This started out being exactly what I wanted to read. After the 1st emotional gut punch in the The Crossing, I was thrown into depression, but Ok to keep reading. But 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, but you need more than weekend Spanish to read the book.

All the Pretty Horses is my hands-down favorite. This was my third reading of it and my first of "The Crossing", and "Cities of the Plains". I know I will read them all again. Brad Pitt's voice is sublime. The combination of the wonderful writing and narration was both spell-binding, and very moving.

‘Things separate from their stories have no meaning.’

The first two novels in The Border Trilogy feature different protagonists and are set roughly a decade apart. Both protagonists: John Grady Cole, in ‘All the Pretty Horses’; and Billy Parham in ‘The Crossing’, are young cowboys and each travels between the US southwest into northern Mexico. The third novel, ‘Cities of the Plains’, opens in the early 1950s with Cole and Parham together at a ranch in New Mexico, just north of El Paso.

‘It was vaquero country and other men’s troubles were alien to it and that was about all that could be said.’

Of the three novels, my favourite is ‘The Crossing’: Billy Parham’s doomed attempt to take a trapped female wolf ‘home’ to Mexico. Billy’s fight to save this wolf is heroic but like so much else in Billy’s life does not succeed. In ‘All the Pretty Horses’ John Grady Cole’s search to find the owner of Jimmy Blevins’s horse is also a doomed quest. And yet, the story itself is a masterpiece and a tribute to a way of life – a culture - fast disappearing. In ‘Cities of the Plains’, the way of life John Cole and Billy Parham are familiar with is coming to an end. The Army will be taking over the land. John has fought – and lost - his own battle to extricate his beloved from her life as a prostitute, and Billy Parham is alone. Again. Or still.

The fates of Billy Parham and John Grady Cole are inescapable. Their existence is simply an infinitesimal part of an infinite whole: the journeyers are less important than their journeys.

‘Our privileged view into this one night of this man’s history presses upon us the realization that all knowledge is a borrowing and every fact a debt.’

I am haunted by these stories. There is a power in the writing quite separate from the events being described that had me enthralled for hours. And yet there is nothing neat and tidy about the prose, nothing polished and complete about the journey. The people are in most ways far less important than the landscape they occupy and the times they live in – at least in my reading.

‘The world was made new each day and it was only men’s clinging to its vanished husks that could make of that world one husk more.’

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

I cry, I cry, I cry.

Cormac McCarthy and Richard Ford seem to be two sides of the same literary coin: they both write poetic prose about the blue collar world, one choosing the South, one the North. It's as if they met one evening in a corner of a dimly lit bar and divided up the country between them. Their rich, authentic voices, attention to minute details, and pummeling insights are eerily similar, yet feel distinct because of geographical implications. They've both won the Pulitzer Prize, and they should share the Nobel Prize one day - it'd be a fitting finale.

Il mio voto -apparentemente basso ed in controtendenza rispetto all'altissima media anobiana- è una media tra i voti dei tre volumi (Cavalli selvaggi ***, Oltre il confine ****, Città della pianura **), letti uno di seguito all'altro per tentare di individuare il filo conduttore della trilogia.

McCarthy chiede al lettore uno sforzo non indifferente nel momento in cui si comprende che il suo west non è quello avventuroso e romantico dei film di John Wayne, bensì è un west di frontiera in tutti i sensi. Frontiera è quella che separa gli USA dal Messico, frontiera è l'età che vivono tutti i protagonisti passando dall'adolescenza all'età adulta, frontiera è quella che separa il bene dal male, frontiera è quella temporale in un ""tardo"" west che non vive più l'epoca della scoperta, ma intravede la sua fine con i pickup che affiancano i cavalli e le guerre mondiali che costituiscono il passato recente di tutte le vicende.
Il west atipico di McCarthy è il regno dei vaqueros più che dei pistoleri: le pallottole sono centellinate, mentre abbondano i pasti di fagioli e tortillas consumati all'aria aperta. E' un mondo che sente l'eco della modernità in arrivo eppure la rinnega rifugiandosi negli echi di un passato glorioso: la ricerca di alcuni cavalli scomparsi, di un fratello, di un amico, il rapporto con una lupa ferita (strabilianti gli echi di Jack London!), l'amore impossibile con una prostituta, sono tutti espedienti per aggrapparsi ad un epoca al lumicino. I protagonisti, che per età anagrafica oggi definiremmo poco più che adolescenti, parlano e agiscono come adulti: questo richiedeva la vita di allora e forse oggi il confronto fa sorridere.

McCarthy dipinge uno stile di vita, o meglio dipinge LA vita di questi giovani uomini. E la vita non può essere fatta solo di gesta epiche, grandi amori e terribili vendette come nei film: la vita è fatta anche di lavoro, di sofferenza, di noia, di incontri più o meno significativi (in questo senso alcune pagine di Oltre il confine sono memorabili). E, come accade nella vita, gli eventi non si possono legare tra loro (in una trilogia, ad esempio) se non con una costruzione mentale. Quindi leggete questi romanzi di McCarthy, ma fatelo separatamente e a distanza di tempo e senza cercare un senso univoco che unisca queste tre belle storie.

La roba che scrive quest'uomo è letteratura da figli di puttana.
In senso buono, però.

All the Pretty Horses:

John Grady leaves Texas, knowing that his mother is selling the family ranch. Taking his friend Rawlins, they light out for Mexico, where trouble and passion are as much a part of the landscape as rock, dirt and horseflesh.

I don’t think there is a writer more suited to westerns; McCarthy’s dialogue is sparse and dry, yet shot with amusement and even affection. His descriptions are a panorama of vivid and moving immediacy, his narration is pragmatic and immersive, the action swift, brutal life-or-death, gripping. All the Pretty Horses is a kick of spurs on the flank of the reader, driving us into a wide vista of open possibility and distant catastrophe. It is a tale that is beautiful, breathtaking and desolate, and I did not pause before turning to The Crossing, next in the trilogy, because I am not merely immersed in, but in love with, McCarthy’s border states / Mexican tales.

The Crossing

The remarkable beginning to this story thrust me into the life of Billy Parham, following him to Mexico as compelled as the wolf he has roped. There’s a quality of disbelieving humour to be found in these passages, but it soon turns to loss and sadness. There is worse news on his return, and it seems that every move that Billy or his brother, Boyd, are apt to make are prompted by resolute conviction and dogged by the land’s uncaring harshness. Two flaws make this story less perfect than All the Pretty Horses: too much sidelining into other people’s stories, and too much dialogue written wholly in Spanish. In ATPH, this added great atmosphere while retaining the sense of the discussion (one of the things that struck me as proof of McCarthy’s adeptness at writing about the differences on either side of the border), but it is overdone in The Crossing, to the point that I often found I was puzzled at the end of an exchange. Despite this, Billy Parham’s tale is destructive and fascinating, sad and beautifully written.

Cities of the Plain

The protagonists from the previous stories are united in this final book of the Border Trilogy, and working on a ranch together; their friendship brings to this story everything that was fine about the first two tales, while being an instant warning sign to the reader that here are these stubborn sumbitches once again; how long before one or both of them are riding headlong into trouble? Sure enough, John Grady is in love once more, and Billy Parham’s inability to let things go is riding him along behind.

There is no doubt that all three of these tales can seem barren of hope until viewed as a whole after reading, especially the end of the epilogue which leaves us with a sad, quiet peace; instead McCarthy substitutes the odd kinship of those in trouble, friendship, stubbornness, the unspoken and intuited code of cowboys who can’t quit, or won’t, and their love for two Countries during their troubled times.

Despite the sadness that each of these books left with me, I can’t emphasise their beauty enough – John Grady and Billy Parham are two of the most frustrating, yet sympathetic protagonists I’ve run across as a reader. McCarthy’s trilogy were my first reads of 2010, and the rest of the year may well seem frivolous in comparison… what a powerful writer.

Reviews:
- All The pretty Horses
- The Crossing
- Cities of the Plain

L'amore fino alla morte
E' una trilogia bellissima. Che parla dell'amore in tutte le sue forme: nel primo libro l'amore dell'amicizia, nel secondo l'amore fraterno, nel terzo l'amore per una donna. E in tutti la durerzza della vita.
E' un'opera molto triste,dura e drammatica,che si svolge in una natura fatta di paesaggi bellissimi. Ci sono dei passaggi davvero crudi,ed altri davvero commoventi,ma tutti insieme formano una grande avventura dove le descrizioni di una natura selvaggia e incontaminata insieme,ci fanno sognare la libertà di una corsa senza ostacoli.

So I've read 'The Road,' but this was my first introduction to the books that cemented McCarthy's reputation. I'll review them briefly individually.

All The Pretty Horses: 4/5 stars. Borderline 5. Bleak, touching, with one of the best minor characters ever in Blevins - just pitch-perfect and left you wanting more. The chess-mastery and the grand dame were a bit much (the first a bit unbelievable and the second a bit too on-the-nose about many things), but I liked the dialogue in general and the weird, short-lived camaraderie of the three amigos in Mexico.

The Crossing: 2/5 stars. It starts well, and I *really* wanted to like the 'boy meets wolf' story, but ... the interaction with the wolf got too unbelievable too quickly. Also, while I liked the foreboding of the errant Indian, not much else made sense in terms of the timing of his attack and of the pursuit through Mexico. I did like the scene where they found the horses being driven across a plain and thought they'd recovered them, but this whole 'Murphy's Law' style of storytelling becomes trying on my patience very quickly. All The Pretty Horses was fresh and interesting, but here it felt like things were just going wrong at every turn in order to just descend to rock-bottom for the characters. The girl started out interesting, but became uninteresting with the elopement. Too much waxing eloquent about nothing. It seems every freaking character had a need to unburden their soul to the wayward Billy - why? And to what end? It became tiresome.

Cities of the Plain: 2/5 stars. Some really good dialogue and a really strong start, but, while The Crossing dragged on far too long, this one didn't give us enough of the camaraderie between the ranch-hands (in terms of: what *led* to their friendships?). Characters were not that well-distinguished, either in appearance or in their behaviors. Minor characters were largely forgettable. The intro, while good, dragged on far too long (I distinctly recall thinking 'is anything going to actually happen?'), and the 'boy-meets-hooker' story was just ... borderline absurd. I get the fascination with broken things, but it was just too obvious and too tedious in the telling. The pimp was almost interesting, but then didn't turn out to be, at least not for me.

Overall, this was a frustrating and uneven collection. I really enjoyed All The Pretty Horses, and I really think McCarthy hit on something there, but the flaws in the other 2 books are glaring. They feel like Hollywood sequels, and they really don't add much of anything to anything that wasn't already covered (either philosophically or emotionally) in the first book. And the depths plumbed by that first tome were indeed brutal, and unmatched even by the eyeball-sucking blinded man in The Crossing.

So overall ... just okay, and disappointing in many ways. In fact, had it not been for Blevins, I don't know what I would've made of All The Pretty Horses... probably just a 3/5.

I may have more thoughts later, it's all still a bit fresh.

America studies itself in the mirror of Mexico. By far the best Cormac McCarthy book I’ve read. Definitely the most entertaining. With McCarthy I have struggled mightily to find the message in his novels; not so much in this one. In this one it is at times more explicit (in the ramblings of characters) and implicit (in the plot of the story itself) which makes it easier for someone like me. The book is existentialist but he does not seem to want to give a detailed answer to the questions he poses, which is what makes the book (all of them, really) so poignant. God exists. We do not understand him. The human tragedy goes on. A sad book.