Magnificent!
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Really great book. It's amazing how such spare prose can be so powerful. The absence of artifice makes it really feel as if McCarthy really experienced all the things that he writes about. Tremendous. Must read the next one.
One tiny whinge - my spanish is not good enough to understand all the dialogue that is in Spanish. Couldn't it be translated somehow without ruining the flow?
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Fantastic but heartbreaking read
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This book is one that will stick in my mind for years to come. It depicts a life and a landscape that is unremittingly stark and brutal. One critic described it as a novel that leaves the reader feeling "emotionally ransacked" and I could not agree more. It was deeply upsetting and unsettling at times but a must-read book.
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Language gets in the way.
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The trouble with breaking many of the rules of classroom English is that the result can be unclear. I find McCarthy's style very muddled. The failure to distinguish between narrative and dialogue and the prolific use of He rather than the character's name simply muddies the waters. There's a key scene where Billy uses his rifle. The previous sentence has a different character as its subject yet in the next paragraph we get: "He climbed over...." meaning Billy. I had to re-read this twice to be sure who was climbing over and doing the shooting. By that time the impact of the action was diluted. The prose is full of instances like this which seem either lazy or an affectation too far. I just about got through All the Pretty Horses. I abandoned this. There's no reason why beautiful prose can't also be clear, otherwise the experience becomes a distant one for the reader. Ultimately I gave up caring about the characters because the story was too difficult to follow. And that's the point where I gave up with the book.
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A genuine work of lietrature.
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Cormac McCarthy leaves most contemporary writers of the English language light-years behind him in this majestic novel set in Mexico and the American south. Apart from the cowboys and the Mexicans, the true heroes of this novel are the English language and the limpid poetic vision with which McCarthy presents his harrowing view of the world. Beautiful, awe-inspiring, possessed of a moral framework which is required by all truly great writers, this is one of the great books of the 1990s - read it!
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A Masterpiece of American Literature
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The Crossing continues thematically (if not narratively) where All The Pretty Horses left off and is an even greater work than that gem. McCarthy continues to explore his timeline ideas where America represents the future, Mexico the past and the borderlands the present, and ideas of mythology and how myths are made. The prose is majesterial and the symbolism meaningful. The finale is both heartbreaking and poignant.
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