
THIS first section of the book reads, indeed, like a cross between Faulkner's novella "The Bear" and "Don Quixote." It is about the length of a novella, and it is written with such force and momentum - the reader is so ransackedĮmotionally by the end of it - that it seems, one-third of the way into the book, that Mr. If an old man in antique armor on a bone-thin horse, followed by a fat would-be squire on a mule, was once a strangeĪpparition on the highways of Cervantes's Spain, then a young man on a cow pony dragging behind him a wild and recalcitrant she-wolf through ranches, American and Mexican, where wolves are a remembered tale of ravenous ferocityĪnd terror, may well seem to replay that story, with the same mix of comedy, cruelty and philosophical wonder. And at once we are in the world of romance. Unfenced land to return it to the mountains of Mexico from which it came.

From this sudden, arcane, unexpected view into the settling of America the novel proceeds.īilly Parham, the protagonist, who has dreamed of wolves, finally stumbles on a method and traps the wolf and, also unexpectedly, hogties it, muzzles it, leashes it with a catch-rope - all of this heart-stopping to read - and sets off south across the Practical and almost obsolete art: longspring traps for coyote, larger traps for cougar and bear and wolf, iron-toothed, brutal and jagged, springs and chains and stakes greased with lard and packed in wooden boxes, fruit jars andĪpothecary bottles in which swim the liver and gall and kidneys of animals, elixirs for the purpose of scenting the traps. They acquire a key to his cabin, long shut down, and the boys are given entry to the workshop of a cruel, immensely
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It is an emblem of their moment in the history of the West that the last trapper who might know how to go about it is gone. Father and sons set about trapping the wolf, but A wolf has come down out of the Sierra de la Madera to the south and begun to attack grazing cattle. The novel begins on a small cattle ranch in a New Mexico valley in the last years of the Depression. McCarthy is a writer who can plunder almost any source and make it his own. Many literary and cinematic echoes or on the fact that Mr. But "The Crossing" is a tale so riveting - it immerses the reader so entirely in its violent and stunningly beautiful, inconsolable landscapes - that there is hardly time to reflect on its It will put readers in mind of Faulkner, Twain, Melville and Shakespeare, it will also put them in mind of Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, Miguel de Cervantes, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad and, for good measure, John Ford, It deserves to sit on the same shelf certainly with "Beloved" and "As I Lay Dying," "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and "The Confidence-Man," and if "The Crossing" is a miracle in prose, an American original. The answer providedīy "The Crossing," the second novel in his projected Border Trilogy, is that he writes an even better book. McCarthy got compared to William Faulkner - he has often been compared to Faulkner - Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Shakespeare. Which won a National Book Award for 1992 and accumulated extraordinary praise? Mr. HOW does a writer like Cormac McCarthy - if there is any writer like Cormac McCarthy - follow up on the immense critical and popular success of his novel "All the Pretty Horses," June 12, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Finalīy Cormac McCarthy. And what I see sickens me.The New York Times: Book Review Search Article Damn him in every shape and form and guise.

You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. For you and for every one and every thing that you have chosen to care for.

Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. If you could banish the fear of death from men's hearts they wouldnt live a day. Show me a religion that prepares one for death.

And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Cant you see? The clamour and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. Can you understand that? Look around you man.
