Fantastic trilogy!

The Crossing is truly the best book within this trilogy. It is an absolute must-read if you desire a story where every single word is perfectly placed.

The writing is super dense, filled with vivid imagery that transports you right into the heart of the story. There are also numerous profound ponderings on the human condition, which make you reflect deeply.

Moreover, the violent scenes add an extra layer of intensity and authenticity to the narrative.

If anyone happens to be stalking my Goodreads in search of gift ideas, I would not object to receiving a boxed set of the Border Trilogy. It would be a wonderful addition to my collection and a source of great literary enjoyment.

Overall, this trilogy is a remarkable piece of work that deserves to be discovered and cherished by all book lovers.

I'm truly making a mark on this place. I rate the series five stars mainly because if I were to ever encounter McCarthy and he called me out for giving him less than five stars, I'd be scared that he might beat me to death with a branding iron or cave my head in with a rusty shovel.

I have a deep affection for these books as a whole, but especially for "All the Pretty Horses" and the opening chapter of "The Crossing". Back when I was a twenty-something punk, my friends and I would ride our motorcycles around this area of Texas, and I made numerous adventures into Mexico - you could call it "All the Pretty Kawasakis". I really like his extensive use of Spanish, untranslated and without any apology. I also love his concise yet precise description of the landscape.

Recently, I read Spanish translations of these books that were really well done. However, I doubt he would translate well into Polish or Russian. I appreciate his style, but I would hate to see a generation of mediocre writers attempting to imitate McCarthy's disregard for convention. With lesser writers, it just comes across as half-literate or pretentious and tiresome.

At the Beginning of the World

At dusk, the traveler arrived at this place. The surrounding mountains were getting darker and darker, and the wind blew through the now cold pass as night approached. He put down his burden to rest and took off his hat to cool his forehead. Then his gaze fell on this altar, stained with blood that neither the inclement weather of the Sierra nor the storms of the Sierra had been able to erase in all these millennia. And there he chose to spend the night, such is the imprudence of those to whom God has been so kind as to spare a just part of adversity in this world. […] Since we cannot know ourselves in wakefulness, what chance do we have of knowing ourselves in dreams?

McCarthy's writing hides more things than it reveals: for the reader, it is a duel with himself to read beyond the sense and the limit of rationality, to come to believe that the madness in the story is a sacred thing, a fragment of divinity. McCarthy's man opposes the void in such an impulsive and irrational way that he is swallowed up by it. Among horse thefts, the capture of a pregnant wolf, the rescue of a young woman sold to a protector, the men of the road, the cowboys and the laborers, the vaqueros and the merchants, the blind masters, the philosophical vagabonds, the trainers and the bandits, and the indios and the gypsies meet, for a landscape of mountains and mesas and plains that crosses the infinite and metaphysical border between Texas and Mexico. The men are men of few words; they flee and pursue and hunt. The women are intense and decisive, deep in feeling and in opposition. Tradition does not allow forgiveness, the stars fall and it is only grass and blood and stones and rain. All stories are one thing: every human being is an orphan, stumbles upon the messenger of an irreparable pain, accepts to become a witness to the tragedy, realizes that he has traveled too far to be able to return. And the end is an epic deception within a night of dreams. McCarthy's man remains attached to the dimension of the journey, to darkness and to the search; he is a being turned towards the sunset, unconsciously, a solitary interpreter of a cruel and unrelenting nature, a nocturnal knight bent by things, a defeated dreamer between freedom and justice. But there is also a lot of concreteness, a lot of nature: food, beans and tortillas, animals, livestock, plants, wood, leather, skin, fire, camps, water, faces and affairs, horizons, families and weapons. No one is interested in troubles and yet remains imprisoned by them, no one seeks war but every moment is a subtraction from peace and good; humanity is wild, brave and ready, hopes and desires, cries and remembers, chooses in pain and acts resolutely with friends and enemies. It is a vanished world, composed of beauty and loss, steeped in evil and destiny, built with what is left to each being, that little that remains of the singular, of the unique.

“It was not an illusion. He knew that the things we most desire to hold in our hearts are often taken from us, while those of which we could do without often seem, precisely because of our indifference, to show an unexpected capacity to endure over time. He knew how fragile the memory of loved ones is. Certainly, we close our eyes and talk to them. Certainly, we long to hear their voices just one more time, but these voices and these memories fade more and more, until what was once flesh and blood is no more than an echo and a shadow. In the end, perhaps, not even that.”

I had a really hard time with this piece of writing.

It was very stark, lacking in any sort of embellishment or flourishes.

The pace was also extremely slow, which made it a bit of a chore to get through.

While the author did manage to make his point, I couldn't help but wish that he could have done it in a more concise and efficient manner.

I found myself having no real involvement with the stories or the characters.

I mostly just finished it because I had been told that he was a magnificent author.

But based on this particular work, I'm not entirely convinced.

Perhaps I need to read more of his work to truly appreciate his talent.

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

The Crossing (1994)

Cities of the Plain (1998)

What kind of man offers to share dry crackers with death? This is a question posed in the epilogue of the final novel of this trilogy. It's a metaphysical question made both concrete and comical by the ordinary detail of dry crackers. Billy Parham is sitting by a deserted roadside in Texas, talking with a stranger. He is completely destitute, starving, hot, sick, and old. He has offered his last bit of food to a random stranger and has slipped into an allegorical frame of mind, acting and talking as if this stranger might be Death, finally ready to take him away. The stranger answers Billy's metaphysical questions with great ease, as if there was nothing unusual about them. Billy admits that he had invited the stranger over because he might be someone he was expecting.

"What does he look like?"

"I don't know. I guess more and more he looks like a friend."

"You thought I was death."

"I considered the possibility."

The peculiarities of McCarthy's style add to the strange flavor of this scene. He doesn't use quotation marks for dialogue. He doesn't tell you who is talking; you have to figure it out from the context. He doesn't even use apostrophes – it's "dont" not "don't" in the text. And key passages are presented in Spanish, without translation, once again forcing those of us who don't read Spanish to try to understand the meaning from the context.

For example, the stranger doesn't say "What kind of man offers to share dry crackers with death?" Instead, he asks "Que clase de hombre comparta sus galletas con la muerte?" And Billy replies immediately, "And what kind of death accepts them?"

The style creates an otherworldly atmosphere that persists even when the author is describing the most ordinary activities in great detail. It also trains the reader to look closer, trying to find meaning in the context, never expecting all the answers to be clearly laid out. The implication is that life itself is just such a puzzle, which may or may not have a solution, and that you may not know you have the solution even if you've found it.

The epilogue seems to shed new light on the destiny of man and could stand alone as a great work of literature, like the Grand Inquisitor scene from The Brothers Karamazov. To appreciate it, you don't really need to know the plots and characters of the three novels, but it does help to be accustomed to McCarthy's unique style, and there is much to be gained by experiencing the full unfolding of the story.

As you get involved in the narrative, what first seemed like weaknesses become strengths. Sometimes the author progresses very slowly, providing a lot of painstaking detail about dealing with horses and cattle, about healing people and animals, about fixing things. Step by ponderous step, he tells you everything you'd need to know to do it yourself. Some passages read like a handbook for the modern cowboy. But miraculously, the tedious detail helps provide a concrete and very believable background for the occasional flights of allegory and metaphysical insight. The detail is a heavy anchor, holding the narrative in place; it is also a dark background against which the brilliance can truly shine.

The basic story is both gripping and extremely painful – plans are broken, nothing works out the way the characters want, random cruelty and violence erase all. But in the very telling, it is transformed, showing how through the ages man has added a heroic flavor to the ordinary – ordinary people and events turning into epics. The flat, unadorned presentation of the facts is just the starting point for the tales that others will tell.

For instance, in The Crossing, Billy Parham, a young boy from Texas who was caught up in a series of dangerous circumstances in the wild wilderness of Mexico and is now returning to try to find his brother, hears a ballad and immediately recognizes that it is about his brother. The ballad is the first evidence he has that his brother was killed and how it happened. And that much is "true." But later he learns that this same song has existed for generations. It applies to his brother as it applied to others before him. The shape of the older story reforms the memory of the recent events. And the recent events lead to subtle changes in the ancient narrative. At other points, we see people retelling events that just happened, that must be fresh in their minds, but telling them as legend, because legend shaped their seeing and their remembering.

These books are filled with men and the doings of men. Women appear as objects of desire and as ideal aspirations, but we don't get to see them as real living people. Magdalena, the young prostitute that John Grady Cole falls in love with in Cities of the Plain, is almost an exception. We see her idealized by Grady and also see her on her own and described by her pimp. But her name is used very rarely – mostly she is just "she," an unknown and unknowable entity, the object of other people's desires, whose own desires remain a mystery.

All in all, McCarthy has created a modern allegory that works. He portrays concrete daily reality with the immediacy of a Melville and manages to lull us with ordinary detail to the point where we accept, welcome, and savor his sudden insights into the nature and destiny of man.

See my other reviews for more complete thoughts.

But I just wanted to say here that even though people may dismiss this series. It is a more critical success, and in the eyes of the more artsy people (of which I am admittedly a part), it is considered a lesser work. However, this is (along with Suttree) my favorite work by McCarthy.

It is such a beautiful piece of fiction. The language, the imagery, the characters - all come together to create a world that is both haunting and captivating. I actually find it nearly impossible to talk about because it's so moving and powerful.

Every time I read it, I am drawn in deeper and deeper, and I come away with a new understanding of the human condition. It's a work that will stay with you long after you've finished reading it.

The first two books can be read separately as the stories told are independent, while the third requires the reading of the first two texts of the trilogy.

Horses Wild: The young John Grady goes to Mexico to realize his dream of becoming a cowboy. The establishment of a relationship with the daughter of the ranch owner where he has found work will complicate things. This book is considered by many (or at least so it seemed to me) the best of the trilogy. Surely it is the most easily approachable. The hardness that characterizes McCarthy's prose is here more contained yet very effective. Even when the 'ugliness' occurs 'offstage', one cannot help but be deeply affected.

Beyond the Border: The protagonist in this case is Billy and the events described are chronologically before the events of 'Horses Wild', although there are no narrative connections with it. Billy crosses the border to reach Mexico three times: the first to free and return a wolf to nature, the second (together with his brother Boyd) to recover some stolen horses, the third to find his brother. In this book, the violence and injustice that pervade our lives explode, making this book perhaps more difficult to read and endure than the previous one, but in my opinion almost formative (we can say that it is a non-canonical coming-of-age novel).

City of Plains: The paths of John and Billy meet. John falls in love with a girl forced into prostitution and from here the problems arise. Billy will perhaps intervene, seeing in Grady his brother Boyd again. A very bitter book, almost romantic in a sense, of which however I do not want to add anything more so as not to make spoilers.

If there is any beauty to be found in misery and pain, it has been captured in this trilogy.

This is an incredible western trilogy that does little but stare into the face of death and study its bony features for over 1000 pages. The Crossing is a prime example, with several hundred pages dedicated to the protagonist's situation worsening continuously. Every plan they make fails, often in a brutally violent way.

All The Pretty Horses is easily the best book of the trilogy. Although brutal realism is present, it manages to avoid being an endless stream of tragedy and setbacks. The passion and determination of the main character, John Grady, give this first book more direction and focus. In contrast, The Crossing meanders from pain to suffering and back again.

Both tones of each book are combined well in Cities On The Plain. However, by this point, McCarthy's penchant for brutality has made the story somewhat predictable, and readers are well aware of where things are headed.

Nevertheless, in between the main events of the books (typically tragedies involving knife fights, gunfights, and horses), there is some achingly beautiful prose. Just like in life, it takes a lot of pain to achieve enlightenment.

I would highly recommend All The Pretty Horses. By the end, you'll know whether you have the grit to make it through the other two books. Just remember, as McCarthy makes clear: it can always get so much worse.

I came to McCarthy's celebrated Border Trilogy already a convert to the author's work. I rate 'No country for old men' among the best books I have read. I am less enthusiastic about 'The road', yet it is a powerful and unforgettable read.

'All the Pretty Horses' is the first volume in The Border Trilogy. The story opens in Texas shortly after World War 2, at a ranch near San Angelo where part of a traditional American way of life is coming to an end. It is 1949 and schoolboy John Grady Cole is at his family's ranch house to see his grandfather lying in state on the eve of his funeral. A storm is gathering, and the funeral itself takes place in a howling wind that blows the preacher's words away.

The opening scenes conjure the ghosts of America's past, the Comanche trail before the white men came and tamed the land and fenced it in. They introduce some of the great themes of McCarthy's writing: individual isolation; the vastness of landscapes; change and the passing of ways of life; freedom and migration; fate and destiny in a godless world.

Shortly after the funeral, under the darkness of night, Cole sneaks out of the house to meet up with his 17 years old cousin and neighbour Lacey Rawlins. Together they head west and south towards and across the border, into lawless Mexico and whatever it may hold for them. It is as though they have passed back in time a hundred years or more. Only the Comanches have gone.

The story unfolds in just four long chapters, and in the first one the fugitives move slowly on the trail from camp to camp, stopping at the occasional settlement, crossing prairies and rivers, drifting from one chance encounter to another. Somewhere along the way Cole and Rawlins are joined by a crazy young lad who may or may not be sixteen years old and who may or may not be named Jimmy Blevins. He rides a magnificent bay colt like he was born in the saddle.

The young men's travels stop when they meet up with some vaqueros herding cattle on the remote plains of Coahuila, and they join up to work at breaking in wild horses. Their picaresque journey reaches a hiatus at this point. In the second chapter we learn a lot about breaking horses, and Rawlins drifts from sight for a while, as Cole pursues his infatuation with the hacendado's daughter Alejandra. Events then take a bad turn, and through the last two chapters the dream becomes a nightmare. The Americans find that Mexico has its own rules of power and influence and McCarthy takes us deep into the country's heart of darkness.

From its beginnings in recent history, 'All the Pretty Horses' develops into a latter-day Western, a tale of riders and horses and bad men and gunfights. By the end of the novel Cole, clad in a serape, has attained an almost mythical presence that evokes the Clint Eastwood of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, a "pale rider passing with blanket and rifle", later described as like an "apparition out of the vanished past". The novel begins and ends with a death and a funeral and a storm brewing, and leaves us with a telling image of the native indians who once had this land to themselves.

'The Crossing' is the second volume of the trilogy and was first published in 1994, two years after the opening volume 'All the Pretty Horses'. I was surprised to find - after the open ending of the previous novel - that it is a completely separate story and not a sequel.

However, 'The Crossing' shares a number of striking similarities with 'All the Pretty Horses'. Like the first volume, it is a story told in four acts and has as its central character a teenage youth who must ride alone on an epic journey across the border into Mexico, into a hostile land that time seems to have forgotten.

Here the protagonist is a 16-year old youth named Billy Parham who, as the story opens, lives with his parents and his younger brother Boyd in the wilderness of Hildago County in New Mexico, close to the Mexican border. The story is set just before and during World War 2, although you wouldn't know this from the opening chapter describing the harsh wintry mountain landscape of the Peloncillos. Much later in the story Billy will stumble on the fact that his country is embroiled in a global war, but by then Cormac McCarthy has taken his characters - and the reader - into a world that could have existed a hundred or more years before.

Billy Parham's abandons the world in which he has been raised to strike out alone into the wilderness and the vanishing world of old America, in which he finds great natural beauty but also an increasing indifference to his fate. Thus begins a series of journeys involving a number of random encounters with people on the trail. Many of the people met have their own stories to relate, and so we are treated to a number of tales within a wider tale - some long, others no more than short vignettes.

As in 'All the Pretty Horses', events in 'The Crossing' take a dramatic turn in the second chapter, leading into a dark and dangerous world. Billy returns to Mexico with his young brother Boyd on a second journey, this time a mission of vengeance and redemption. As in the earlier novel, the travellers are joined by a young stranger - this time a girl - who draws them into events and relationships with unforeseen consequences.

There are so many similarities between the first two novels of this trilogy. Both involve the theft of horses and a mission to recover them, and we spend a great deal of time in the saddle in this pursuit. In each, the central character has a cold, distant relationship with his father and feels an undefined yet urgent need to break away, before a homecoming of sorts. Like John Grady Cole in the earlier novel, Billy Parham takes on the ways and appearance of a man from an earlier time, "...something in off the wild mesas, something out of the past. Ragged, dirty, hungry in eye and belly. Totally unspoken for."

'The Crossing' echoes the great tradition of American literature, particularly Jack London and Ernest Hemingway - the opening chapter, in particular, is reminiscent of London's 'White Fang', while the narrative arc recalls Hemingway's 'The Old Man and The Sea' in its account of doomed enterprise. The picaresque nature of the journey, with its numerous diversionary tales, follows the path of Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. McCarthy also shares Herman Melville's love of detailed descriptions of people at work, and the technical processes they apply: at one point he gives us a detailed account of how a doctor treats a gunshot wound. It is as if he doesn't want to waste any of the information he has gleaned from his researches.

I found in 'The Crossing' the same qualities that I admired in 'All the Pretty Horses': a writing style that, at its best, can be extremely beautiful and lyrical; an emotional engagement with his characters that is often profoundly moving; a deep love of landscape and country and of times gone by; an appreciation of the best and the worst of humanity. This is a book that I enjoyed immensely, perhaps more so than 'All the Pretty Horses'. Its ending is just as bleak though, as McCarthy leaves us with an image of despair, a young man sat on the white line of the highway, with no direction home, with nowhere to go.

The final volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, 'Cities of the Plain' binds together the separate narratives of the first two volumes in a fitting finale to those stories.

It is 1952 and our story opens in a whorehouse in a Mexican town where three Americans have taken refuge from a storm. We already know two of the group from the first two volumes in this trilogy: John Grady, whom we left riding alone into a desert sunset at the end of 'All the Pretty Horses'; and Billy Parham, whom we last saw slumped on an empty highway with nowhere to go at the end of 'The Crossing'.

What is startling from the beginning is the realisation that McCarthy's protagonists - so adept at horsemanship in the earlier volumes of the trilogy - now travel by beat-up truck, as they work an old cattle ranch in New Mexico, close to the border, in a land as desolate and unyielding as those they traversed in earlier times. Every crucial journey in this novel is undertaken on four wheels, in a truck or taxi cab. This is in stark contrast to the first two novels in which the protagonists move only on horseback. It feels like times have changed.

The war has changed everything. The ranch on which Billy and John Grady work is struggling to survive and looks set to be sold to the army for military use. Billy has lost something along the way. He no longer wants what he once thought he wanted, now he doesn't know what he wants. John Grady, meanwhile, finds what he wants: he has fallen for a young whore in a Mexican brothel and tracks her down and tries to entice her away. You know this is a story that can have no happy ending, and McCarthy does not keep us guessing as to the outcome: he signposts us to where this venture is going and a sense of doom hangs over proceedings, like a vulture perched on a dead tree.

McCarthy continues to explore his familiar themes of fate and destiny, and his characters grapple with their thoughts on choice and predestination, in a world in which perhaps all events are already mapped out and everyone must play out their predetermined role.

'Cities of the Plains' follows the structure of previous volumes in the trilogy, the story being told in four long chapters, each a separate act of the narrative. However, here the chapters are broken into smaller, episodic segments as we jump from location to location. This fractured narrative leaves behind the epic sweep of the first two volumes, and the story has a more traditional narrative structure as it develops. While I felt this novel lacks some of the grace of the first two volumes, it still tells a compelling and powerful story and is full of the beauty, kindness, cruelty, violence and evil that characterise this trilogy. It spans the best and the worst of humanity.

Unlike the earlier volumes, 'Cities of the Plains' has an Epilogue, which starts with another journey on horseback into the unknown and the reader anticipates another existential trip where time seems to stand still. McCarthy here shows great sleight of hand and suddenly we are thrust forward in the space of a few words into the twenty-first century (well, 2002 to be exact - four years after the novel was published). A jump of some 50 years, a leap into the future.

Billy must now be 78 years old, eking out a living as a film extra, wandering the land again but this time without his horse. Even his riding boots don't last and must be discarded, his last link with the open trails now gone. Finally, McCarthy gives us a tale within the tale, and a dream within a dream, a last philosophical exchange that leaves Billy - and the reader - struggling to understand. There is no redemption, no resolution, no neat tying of loose ends. But maybe a recognition of a man's identity and purpose, a homecoming of sorts for the restless wanderer.

McCarthy is not an easy writer to recommend, as I recognise that some readers will not tolerate his style and authorial idiosyncrasies, let alone his particularly American subject matter and themes. He never uses a semi-colon, or quotation marks for dialogue; the reader has to work out what is spoken, and by whom. He seldom uses as much as a comma, and occasionally his sentences can be very long. When it works, as it usually does, it can be extremely beautiful and lyrical. When it does not, it is clumsy and irritating. I must confess I am also irritated by McCarthy's frequent use of Spanish dialogue without translation, and his very wide vocabulary - often specialised and technical, describing flora, fauna and geography - had me turning to the dictionary more times than I would have liked. Nevertheless, I enjoyed immensely the lyricism with which he tells these stories. His prose can be rather clunky at times when he veers into abstract thought, but mostly the writing is vivid and spare and poetic.

In conclusion, the Border Trilogy is a remarkable achievement, a testament to McCarthy's talent as a writer. Each volume stands on its own as a powerful and engaging story, yet together they form a cohesive whole, exploring themes of love, loss, fate, and the search for meaning in a changing world. While not without its flaws, the trilogy is a must-read for anyone interested in American literature, or in the human condition more generally.

This started out being exactly what I wanted to read.

After the first emotional gut punch in The Crossing, I was thrown into depression, yet I was okay to keep reading.

However, then the text became very meandering. The encounters of the protagonists were just lists of encounters and the cruelty became a list of cruelty.

Having practiced Spanish for many years, I was fine reading this trilogy. But if it had been any other language interspersed throughout the book like the Spanish was, I would have stopped reading as I don't have time to Google translate whole paragraphs.

The Spanish definitely helped set the tone of the book. It added an extra layer of authenticity and atmosphere. But one really needs more than just weekend Spanish to fully understand and enjoy the book.

Overall, while the beginning was promising, the meandering nature of the text and the heavy use of Spanish made it a bit of a challenge to get through.

Perhaps if the author had been more concise and less reliant on the foreign language, the book would have been more accessible and engaging for a wider audience.

Deze drie boeken in 1 keer achter elkaar lezen was ZO waardevol. It was truly an amazing experience. Alles hieraan is prachtig, zoals altijd te verwachten is met Cormac McCarthy. His writing style is unique and captivating, drawing the reader in from the very first page. Each book is filled with vivid descriptions, complex characters, and thought-provoking themes.

Reading these books consecutively allows for a deeper understanding and appreciation of McCarthy's work. The stories build upon each other, creating a rich and immersive world. The language he uses is beautiful and powerful, evoking strong emotions in the reader. Whether it's the harsh landscapes he描绘s or the intense relationships between the characters, McCarthy's writing leaves a lasting impression.

In conclusion, reading these three books by Cormac McCarthy is a must for any lover of literature. It is a journey that is well worth taking, filled with beauty, depth, and meaning. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a truly unforgettable reading experience.

Di McCarthy has read "No Country for Old Men", which he liked very much, "Suttree", which he liked much less, this trilogy, which he loved immensely, and "The Orchard Keeper", which he doesn't remember very well.

If one didn't know who the author was, they would seem to be written by three different people, so diverse are the styles (he considers the trilogy a single book, even though we know it's not).

"No Country for Old Men" is read in one go, the style is spare, the sentences very short. It seems like a screenplay.

"Suttree" has a much more complex language, with detailed descriptions and frequent introspections.

The trilogy in question is written with a style that is a middle ground between the two just mentioned.

And it is simply little less than a masterpiece.

One of the three books, "All the Pretty Horses", has also been brought to the big screen with the title, in Italian, "Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken" (if you haven't seen it, you haven't missed much).

He doesn't think he will ever read it again because the memory he has of it is powerful, and it doesn't happen often to him, not even with the most beloved books.