instead, was a long twisting thread of a tale where every turn is a turn for the worse, where each decision, even if made for the right reasons, somehow results in loss and even more isolation for the main character, Billy. This slow-building anguish is offset by the almost Zen-like descriptions of the desert, the mountains, the dusty poor towns and people. McCormac's way of presenting dialogue--no quotation marks, and unencumbered by descriptive adverbs (she wrote thoughtfully)-- fits with the spareness of the landscape he describes so gracefully. His one joke in the book (I won't spoil it for you Texans), is told with as much forthrightness as the scene that describes how the blind man lost his eyes--one of the most horrifying things I've ever read. The final scene of the book made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I put this book down realizing that there were layers and layers of meaning here, and that I had only absorbed one or maybe two. It's a book that I believe will only improve with rereading (and I will be rereading it, something I rarely do), and one that would provide excellent material for classroom discussion on any number of topics. It's a book that I found myself really wanting to talk with somebody about, so hey, somebody invite me to their book club and let's put this one on the list!

I feel that CM really excelled in this second book of the trilogy. While I thought that "Pretty Horses" was quite wonderful, "The Crossing" really works its way into one's mind and soul. Character development, scene description, dalogue are superb. One of the best books I have read.

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!

This book is probably the most difficult of the three in the Border Trilogy. McCarthy pulls out all the philosophical, linguistic, and metaphysical stops in his writing here, to an extent beyond even his other famous work, "Blood Meridian". It was tough going, working through the shifting narrative voices, the textual structure (and lack thereof), the absurd and the profound -- and that's not even considering the tragic plot. McCarthy creates a hero in this book, Billy Parham, quite different from the hero in the first book of the trilogy. Billy is not the elegiac mystery that John Grady Cole, of "All the Pretty Horses", is; rather, we are plunged deep into understanding and compassion for him. He seems to be our viewpoint to the nth degree. This of course makes the things he goes through in the tragic plot of the novel, so much more incisive to a reader's mind and heart. Difficult is the word for this book -- difficult and rich.

The scenes rhythmically unfold into a desert dying on the vine. We think of T.S. Elliot's "The Wasteland;" we think of "The Grapes of Wrath." Everything that's real and unreal about America is spelled out onto a portrait of a border crossing. The youth and the old, the innocent and the guilty are painted like a canvas in classic western colors. Yet what is found across the great chasm to Mexico is as uncivilized as we are. McCarthy is rapt with language like a man obsessed. Slowly and deliberately, the young cowboy is made brutally aware that in the desert, it is each man for himself. We are reminded once again of that distincly American notion of manifest destiny. It is a seamless book without end or beginning. Characters are distinctly lost in America. They only pause briefly to wipe the sand off their trousers and troll on through the desert. People have compared McCarthy to Faulkner. His prose is unsurpassed. Even the jacket reviewer called it, "luminous and appalling." Here's a little brush stroke: "He woke all night and at each waking the signature of Cassiopeia had swung further about the polestar and at each wakening all was as it had been and would forever be. At noon the following day he rode into Lordsburg."

once you are hooked on Cormac McCarthy's world of a desperate, stark west there's no going back..sort of like his characters..Billy Parham is innocent enough to believe he can set a captured wolf back in the mountains of Mexico but his journey there dispels him of that innocence and the people he meets along the way..he grows up like we all do..maybe disillusioned, a bit bitter and angry..but the lyrical prose of Cormac McCarthy makes the journey all worth it.