McCarthy, Cormac

Average customer rating:

McCarthy carries the Fire
Just Bad
Powerful
LEVI'S REVIEW
Hunger a powerfull enemy

The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
Cormac McCarthy
Manufacturer: Vintage Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Action & Adventure | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Adventure | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Science Fiction & Fantasy Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (Oprah's Book Club)
Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Water for Elephants: A Novel
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

ASIN: 0307387895
Release Date: 2007-03-28

Amazon.com

Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham

<hr size="1">Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane

<img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/books/promos/a-plus/coronado.tilt.jpg" border="0" align="left"> Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play). 

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane

<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" class="bucketDivider" />

Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER
National Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist

A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year
The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington Post

The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

Customer Reviews:

McCarthy carries the Fire.......2007-06-25

There's alot of great contemporary fiction to pick from, do yourself a favor, pick this book. The Road will appeal to a diverse cross-section of book lovers. The setting is post-apocalypic America but the story is allegorical and quicky transends the setting. After reading this book one understands why McCarthy is considered one of the best in modern American fiction. He's a master story-teller....a good guy who carries the "literary" fire.

Just Bad.......2007-06-25

The book was redundant, repetitious, mundane, boring...get the idea? The first 275 pages were the same events over and over, then the ending did NOT add to the story. Sorry I took the time to read it.

Powerful.......2007-06-25

McCarthy has written a terse, powerful and moving story in The Road. I found the style of his writing to be exactly what it should be in telling a tale of this nature, no chapters to divide the story, just like the bleak unchanging world protrayed. My advice, stop reading this review and start reading The Road.

LEVI'S REVIEW.......2007-06-24

I REALLY ENJOYED THIS BOOK. THE SUBJECT MATTER OF THE WORLD'S DEMISE AND THE HOPELESSNESS OF MANKIND WAS QUITE DEPRESSING BUT THE THRILL OF THE FATHER AND SON'S STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE AGAINST THE ENVIRONMENT, STARVATION, AND CANNIBALS KEPT ME TURNING PAGES LATE INTO THE NIGHT. ALTHOUGH DEPRESSING, THE BOOK FELT PLAUSIBLE GIVEN THE PRESENT EVENTS IN THE WORLD. THE ONLY THING THAT I DID NOT LIKE ABOUT THE BOOK, AND I DID NOT TAKE AWAY A STAR SINCE I ACCUSTOMED TO IT, WAS THE WRITING STYLE. THE AUTHOR USES ALOT OF INCOMPLETE SENTENCES. I ALMOST PUT THE BOOK DOWN WHEN I FIRST STARTED READING BECAUSE IT WAS TOO CONFUSING BUT I PERSERVERED. HE ALSO DOESN'T GIVE INDICATIONS TO WHO IS SPEAKING EACH LINE.

Hunger a powerfull enemy.......2007-06-24

Cormac stile is ok, but though is fiction, describing how to survive under those hard circunstances should be more real. I know that very well as I was envolve in a true story of surviving without food for three weeks, eating leaves from trees as the only source of food. When the hunger is too severe induce hallucinations. I am the author of "Days of the Embassy" plublished June 11, a true story of surviving. For those that like fiction, I recomended "The Road". [[ASIN:0977866238 Days of the Embassy

Average customer rating:

Ineffible
Tense. Eerie. Nearly painful.
Hard to shake the images
Long, Depressing, Boring
Took my breath away...

The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Manufacturer: Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Sunset Limited
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
No Country for Old Men
Thirteen Moons: A Novel
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

ASIN: 0307265439
Release Date: 2006-09-26

Amazon.com

Book Description

A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

Customer Reviews:

Ineffible.......2007-06-24

This book is magnificent. McCarthy mesmerizes readers every step of the journey and reminds us that even in the bleakest and direst of situations, hope and goodness are revealed.

Tense. Eerie. Nearly painful........2007-06-23

It seems clear to me that the author was immersed in feelings of great dread and fearful hope, the kind one might feel when one is struggling to uphold a terrible responsibility nearly beyond what a person could take. A more awful and more noble view of what a father might endure to protect his son I cannot imagine. Hope and hopelessness grappling and vying, and the reader at the fulcrum of it all. This is a novel you will *feel*. Put comparisons with other apocalyptic fiction out of your mind. This is a tearing and unrelenting journey beyond the pale. You will have difficulty putting it down, and when you do you will feel a great swell of mingled pride and pity for these imagined characters at the end of the world.

Hard to shake the images.......2007-06-20

This bleak imagining of a destroyed future world is full of some amazingly hard questions of morality and the nature of life. I found it difficult to shake the gray and ashen world created by the author. I also found it unsettling to examine myself in the context of what decisions I may make if faced with the trials of those walking "The Road".

Several of the details of the book are left open to the reader's interpretation. I have spoken with two other people who've finished the book, and between us we have three very different impressions of the characters and their situation. This is a hard book to gush about due to the grim subject matter, but it is powerful and thought-provoking.

Long, Depressing, Boring.......2007-06-20

It seems like each new chapter brings a more grim reality to the father and son wanderers.

-- We have seen the future and it is not worth living for. --

I also found the writing style a distraction from the purpose of the book. Given the grim subject matter, one might think I would welcome a distraction, but no. I found the lack of apostrophes an only grimmer distraction from the already grim story line.

-- We have seen the future and not only is it not worth living for it doesnt use correct punctuation either. --

Took my breath away..........2007-06-18

Normally I am too asocial and lazy to write reviews. But this book is worth it ! Absolutely stunning! Not only could I not put it down but I keep reading it over and over again. It's the kind of story you won't be able to stop thinking about. I wish every head of every nuclear power in the world could be given a copy of this book.

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

Average customer rating:

Thanks to reviewers...
This novel is experienced rather than read
too violent
Brutal yet beautiful. . .
Be prepared

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
Cormac Mccarthy
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Road
No Country for Old Men
Underworld: A Novel
The Border Trilogy
Suttree

ASIN: 0679728759
Release Date: 1992-05-05

Amazon.com

"The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed." If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power. From the opening scenes about a 14-year-old Tennessee boy who joins the band of hunters to the extraordinary, mythic ending, this is an American classic about extreme violence.

Book Description

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridianbrilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

Customer Reviews:

Thanks to reviewers..........2007-06-26

I appreciate your warnings. I just got this book (on CD) and was thrilled because it's been hard to find in audio form. I've read and appreciated everything by McCarthy, and couldn't wait for what I'd heard was his "piece de resistance." Now I think I'll skip it. I need roaring horror (as a friend of mine says) "like another neurosis." Maybe I'll change my mind; I've always been fairly impervious to violence. I loved The Road, and Deadwood is my favorite TV series. But this sounds over-the-top, 'Blood' curdling. I think I'll leave my blood uncurdled for the moment. If I change my mind, I'll write a review. Again, thank you for your, ahem, candor.

This novel is experienced rather than read.......2007-06-20

This novel is an experience. I am not sure where to begin. It is not bound by proper character development or narrative trajectory. The most important event of the novel is never revealed--the reader is left to imagine that event, or at least sit uncomfortably with the implication of that event. And I suppose that is the most remarkable thing about the novel, the way the reader is implicated. But there is also the language, the imagery, the iconoclasm.

McCormac drives the narrative forward in unconventional ways. There is the sheer spectacle of violence and all the qualities of great writing. There are the questions raised in the reader's mind: How far will these men go? What events will force them to greater extremes? What kind of ugliness resides in the landscape ahead?

There is little question as to brutality of these men. I was never waiting for any sort of redemption or failure or revelation. There is no evidence in the text that such things are available in the world of this novel.

It is a novel of hyper-reality, of haunting images, of brilliant monologues. It is the sort of novel that makes me want to stop writing.

There are similarities between "Blood Meridian" and "All the Pretty Horses." The protagonists of both novels are 14-16 year old males. There are similar themes: an inability to deal justly with the world at hand, a longing for a world that is gone, transformative power of violence, loyalty, landscape, animals.

And not that this should be any measure, but I also noticed that "Blood Meridian" was not a best seller like the border trilogy. And that perhaps highlights one of the defining features of this book, it demands a lot of the reader.

too violent.......2007-06-13

all about violence and no plot what so ever. guess people think he is cool because he writes so violent. I find him boring.

Brutal yet beautiful. . ........2007-05-10

I had never read McCarthy but picked up this book along with "The Road" due to all the Hype from the Oprah book club selection. While the "The Road" is a very good book it is not the masterpiece of "Blood Meridian." This is the most powerful books I have ever read. McCarthy's style is highlighted here: sharp, dry, brittle, and panoramic. I was enraptured by how McCarthy was able to capture the imagery of the southwest landscape with his words. The story itself is horrific, epic, and yet commonplace, the conquering of the west and its people by the whiteman has been better illustrated. On top of all this McCarthy is a grand story teller, who can stretch the limits of imagination without losing the common touch-in other words he keeps it REAL. This is a challenge, but worthy one! On a lighter note I also recommend "Across the high Lonesome," a book set in the modern American west I picked up after seeing Larry McMurtry give it props.Across the High Lonesome

Be prepared.......2007-05-10

I bought this book because it was a part of my creative writing workshop. Other people in the class actually recommended it. I guess this is one of those books you either love (because the writing is very good), or you find very upsetting and can't finish (it is super gory, people are evil apparently just for the sake of it--there is no internal monlogue, so none of the violence is explained, justified, rationalized...)

I couldn't finish reading this book even though it was a part of my class, and I never plan on opening it again, but lots of people really love McCarthy's writing style and think he presents an accurate view of the violence or grittiness of life (or something).
You are warned.

Average customer rating:

a disjointed, disturbing novel
Great novel
At a certain age, what is important becomes clearer
Not one of his best.
Naturalism or existentialism

No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Road
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
The March: A Novel
Suttree

ASIN: 0375706674
Release Date: 2006-07-11

Book Description

In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of his famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones.

One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law–in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell–can contain.

As Moss tries to evade his pursuers–in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives–McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.
No Country for Old Men is a triumph.

Customer Reviews:

a disjointed, disturbing novel.......2007-06-26

where the sociopath kills everyone. Maybe we should build the wall between Texas & the US, rather than Mexico & the US.

Great novel.......2007-06-24

Spoiler warning!!!

The reason I like this book so well is because it played out exactly as it should have. The killer won with his warped sense of judgment intact and all. He even goes back to kill Moss's wife just to keep his word. The book doesn't even give you a scene describing the killing of the main character and his runaway companion. Such a formality it was. Their deaths were more of an afterthough, an obvious course of events, they never had a chance. I for one didn't expect that.

The strength of the story is Sheriff Bell lamenting about his life and more importantly the utter resignation he feels about having to content and live with psychotic killers and brutal murderers he cannot understand. It didn't used to be this way he says, and he knows that he can no longer keep his people safe against such a foe. I don't think he's sure humanity can deal with such soullessness and brutality. It's hard not to agree with him.

At a certain age, what is important becomes clearer.......2007-06-24

No Country for Old Men by McCarthy is a tremendous thriller yet it is quite violent. If you are sensitive to violence, then I would say to bypass this novel. Otherwise, it does keep you on the edge of your seat.

I wouldn't say that this is McCarthy's best book, but it is a very compelling read which examines life's goals and the pursuit of those things which are going to make us happy and keep us alive to see another day.

It is a story with a western landscape, sheriffs, bad guys (especially one special character) and a string of dead bodies. You may not like the ending but you cannot say that it does not hold your interest.

Good thriller. Interesting study of character, motivation and luck (good and bad).

Bentley/2007

Not one of his best........2007-06-20

This book troubled me. It was the least interesting of all the McCarthy I've read.

Briefly, it is the story of a man, Llewelyn Moss, who is antelope hunting when he finds the after-effects of a drug deal gone bad. Llewelyn follows a blood trail that leads him to a dead man with a bag of money--some two million dollars. Llewelyn takes the money. And the bad guys chase him down.

On the surface, there's plenty to like about this book. Lots of talk about guns and cars. Horses. Lots of violence--though the violence is pretty pedestrian compared to some of McCarthy's other work. The men are simple and plain spoken and moral in a cowboy sort of way. It is a very readable book, and approachable for McCarthy.

The thing that bothers most people--the unexpected twist about half way through the book--didn't bother me at all. I have come to expect such things from McCarthy and I appreciate them. Were this twist to be anything different, it would undermine the premise of the book and be distinctly un-McCarthy.

But all in all, book feels unfinished. As though it is an early draft. It lacks the depth of his other work. There are moments that feel genuine--one of the final scenes, when the Sheriff visits his wheelchair bound uncle and confesses his cowardice in battle. This scene rings true. There are other moments. But taken as a whole it feels skeletal.

I've heard or read someplace that they are going to make a movie out of the book, and I can't help but wonder if that is part of it. Did McCarthy send the thing off before it was done? Was it written with a film script in mind? I don't know. I like to think that somebody like McCarthy is above such things, but now that he is rich and famous and getting on in years, you never know.

Naturalism or existentialism.......2007-06-20

Llewelyn Moss finds money and guns, including a submachine gun. He wants his wife, Carly Jean, to go to Odessa to wait for him. He feels at least two groups of people are looking for him, not including various law enforcement officials. He uses two motels to stay ahead of everyone. He alters a Winchester shotgun in anticipation of a fight. The care he takes, the planning, reminds the reader of Ernest Hemingway's characters preparing to go hunting or fishing. One is also reminded of THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE in terms of the author's use of descriptive detail to show carnage.

The bodies at the site of Llewelyn Moss's discovery of the money and the guns are seen by Sheriff Bell and others. It is determined they have been there for four or five days. Heroin is found in the back of the vehicle. Texas Rangers are on the way to the scene. Moss finds the sending unit, the transponder, in the packs of money. He reflects to himself that he has been running on luck. He anticipates that someone like Anton will enter his room by stealth, but he hasn't factored in that Anton is a crack shot and highly motivated to injure him. Moss is hit at least three times and retreats to a hospital in Mexico. The sheriff warns Carla Jean that her husband is in an extremely dangerous position.

Cormac McCarthy begins his work with the promising notion of an everyman encountering a stash of money, drugs, and guns, seemingly his for the taking. The problem is that criminals, of all people, don't like being inconvenienced and they certainly don't like being crime victims. In the end one character, a man who seeks to prevent injury, comes to question his own capacity to pursue his vocation.

Average customer rating:

Classic
Like the moon in the dark desert sky, this book is like a long and beautiful music note
literary masterpiece..
Threw it away.
Just finished- first thoughts

All the Pretty Horses
Cormac Mccarthy
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Movie Tie-Ins | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books

Mystery | Book Clubs | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Mystery & Thriller Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Crossing
Cities of the Plain
The Road
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
Suttree

ASIN: 0679744398
Release Date: 1993-06-29

Amazon.com

Part bildungsroman, part horse opera, part meditation on courage and loyalty, this beautifully crafted novel won the National Book Award in 1992. The plot is simple enough. John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick--a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins--encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance. Readers familiar with McCarthy's Faulknerian prose will find the writing more restrained than in Suttree and Blood Meridian. Newcomers will be mesmerized by the tragic tale of John Grady Cole's coming of age.

Book Description

Now a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Matt Damon, produced by Mike Nichols, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.

The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.

Customer Reviews:

Classic.......2007-06-20

This is a classic novel, solid writing and straightforward narrative. The narrative is driven forward by John Grady Cole's desire--his desire for a bygone era of Western ranches, his desire for the daughter of a wealthy Mexican ranch owner, his desire to act by his own strict ethical code in a world that is largely indifferent to such a code.

The novel is full of great passages of descriptive prose, drawing out the landscape before the narrative settles down into the characters and action. The expansive descriptions remind me of the way a Western film pans out to the cowboy landscape, to the lone men in the landscape, to horses and cattle. It reminded me somewhat of Zane Gray novels or similar such genre work, except the characters are much more complex, and of course the language is nothing like a genre Western. It is only the plot that makes me think of classic Westerns--working cowboys, guns, horses, the pretty daughter of wealthy landowners.

I tend to read for long stretches, so there were moments when the rhapsodic descriptions of landscape seemed repetitive--almost as though the writer felt obliged to remind the reader that this was after all the Great American West. I didn't need to be reminded and the descriptions often took me out of the action. Though I suspect that I might not have noticed it if I did not read at such long sittings.

McCarthy created secondary characters very well. Some of the greatest insights come from Alfonsa, the aunt of the beautiful daughter. The characters of the ranch-hands and town folk are nicely filled out. They are not simply backdrops or props, off of which bounce the protagonist or the action. They have their own lives and their own stories. It adds depth and credibility to the story. And all these characters are smart. That is one important thing that comes through in this novel; the characters are always the smartest people in the room.

It is refreshing to read a book that does not employ those little cliff-hangers, those chapters that end like a Scooby Doo episode or an after-school special--to borrow from the end of the first chapter of American Pastoral, "I was wrong. Never more mistaken about anyone in my life." Or the end of the second chapter, "...only then did I discover that Jerry Levov, having arrived late, was among us." This always feels cheap to me.

McCarthy runs the narrative out. I don't know what life will bring for Grady, but I do know that this story was the defining moment of his life. Everything that happens to him will either spring from or be compared to this trip to Mexico.

Like the moon in the dark desert sky, this book is like a long and beautiful music note.......2007-05-23

I cherished the slow rides across the desert with the rich imagry and the long contemplations about life, love and God (which might be horses?). There are few explantions -- things happen because that's the way they are and answers either come much later or perhaps never at all. Life in this time requires complete trust in oneself and patience. It is a much different world than we live in today with our constant need for answers and information - perhaps that is why the book seemed like such an escape. All of this is illustrated through the story of John Cole and Lacey Rawlins and their sometimes companion Blevins and their trek through Mexico. I have yet to come across another author who's style, prose and imagry can compare to McCarthy's. I am a desert worshiper and appreciate that McCarthy captures so well, and helped to show me more, the bounty of life and beauty that the desert holds.

literary masterpiece.........2007-05-09

perhaps the most memorable of the Border Trilogy..Cormac McCarthy takes a little getting used to as far as his literary style but once you find the rhythm of his words sit back and enjoy being transported to a world of masterful prose..John Grady Cole is 16, parents divorced and his grandfather, the only adult he's close to dies then his world changes..deprived of life on his grandfather's ranch after it's sold..he decides to cross the border into Mexico..he's joined on the trip by an old friend, Lacey Rawlins..along the way they meet another teenager, Jimmy Blevins, most likely riding a stolen horse..the three amigos ride into Mexico..and what awaits is a journey that turns them from kids into men..in a harsh Western way..beautifully told...splendid imagery..

Threw it away........2007-04-18

Horrible. Simply horrible. Picked this book up at a book fair and struggled to make my way through it. I understand the whole somewhat unique approach the author took to his language in writing this drivel, but it's just painful to read. So many times I'll have to re-read a section, just to make sure I know who's speaking. It's a dumb story, not well told at all, and I found it hard to care about any of the characters at all. I didn't even finish it. Stopped about 15 pages from the end and literally threw this book in the trash just so no one will ever have to set eyes on this piece of garbage ever again.

Just finished- first thoughts.......2007-04-18

I've only just finished Moby Dick before reading ATPH so cryptic style was not a problem, if you follow me, shipmates? I have been aware of Mc Carthy for some time, but have been reluctant to read him, I think due to his artistic reputation. Comparisons to Faulkner aren't enticing, or maybe they are. Anyway, the time was right after Melville. Still, I must say, I liked the story and will read more of this Cormac McCarthy, so mystical and subtle.
One thing. Does anyone else see a connection with Gabriel's Story by Dunham, another fine book?

Average customer rating:

Not Alone, But Lonely
Risky lyrical prose yet lacking sufficient editing and substance
Meanders like a river, rushes like a flood
Knoxville's Faulkneresque underworld
Not My Existence Here in the Fifties!

Suttree
Cormac Mccarthy
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
Child of God
The Orchard Keeper
No Country for Old Men
The Outer Dark

ASIN: 0679736328
Release Date: 1992-05-05

Book Description

By the author of Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, Suttree is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there--a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters--he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.

Customer Reviews:

Not Alone, But Lonely.......2007-05-18

Suttree is the story of an emotionally wounded loner who lives among a motley assortment of criminals, alcoholics, and other societal outcasts on the outskirts of Knoxville in the 1950s. Suttree is estranged from his family, but it's never made completely clear why he walked out his wife and child, his relatives, and the life of privilege he led. Surviving day-to-day on whatever money he earns from the spoils of his fishing, he never has more than a few dollars in his pocket, and those are inevitably spent by the day's end.

In this world of misfits and outcasts, happiness and companionship are fleeting. Hunger, cold, and drunkeness fill days. But there is more, the community that Suttree inhabits is filled with characters who befriend, support, and care for each other. Each character innately understanding the vulnerability they have in common. Each having experienced degrees of pain and hopelessness.

McCarthy's prose is complex and dense; more than average concentration is required of the reader. It's not uncommon to find yourself re-reading passages, each re-reading allowing the words and imagery to more fully unfold in your mind. The payoff are passages rich and full of feeling. The world McCarthy describes has layer upon layer of detail and through Suttree's gaze the elemental and temporal nature of life is revealed.

I'd recommend McCarthy to patient and focused readers. People who don't need an immediate payoff and who appreciate prose and language. An alternative to Suttree is Blood Meridian, a more intense, violent, and perhaps more accessible work. McCarthy is an author who will leave an impression.

Some quotes:

"The willows at the far shore cut from the night a prospect of distant mountains dark against a paler sky. Halfmoon incandescent in her black galatic keyway, the heavens locked and wheeling. A sole star to the north pale and constant, the old wanderer's beacon burning like a molten spike that tethered the Small Bear to the turning firmament. He closed his eyes and opened them and looked again. He was struck by the fidelity of this earth he inhabited and he bore it sudden love."

"You see a man, he scratchin' to make it. Think once he got it made everything be all right. But you don't never have it made. Don't care who you are. Look up one morning and you a old man. You got nothin to say to your brother. Don't know no more'n when you started."

"He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus."

"Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them."

Risky lyrical prose yet lacking sufficient editing and substance.......2007-05-14

Most reviewers, professional or not would commend Mccarthy for Suttree or the Border trilogy as his magnus opus, though I'd reckon not. Indeed the lyrical prose in Suttree elevates standards in English literature with neologisms and erudite syntax as should that of any literary master, yet sometimes, now I mean a few occasional chapters and segments in which intense human emotions are compounded, say the death of a loved one, or some inevitable parting by fate, Mccarthy resorts to mere description, often overtly hollywood and trite--lacking in compassion and humanity and courage, qualities by which Faulkner makes adept use of.

To speak Mccarthyesque means to speak of purgatorial violence and its philosophy and affect on our consciousness and religion. What he does not do well is his way with familial issues particularly with the psychology of father-son relationships. Mccarthy fails to delve into the substratum of character denoument and development by overtly focusing on novel language of simple emotions--He is not condonable nor credible as a father, loving or not, simply because some readers realize that Mccarthy simply is not a father and never will be a father at all (The Road exemplary). Aside from an attempt of achieving a negation of archetypal bildungsromain as seen in Blood Meridian, the emotional constellation of Suttree and his lover(s)/ sons was a huge disappointment for me. I would stick with Faulkner's collection "The Country" instead.

Mccarthy does well by completely forsaking character development (as with blood meridian) rather than explicating simple emotions propounded in a lyrical voice that compromises its very meaning, which is the daunting weakness (though understandable) of modern avant-garde poets and musicians alike.

Meanders like a river, rushes like a flood.......2007-04-19

I've read all McCarthy's books and this might be my favorite. Only a master could weave these murky memories into such a spell-binding story. The plot (what there is of it) meanders at the languid pace of the Tennessee River and -- though it contains no real conflict (save Suttree's shadowy fits) -- I could not stop turning the pages. I closed the book with more empathy for Suttree than any literary character I can remember. The book is sublime.

Knoxville's Faulkneresque underworld.......2007-03-13

Set outside of Knoxville over several cold winters and hot summers during the early 1950s, Cormac McCarthy's novel introduces us to the outcasts, bums, and criminals (both petty and felonious) who claim friendship with Cornelius Suttree, a college-educated, privileged man who has left his wife and son to live hand-to-mouth selling fish caught from his houseboat on the Tennessee River.

Suttree's is a life of excess and disappointments: his rare windfalls go to liquor, his two attempts at romance are doomed, he allows himself frequently to be taken advantage of by both strangers and friends, and many of his associates end up dead or in jail. His drunken sprees (and, especially, their aftermaths) provide much of the hilarity; many sections begin with sentences along the lines of "He woke in full daylight by the side of a road."

Most memorably, in one of the novel's many flashbacks to Suttree's time in a county workhouse, we meet "countrymouse" Gene Harrogate, a young, delinquent, wide-eyed idealist who is arrested for--well, I can't rightly tell you without spoiling one of the most hilarious scenes in the book. Gene eventually sets up quarters in a cave under the city bridge, which he exhibits to Suttree with as much fanfare as a New Yorker would show off a rent-stabilized loft in SoHo and where he develops outlandish schemes to become wealthy. Throughout, I kept imagining that Harrogate had wandered into Tennessee from a long-lost Flannery O'Connor story. At first the novel's perspective alternates between Suttree and Harrogate, but eventually this becomes Suttree's story.

Having read four Faulkner novels during the past year, I was a little disoriented reading "Suttree." While the characters and the episodic storyline certainly echo other writers (Twain, Steinbeck, Joyce, and obviously O'Connor), its style picks up where Faulkner's "Sanctuary" and "Pylon" left off. Most superficially, McCarthy adopts and adapts Faulkner's punctuation hiccups and his tendency to invent compound words (bibpocket, packingcrate, sootstreaked). He also exhibits what has become a trademark habit of using arcane and archaic words (mascled, warfarined, slaverous--four times!). But, ultimately, it was McCarthy's third-person omniscient descriptions of Suttree's drunken sprees that firmly planted me back in Faulkner's Old South. I've claimed that nobody does drunk like Faulkner--but McCarthy places second in a strong showing.

There is a strong streak of melancholy and despair running through the book, yet, like William Vollmann, McCarthy instills his characters with so much humanity, along with an unrealistically resilient optimism, that they are, more often than not, endearing even when their hopes are predictably dashed. For all of the book's surface resemblances to so many other literary antecedents, the degenerates and scalawags who populate "Suttree" still manage to be unique and memorable.

Not My Existence Here in the Fifties!.......2007-01-21

The bridge on the cover of this book is just one of three we had to cross Fort Loudon (part of the Tennessee River) in downtown Knoxville when I was growing up. He wrote about the pigeons which abounded here, particulary in the underbelly of the Greyhound Bus Station situated on Gay Street at that time. Now, today, the town wants rid of them and has brought in predators to kill them out in the open for all to see. Our beloved main street in town has been taken over by yuppies from who knows where and they don't like or want to see birds, trees or city buses on their turf. They did entice the young mayor to let them have their own liquor store on our sacred street so they would not have to stoop to riding one of the disgusting buses. They have blasphemed this sacred (to us native Knoxvillians) street of my childhood. I came home to the downtown area, but now I hate it and what it stands for.

Evidence of the fallen ladies in the upper stories of the retail store was noticeable, as now. We have that kind who were relocated here from New Orleans and prey on the bus drivers. Back then, the madams and houses were profiting from police protection and some rotten cops who brought girls there as laundresses?

Did they call tennis shoes "sneakers" back then? I must have been so innocent to have missed that, but I detested that kind of footwear anyway. It was not dignified. The large carp were still in evidence at the 1982 World's Fair (huge fish) and are at Volunteer Landing to this day.

This fictitious story is about Cornelius Suttree as a wandering (you might say "homeless" even) fisherman with a vivid imagination, especially at night where he spent his time fishing on the Tennessee River under the bridges and along the slopes down Sequoyah way as it meanders through the town from one end to the other. He is young and rebelling against his privileged life as a member of a prominent family. Sounds like someone I know who told me that life here in the Fifties was not good! He got that wrong idea from reading this long book. Suttree was a pre-hippie (a dropout from society) and he sees what he wants to see only it's the under belly of the old town, which he thinks is unique. Actually, a small town Pulaski had the same shacks, poverty, and human squalor in my life time about as bad as this big town.

It seems that young Mr. Suttree has had some kind of mental breakdown and has become the same as a bum seeing what he choose and not factually, but through a glass darkly. In fact, he appears to be one of the mental patients which this town spawns every generation. Written as fiction, but used as the basis of past history by some, McCarthy would be proud that his sordid book is used as reference material. Sure, some of the sites are locateable still but what took place there is a "figment of his imagination."

His thesis was so good that he received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation (those who formed the University of Chicago) and the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to complete 471 (in the paperback) pages of nonsense. The town is real and still backward for the times; it has never been a progressive town unless you talk about bars, stills, breweries on Gay Street such, but one of hard drinkers, fighters, family fueders and so on. It could as easily been Pittsburg, PA, Cincinnati, Ohio, or any place in between with a river running through or around the downtown area.

It's pure drivel, not fact in any way, not history; for entertainment value only. It's too bad that some newcomers have been influenced by the poor conditions of this town's past and came here to change things. Even I was foolish enough to believe I was reading history before I came to know the local history writer. This is an old book -- and none of it is factual, none.

Average customer rating:

Disappointing pseudoprofundity
This is for me one of the finest books I have read, even if it was a play.
Florida to California
Straight To the Point
Another trophy for McCarthy

The Sunset Limited
Cormac Mccarthy
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

United States | Drama | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Drama | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Road
Suttree
No Country for Old Men
Child of God
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

ASIN: 0307278360
Release Date: 2006-10-24

Book Description

A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made.

In that small apartment, “Black” and “White,” as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men–though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it.

Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life.

Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deceptively intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time.

Customer Reviews:

Disappointing pseudoprofundity.......2007-04-01

I read this book immediately after finishing Richard Dawkins "The God Delusion", which may have been a mistake because I could not help thinking a much more interesting play would have three people at the table, the third being Dawkins who would mop the floor with these two sorry saps. Neither Black or White offer much of anything that is profound, hopeful, or insightful. Black carries the flag for the faithful, willingly accepting his dismal life because he'll eventually be gwine up to hebben; White carries the flag for those without faith, unwilling to accept his dismal life because of the crushing weight of his unbelief. Neither man is going about the business of living. Maybe that's the point - life isn't black and white - but to whom is this a revelation?

McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Suttree, and border trilogy are among my most favorite books. I miss the author who wrote so wonderfully. The exceedingly spare prose of his most recent books is wearing very thin.

This is for me one of the finest books I have read, even if it was a play........2007-03-30

Although very brief, Mccarthy's play took me twice the time it should have because I had to stop and savor the dialogue. I was loving the comments of "Black." I found them profound, witty, gentle and loving, and often very moving. "White", too, had terrific witty lines.This play reminded me of an Edward Albee type of verbal exchange--one that was so rich and brilliantly composed that I was genually thrilled to be reading it.
However, I felt that the final few pages jumped ship. Suddenly The characters were worn out, not able to keep going. I could imagine Black saying and doing so much more. He, earlier, vowed to go home with White, yet inexplicably he gave up. The character built by McCarthy would not have suddenly folded. That part did not seem to fit. I wish I knew what McCarthy was feeling at that point.
I have read most of McCarthy's works, and found this and The Road to be my favorates. We are blessed to have a writer as fine as McCarthy. The only other living author I treasure as much is Haruki Murakami.

Florida to California.......2007-02-23

I really enjoyed this play. McCarthy's prose is incisive, witty, sympathetic, and more than occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. While there are moments where the dialogue stalls a little, even feeling slightly pedantic, the momentum of the work as whole carries the reader forward uninterrupted.

The questions addressed are fundamental. Even critical. Don't leave home without them.

My major question is why did McCarthy choose the "Sunset Limited"? It runs from Florida to California and would never be in a subway station. What gives?

Straight To the Point.......2007-01-08

In his brilliant book EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOTHERAPY, the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom devotes an entire section to meaninglessness. As life has no objective meaning, we are left to construct our own. Yalom starts the section out hauntingly, with an actual suicide note of someone now dead from his own hand. In the note, the man describes a group of morons whose only purpose is to move bricks from one side of a yard to another, back and forth, without any reflection as to why. One day, one moron does so reflect and, from that day forward, is never as content to move the bricks as he was before. The author of the note states that he is that one moron.

That person, whose identity is unknown, could well be the character White, one of only two characters in this play by Cormac McCarthy. On the outside, he would seem to have things going for him. He is well educated, articulate and displays the mannerisms of someone comfortable in social class. Yet inside is an emptiness so profound that jumping in front of the Sunset Limited, a train, is seen as the only option. Indeed, White's outlook is so bleak that he does not view this as pessimistic, but rather as realistic and even something to embrace.

White's polar opposite is, not surprisingly, Black. He is the opposite of White in two ways. Externally, he is dirt poor, has a violent and misguided history and a life few would envy. More profoundly, however, is the polarity of what is inside. Black has a faith in the Bible, in Jesus, that infuses his life with a meaning totally lacking in White. Despite his hard circumstances, he sees a reason to live and to try to help White see such a reason as well.

The conversation between the two is simple yet profound. White's education and worldliness have left him with a powerful intellect but no guide to use it for personal fulfillment. Every attempt by Black to show White a path towards some light can easily be rationalized away. But this rationalization always leads back to the hard end of the Sunset Limited.

SUNSET LIMITED is very stripped down. It has one act, only two characters and even these characters are nameless except for their opposite descriptors. This allows for the dialogue and ideas to take center stage. As the conversation is about life, death and meaning, this is a good call by McCarthy. The starkness of the set-up is also a clue that McCarthy views the morality at issue to be absolute. SUNSET LIMITED is a short yet powerful read.

Another trophy for McCarthy.......2006-12-11

The man never ceases to amaze me. In this short play with two characters [Black and White] and in just one room McCarthy exposes us to a vain attempt by an uneducated black with a love of the bible and a heart as big as Texas to save an educated white professoer full of useless, or wasted, education on his way to death. Ending tragically, as most McCarthy books do, it none-the less shows the power of determination: one in himself and the task at hand and the other in a belief in a higher power and a hope for His ability to intervene.

Average customer rating:

Great book for McCarthy fans
Compelling Read
The Wasteland and the Grail King
How dark does it get?
The Inner Darkness of the American Spirit

Outer Dark
Cormac Mccarthy
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Child of God
The Orchard Keeper
Suttree
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
The Road

ASIN: 0679728732
Release Date: 1993-06-29

Book Description

Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.

Customer Reviews:

Great book for McCarthy fans.......2007-06-20

"Outer Dark" is the story of a brother and sister and their child. The child is born in a desperate cabin someplace in the Appalachian Mountains. The brother, Culla Holme, takes the newborn while the mother/sister sleeps and sets the child in the night woods. The child is found by an iterant tinker. The sister/mother, Rinthy Holme, awakes. She confronts her brother, they argue, and eventually both set out separately on the road--the sister to find the child and the brother for no reason other than perhaps desperation.

Once they are on the road, the book follows a classic journey narrative. The landscape is dark and strange. The people they meet even more so. A few of the chapters are perfectly written. There is a chapter about halfway through the book where Culla meets a snake hunter. Now there is nothing particularly important in this chapter as it relates to the rest of the novel--no important aspects of character revealed, not important action or theme, it is just a beautiful handful of pages that form a perfect circle. The dialogue is brilliant. The snake hunter talks about his well, his wife, his hounds, the neighbor with whom he still carries a feud despite the fact that the neighbor has been dead nearly a decade. The chapter is a great example of Faulkner's observation, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." This is true among certain communities in the South, but I also think it belongs to a broader class and generation of people; people who frame their individual and collective lives as narratives to live, relive, and pass along. And I suspect that the reason this chapter stands out for me is that unlike other chapters that rely on strangeness and cruelty for much of their emotional tension, this small chapter is, at least by McCarthy standards, benign. There are no corpses hanging from trees, no drooling mutes or eyeless crones or murdered infants. And I believe that these moments, moments that lean on something other than the weird or cruel, are McCarthy's best. And it is unfortunate that they are often overlooked for the sheer spectacle of his violence.

There are several things I found problematic in this novel. Firstly, there is a triad of evil men prowling the land. They are composite characters that we find in other McCarthy novels. There is the sentient evildoer, the learned man who pontificates the meaning of mankind. There is the cadre mutants, misshapen and nameless--in this case, one man is actually nameless. McCarthy never tells us where they come from or what motivates them. They are just there, a part of the landscape perhaps--a force birthed by the landscape. I don't know. I can only speculate and with very little evidence from the text. Now perhaps they are a reflection of real life, the evil we hear about on the evening news or witness through history. But so what, as I've heard time and again in workshop, life does not good fiction make. Perhaps my problem is that I do not necessarily believe in evil, but rather in motivation--in that people can be motivated to do some awful things. And good fiction is in that motivation. And it does not have to be much. I found the motivations toward evil in Blood Meridian convincing--racism, imperialism, greed, desperation, ceremony. But evil simply for evil's sake, or even as a reflection of some aspect of the human psyche, collective or individual, does not work and detracts from the overall effect of the work.

Then there is the issue of coincidence--or perhaps it is meant to be fate. Either way, the key events of the novel depend upon happenstance that felt incredible and I must say a bit contrived. The first time that Culla Holme meets the triad of evil, he is washed from a ferry on a flooded river. He stumbles into their camp to warm by the fire. And I am trying to figure out why this meeting feels so forced. I suspect that it has something to do with the needless drama of the ferry scene, a drama with no narrative significance other than to put Culla within view of the triad's fire. It would have felt more credible if no great event or drama preceded the meeting, or if some event of greater significance, an event tied inextricably to the progression of the novel, preceded their meeting. As it stands, the action packed ferry scene serves no purpose other than to position the characters.

And then it happens again. McCarthy creates an interesting, high drama scene involving a hog drive, thousands of animals driven through the mountains. One of the hog drivers is forced off a bluff by stampeding pigs. He dies and the blame is assigned to Culla. It is an interesting scene, the dialogue is sharp and the characters of the itinerant preacher and the hog drivers are vivid. They plan to hang Culla but don't have a rope. They march him back to camp for the proper hanging equipment--as one of the characters explains, it is the Christian thing to do. Culla jumps from the bluffs and into the river to escape. And guess where the next chapter finds him? Another river drama, another visit to the evildoer's camp.

A terrible act of violence beings the book to a close. It is turely awful, but it does complete the novel. And were it not for the questions raised by the unmotivated evil, and the coincidences that brought the characters together, the novel would be nearly perfect.

I can't help but wonder how McCarthy could solve the problems of the novel, though I suspect, given his other work from this period, he preferred to leave certain questions unanswered. And these things I label problems are in fact intentional. In any event, I believe an answer resides somewhere in that perfect chapter in the middle of the novel, the chapter with the snake hunter. The thing that makes this chapter work is what Charles Baxter calls rhyming action: "When narratives move in reverse--when they come dramatically or imagistically to a point that is similar to the one they already seemingly passed." I sense that is perhaps something of the intention in this work--much of it doubles back upon itself. One of the reasons the murder is so disturbing is that it had already been committed at the beginning of the work, when Culla left the newborn, naked, in the night woods. But the dramatic events, the river dramas, that bring about the final rhyming murder, ring dissonant with all that came previously. Even though they are repetitive, they stand out from the rest of the work and seem to develop in their own direction--a misplaced rhyme--until the writer pushes Culla into the river and gets him drifting in the right direction.

Compelling Read.......2007-05-13

This is a great book- almost as good as 'The Road'. I didn't want to put it down. The natual slowness doesn't hurt the urge to continue to read. If you like The Road, you will like this!

The Wasteland and the Grail King.......2007-01-03

=Outer Dark= describes a barren Wasteland and Holme is the Grail King, complete with a wounded "leg" as a symbol of his inability to love acceptably. In a Wasteland where women are not valued, children are not nurtured either, and the child ends up burned and half-blinded, in the way that its father and his culture are blind to his disregard for his sister and their child. I love the poetic prose of this writer. And the words-- where does he get those words? Cormac McCarthy is the best writer writing in America today, similar to but better than Steinbeck and Faulkner.

How dark does it get?.......2006-12-21

This is the fourth of McCarthy's novels I have read. "Blood Meridian" is darker and "The Road" is even more depressing, if that is possible. Believe me, it is. One wonders where this author can go with such a style. I still have some of his older books to read---and everything else he writes. I don't think he will disappoint. This book is a lovely--if I may use that word--excercise in language. He uses words (and rare, odd ones, at that) and imagery to evoke a truly depressing reading experience. This book is not for you if you expect a work full of uplifting thoughts and gentle sympathies. Some readers may require a good dictionary. If you grasp "...moiled cant and baneful...", then you can do without. Good luck.

The Inner Darkness of the American Spirit.......2006-10-17

This is the third book I've read by Cormac McCarthy. One thing that impresses me about his work is how well he's captured the endemic American inclination to do violence. His characters ring true. They are typical Americans - like those who in our time vote repeatedly for Bush, clamor for war, support the death penalty, are willing to tortures hapless prisoners, and passionately announce that such-and-such a country should be bombed back to the Stone Age. McCarthy has captured America. What a country!

Average customer rating:

Adventure!
One of the best
Perfect presentation of a perfect story
A five-star book plus a five-star book plus a five-star book equals a fifteen-star book
apologia pro sua vita

The Border Trilogy
Cormac McCarthy
Manufacturer: Picador
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
No Country for Old Men
The Road
Suttree
Rabbit Angstrom : The Four Novels : Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest (Everyman's Library)

ASIN: 0330334611

Book Description

Available together in one volume for the first time, the three novels of Cormac McCarthy's award-winning and bestselling Border Trilogy constitute a genuine American epic.

Beginning with All the Pretty Horses and continuing through The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, McCarthy chronicles the lives of two young men coming of age in the Southwest and Mexico, poised on the edge of a world about to change forever. Hauntingly beautiful, filled with sorrow and humor, The Border Trilogy is a masterful elegy for the American frontier.

Customer Reviews:

Adventure!.......2007-01-04

I love All the Pretty Horses and have read it three times. The other stories aren't quite as good as the first in the trilogy but the package is a good value.

One of the best.......2007-01-04

I love a book that takes more than a day to read. I'm still thinking about the characters months after I have read these book(s) Reading a good book twice is something I rarely do, planning a rereading of this one soon.

Perfect presentation of a perfect story.......2006-05-20

Just one example of the prose which has prompted me to read this three times:

PAGE 141 OF "ALL THE PRETTY HORSES" (punctuation is as the author intended)

"...They'd ride at night up along the western mesa two hours from the ranch and sometimes he'd build a fire and they could see the gaslights at the hacienda gates far below them floating in a pool of black and sometimes the lights seemed to move as if the world down there turned on some other center and they saw stars fall to earth by the hundreds and she told him stories of her father's family and of Mexico. Going back they'd walk the horses into the lake and the horses would stand and drink with the water at their chests and the stars in the lake bobbed and tilted where they drank and if it rained in the mountains the air would be close and the night more warm and one night he left her and rode down along the edge of the lake through the sedge and willow and slid from the horses back and pulled off his boots and his clothes and walked out into the lake where the moon slid away before him and ducks gabbled out there in the dark. The water was black and warm and he turned in the lake and spread his arms in the water and the water was so dark and so silky and he watched across the still black surface to where she stood on the shore with the horse and he watched where she stepped from her pooled clothing so pale, so pale, like a chrysalis emerging, and walked into the water.

She paused midway to look back. Standing there trembling in the water and not from the cold for there was none. Do not speak to her. Do not call. When she reached him he held out his hand amd she took it. She was so pale in the lake she seemed to be burning. Like foxfire in a darkened wood. That burned cold. Like the moon that burned cold. Her black hair floating on the water about her, falling and floating on the water. She put her other arm about his shoulder and looked toward the moon in the west do not speak to her do not call and then she turned her face up to him. Sweeter for the larceny of time and flesh, sweeter for the betrayal. Nesting cranes that stood singlefooted among the cane on the south shore had pulled their slender beaks from their wingpits to watch. Me quieres? she said. Yes, he said. He said her name. God yes, he said..."

A five-star book plus a five-star book plus a five-star book equals a fifteen-star book.......2006-04-04

Here are three amazing books, and one amazing saga, all together in one brimming volume you can throw into a backpack.

The first novel, "All the Pretty Horses" is one of the most beautifully told stories I've ever read. Not only is the writing here packed with imagery, and the story one of McCarthy's most accessible, but the textures of the words used to describe the images are as lush and as enfolding as anything F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote--even when McCarthy's describing the driest of desert plains, the most desolate of ruins, or the emptiest of lives.
The book tells the story of two young friends who leave home in 1948 Texas to ride south into northern Mexico in search of SOMETHING. What happens along the way is tragic and amusing, lovely and gripping, real and amazing. McCarthy seems to paint every scene perfectly, yet he does so using the fewest amount of words possible, and the simplest of details.
"The gray and malignant dawn." "Stars falling down the long black slope of the firmament." "The shelving clouds." "Their windtattered fire." "Narrow spires of smoke standing vertically into the windless dawn so still the village seemed to hang by threads from the darkness."
Long sentences shroud the reader in the events of every scene, and the author's trademark quote-sign-less dialogue gives every conversation a very biblical feel.

The trilogy's second book, "The Crossing" has only thematic and geographical elements in common with the first. The story deals with a completely different character, Billy Parham, a son in a late-1930s New Mexican ranching family. Billy traps a wolf that has been killing his father's cattle but realizes he morally can't kill it and has to return it to its home in the mountains of old Mexico. Billy crosses the border into Mexico, and as he does he crosses from real life into a world of dreams, where everyone moves as if the air was liquid, where every ruin has an irretrievable story, where soot and heat and danger hang in the air, and where nothing ever goes as planned.
The story is not as streamlined or as focused as its thematic predecessor, "All the Pretty Horses," but that's not necessarily a shortcoming. The book sprawls out like a wide hot desert--curling north and south, east and west, across the present and into the past. The writing is as good as any writing I've ever read ever, and certain metaphors and feelings will stay with you for years. For example: the coals of a campfire seeming like an exposed piece of the core of the earth.

The trilogy's concluding part is "Cities of the Plain." The book has some shortcomings, but it's still one amazing piece of work. YOU try writing something this good.
In this book, John Grady Cole--the genius horsetrainer of "All the Pretty Horses"--and Billy Parham--the kindhearted nomad of "The Crossing"--come together as ranch hands on a New Mexico estancia. Here, you can see why this actually is a trilogy. Both characters are older than they were in the previous books--Billy much older--but both are kindred spirits whose stories connect with and affect each another.
"Cities of the Plain" tends more heavily toward the lengthy philosophical monologues that appear only occasionally in the trilogy's earlier volumes, and the whole story at moments goes a little bit long if you've just read the two previous books right before.
However, the writing is gorgeous, and haunting. In one passage, a dead calf's "ribcage lay with curved tines upturned on the gravel plain like some carnivorous plant brooding in the barren dawn." Yeah. Yeah!
And the ending--the ending is amazing. It might not be quite what you expect or ask for, but it is thrilling in its perfectness, in its completess, in how true it feels. It gave me chills of ecstasy. It left me holding the book like a priceless religious relic, re-reading its back cover, flipping back through it to parts I had marked, reluctant and unwilling to let go of these characters or their world.

Reading these collected books is like having a vision: I feel as if I should tell the world about it, but at the same time it seems so sacred and personal that maybe I should just keep it to myself and try to figure out why it came to me, into my life, into my head. These are books that deserve readers. Pick this volume up, and let it seep into your skin, let it open you to other worlds and people and ideas, and let it change you. Let it open your eyes to the world, and to the West, and to the goodness and the hope and the sadness that haunts the lives of all of us.
This is a saga made up of all those ineffable things that most of us just can't put into words. But here, somehow, Cormac McCarthy has managed to do just that. Here is the intangible, but tangible. Here is the unnameable, but named. Here are the thoughts you could never express, expressed. Here is a book worth reading, a book that will change you--you, and the way you see the world.

apologia pro sua vita.......2006-03-23

My names Billy Parham and basically I get everyone killed one way or another for no particular reason. Mostly wrong and never did learn a thing. Is that about right cowboy?
Yeah you covered it nicely.
Boyd?
Like John Grady just said. You nailed it.

Average customer rating:

A fine book
masterpiece of the west...
The Measure of a Man
Cities of the Plain
Epic out of time

Cities of the Plain
Cormac Mccarthy
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Crossing
All the Pretty Horses
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
No Country for Old Men
Suttree

ASIN: 0679747192
Release Date: 1999-05-25

Amazon.com

On a ranch in southeastern Texas, soon after World War II, a group of solitary, inarticulately lonely men gathers to work animals as the sun sets for good on the mythic American West. All of these men nurse losses both personal (siblings or wives) and collective (a shared lifestyle and philosophy). Among them is John Grady Cole, the adolescent hero of the first book in Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy, All the Pretty Horses. John Grady remains the magnificent horseman he always was, and he still dreams too much. On the ranch, he meets Billy Parham, whose own tragic sojourn through Mexico in The Crossing, the second book of the set, continues to quietly suffocate him. The two form a friendship that will nurture both but save neither from the destiny that McCarthy's characters always sense lurching to meet them.

Soaked in storm-heavy atmosphere but brightened by the ranch-hands' easy camaraderie and gentle humor, Cities of the Plain surprises with its sweetness. The awkward doomed-romance plot at the center of this tight, concise novel fails to convince, but, remarkably, does little to undercut the book's impact. What lingers here, and what matters, are the brooding, eerie portraits of the plains and the riders, glimpsed mostly alone but occasionally leaning together, who slip across them, over the horizon into memory. --Glen Hirshberg

Book Description

In this magnificent new novel, the National Book Award-winning author of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing fashions a darkly beautiful elegy for the American frontier.

The setting is New Mexico in 1952, where John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands. To the North lie the proving grounds of Alamogordo; to the South, the twin cities of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico. Their life is made up of trail drives and horse auctions and stories told by campfire light. It is a life that is about to change forever, and John Grady and Billy both know it.

The catalyst for that change appears in the form of a beautiful, ill-starred Mexican prostitute. When John Grady falls in love, Billy agrees--against his better judgment--to help him rescue the girl from her suavely brutal pimp. The ensuing events resonate with the violence and inevitability of classic tragedy. Hauntingly beautiful, filled with sorrow, humor and awe, Cities of the Plain is a genuine American epic.

Customer Reviews:

A fine book.......2007-06-20

This novel concludes the Border Trilogy. It follows protagonists from "All the Pretty Horses" and "The Crossings" through a final epoch. John Grady falls in love with an epileptic prostitute in Mexico and the men go down to try to rescue her. Grady intends to marry her.

This was the least interesting of the three books. McCarthy documents the day-to-day life of a ranching culture fast dieing out. Most of the dialogue lacks the brilliance of the previous books. Many of the scenes and much of the dialogue are simple give and take, with little revelation or philosophy. The epilogue is the exception. A brilliant conversation, falling in and out of reality, probing the meaning of death and purpose of life, takes place between an aged Billy Parham and a stranger. This final chapter is classic McCarthy.

Unlike the other books, which can be read on their own, much of the gravity of this book relies on previous books. The book would have little meaning to the reader who did not read the previous works. And this perhaps takes something away from the work itself, though I don't know how one could conclude a trilogy without falling back on the previous works.

But there is something else that the book lacks. It meanders for the first 150 pages, seemingly without purpose. John Grady is in love with a prostitute, the army is buying up ranch land, a way of life is dieing out.... The other books begin with a very clear direction, and though that direction shifts, there is always a strong sense of purpose to the narrative. The characters are driven and their actions and dialogue are inspired. There is tension. "Cities" falls short of that expectation. It is not a bad book, but it is not nearly as good as the others.

So much of the book is written in Spanish. There are entire paragraphs of conversation. McCarthy offer no explanation or restatement. I don't know what it would be like to read the book and not be able to read the conversations. I suspect that it would be annoying. But as a reader who can follow both conversations, the use of the Spanish seems authentic and almost expected.

masterpiece of the west..........2007-05-09

be sure to read ALL THE PRETTY HORSES and THE CROSSING before jumping into the third of this trilogy by Cormac McCarthy..it brings you John Grady Cole from PRETTY HORSES and Billy Parham from THE CROSSING..working as ranch hands in New Mexico..their life consists of trail drives, horse auctions and stories by the campfire...their lives change forever when John falls in love with a Mexican prostitute..Billy agrees to help resuce her and the ensuing events told in the masterful words of Cormac McCarthy make for a classic story that will stay with you for a long time..

The Measure of a Man.......2006-10-03

About 20 years ago, I bemoaned the lack of heroes in our society. The "anti-heroes", the good-bad guys had taken over and there were only the ones you love to hate in the spotlight. Cormack McCarthy wrote the first volume of his trilogy around the same time and I found some of the heroes I'd been looking for. McCarthy hasn't created his cowboy heroes, he communicated or maybe "channeled" them. It really seems to me that like some of the ancient storytellers, he serves as a medium for the ancient voices. That is not meant to minimize Mr. McCarthy's talent. No-one has been more successful as he in capturing the language and personalities of real cowboys.
"Cowboy" is more than a little ambiguous in our language. Some use the word to describe those who would take advantage of opportunities to scratch advantage from others without regard to conventional ethics or morality but for me and others, it suggests the rugged individualist who follows his own path, his own code, in the pursuit of his goals.
Maybe there's no place for cowboys in our current society and maybe that's too bad

Cities of the Plain.......2006-08-04

Incredible. One of the best novels I have ever had the pleasure to read. McCarthy is a master story teller. I have never read a book by him I did not fall in love with.

Bruce Dodson

Epic out of time.......2006-05-09

In recent years, a lot of people have noticed that book clubs demand a lot of books. No surprise, but the next conclusion is that the taste of book club audiences influence what gets published. I think this is why we have books like "the Devil wore Prada" that are soon followed by "Prep." This is why people who read "Evensong" soon pick up "Brick Lane" and "The Liars Club." My wife belongs to a book club. They have read all of these books.
If men participated in books clubs to the same extent that women do (and I wish that they did), then Cormac McCarthy novels would spawn their own genre.
Cities of the Plain is not about balancing your career with your relationships. It is not about good shoes or good sex. It is about important things like falling in love with the impossibly wrong girl. It is about vast open spaces that leave room for men to make decisions. (Maybe that is what it takes.) Also, it is about horses and guns and blood and honor.
This is oversimplification. There is a specific plot: John Grady Cole works with his friend Billy Parham on a ranch near the border with Mexico. John Grady falls in love with a prostitute at a brothel on the other side. He wants to marry her. Their union is ill-fated.
John Grady feels that he loves her. To him, his love is worthless if it not worth dying for. That is the question he faces.
I encourage people to read this book. It is the last in a trilogy. It was my favorite of all three.

Authors:

Authors

Authors