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| | Location: Home » Mexicans » McCarthy, Cormac » The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, Cities of the Plain (Everyman's Library) | November 21, 2008 |
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| The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, Cities of the Plain (Everyman's Library) | 
 enlarge | Author: Cormac Mccarthy
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Category: Book
List Price: $36.00
Buy New: $20.52
You Save: $15.48 (43%)
Buy New/Used from $19.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  (42 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1690
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 1040
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.3 x 2
ISBN: 0375407936
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375407932
ASIN: 0375407936
Publication Date: September 28, 1999
Release Date: September 28, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Border Trilogy January 7, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I bought this book for a Christmas present. I have read these three books twice and found them just as exciting the second time around. The author is a wonderful writer and I wanted my son to have the same enjoyable experience reading them as I did.
 Adventure! January 4, 2007
4 out of 13 found this review helpful
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 January 4, 2007
5 out of 11 found this review helpful
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 May 20, 2006
11 out of 20 found this review helpful
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 April 4, 2006
56 out of 58 found this review helpful
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.
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