Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy

This book ended Cormac McCarthy's Western Trilogy with it's release in 1998. McCarthy over my reading of this set of books has become one of my favorite authors. It is impossible to read his work without seeing a straight line from Hemingway to McCarthy and for someone who considers Hemingway his favorite author this is a road I am glad to travel.

In Cities of the Plain we revisit a character from each of the first two books in the series, John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham from The Crossing. The year is 1952 and though Parham is nine years older than the nineteen year old Cole the two have developed a brotherly relationship. Certainly with Billy's loss of his brother Boyd in the previous story this in understandable.

The major events in this book take place South of the border in Ciudad Juarez a border town across from El Paso. As the boys from the ranch go across the border one night and go into a brothel John's friends encourage him to partake of one of the women who catches his eye. He declines however and as the story we see the cowboys doing all kinds of cowboy things. Roping cattle, catching wild dogs bringing down calves keeps the boys busy. Unbeknownst to his friends however John Grady Cole has returned south of the border and has started spending time with the young prostitute who has moved to a different brothel, one owned by a very dark character named Eduardo.

Soon Billy Parham and the rest of his friends know that John has a problem and it is becoming bigger and bigger. No longer in lust, he now is in love and he wants to bring this girl out of the brothel and marry her. Eduardo however has no desire to let that happen, he will not let Cole buy her out, it is all complicated by the fact that Eduardo is in love with the young prostitute as well.

This book captures all of the glory of the first two books and brings the characters into the twentieth century. McCarthy's talent is on display here on every page. The scenes that he depicts are beautiful and clear. The relationship between the cowboys is so attractive to someone watching in modern times, the simplicity, the honesty, and the lack of sarcasm and easy rudeness is as attractive as the vivid scenery that the author describes.

Other characters in the book are deeper than any we have seen even in the first two books, at least in terms of secondary characters. On his travels South of the border John Grady meets and establishes a friendship with an elderly blind musician. He also is reverential in his dealings with Mr. Johnson, the elderly patriarch of the ranching family for whom he works. Sitting on the porch with Mr. Johnson as he has wandered out in his long underwear and hearing the stories of the old man's days on the plains driving cattle north, days that he calls the best of his life.

Billy while not the major character in the story, is still a big part of the story and his ultimate decency makes him the most unsullied character in the story. He is a friend in need and a friend indeed as cliched as that is. When the book ends the sorrow he feels over the end we see coming is palpable.

Upon the completion of the book we are given an epilogue. In this we see what happened to Billy in the second half of the century. He travels the country, finding ways to earn a living, as the ranching and cowboy life that he has known ends under his feet. In the final scenes of the epilogue Billy in his seventies is staying dry under an overpass when he spies an old Indian man on the opposite side. The man comes to sit with them and as they talk he tells Billy a story about a dream he had and a dream the character in his dream had. In the end he offers thoughts and questions about what is life and where is reality and where does it end. As McCarthy spins the vision we are allowed to be amused by Billy, even in his seventies playing the innocent asking questions that have more to do with the logistics of the vision than the hidden deep meanings. Later we are told that Billy continues to wander until following the river he is taken in a by a family who find in him something special, he greets the children as they come home from school, teaches them how to ride and feels a level of being home one senses he has not felt for a long time.

As the story of Billy finally comes to an end he is having a very vivid dream and wakes the wife of the family with whom he is staying. She asks him if he would like a drink and reading Billy, an almost eighty year old man still uncomfortable with women saying " Yes Ma'am " with his best manners one is struck by the anomaly of one of the cowboys of lifetimes ago coming to the end of his life in the new millennium. He tells the woman of his dream of his brother Boyd, long dead, and says he wishes everyday that he could spend some time with him, see him ride, one last time. After the woman settles him he tells her that " He is not who she thinks he is." The wife counters will a self assured " We know just what you are." By the end of this story we do to.

Billy, is one of the most enduring characters of twentieth century literature, and perhaps McCarthy's greatest creation. Understated in everything he does, and a hero we would all be proud to know. Yes Billy we all know just who you are.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

The Crossing is the second of the three volume Border Trilogy from Cormac McCarthy. As I read many books at once I must confess that this one took awhile. The book centers on a young man named Billy Parham. Billy, his younger brother Boyd and his parents live on a small farm in New Mexico.

This is a difficult book. There is much meandering thought and much wisdom being imparted from the various characters.

As the book begins Billy and his Father are attempting to trap a wolf that has come up across the border from Mexico and is killing local livestock. McCarthy has been compared frequently to Hemingway and in the writing of Billy's attempts to trap the wolf one sees it. The detail given to each step is exquisite. I must confess many of the terms fall on deaf ears to me but i was able to follow what he was doing.

Billy cannot catch the wolf despite his best efforts. Finally one evening he sets a trap, under the remains of a fire that has been cookfire for some travelers the night before. As he tells his father this his father warns him to return at first light and hope that no one else attempts to use the fire-sight. And he goes to bed and the authors states " that he never saw him again." A very jarring line as one has no idea what is to come.

That morning when Billy arrives he has caught the wolf. He is transfixed, the wolf is caught by the foot but Billy watches her and cannot bring himself to shoot her. For the next fifty pages of the book we see Billy taking the wolf to Mexico. Muzzled, leashed, and taught to follow along on a rope behind the horse Billy travels until his story takes a turn he did not wish. He wanted to return the wolf to the wild, suffice to say for Billy Parham things often do not happen as planned.

Along the way in this section of the book and others Billy meets many different people, most of them Mexican. He meets good people and bad but the good outweigh the bad by far. One of the most compelling and noticeable parts of the book is that, for all the hard luck and sadness that comes to Billy , most of the people of the Mexico he travels through are overwhelmingly generous and kind. Travelers are fed and housed as a matter of fact to be taken as normal.

When the wolf part of the story comes to it's conclusion Billy returns home, slowly and with no great plan, and finds his home abandoned. Billy learns that his father and mother were murdered by horse thieves. Billy, in his stoic way gets his brother Boyd from family friends that have been taking care of him and they head out on the trail. They never come to a spoken decision about their plans but yet they know where they are going.

They cross the border in Arizona and then their story beings. In Mexico again. The same frustration occurs in this book as the previous, many of the characters speak in untranslated Spanish. In cases where necessary I had to use my Spanish to English translator. Still the payoff is worth it.

If you are looking for the typical Western with quick pace and easily resolved problems this is not the book for you. McCarthy's characters do not speak much but they think much and we as readers are given a glimpse of those thoughts on life and death and all the other thoughts we all have late at night.

Along the way Billy and Boyd meet some characters easily remembered. To advance the themes of the story these characters often have much to say, and much that they say is shaded in gray, with duplicate meanings and understandings.

This man is an exquisite writer. It is not easy. It is work. McCarthy however writes characters as deep and thoughtful and affecting as any you will find.

Be ready to take time. Take breaks if you need. I finished two books between the wolf section and Billy's return home, I even contemplated giving up. I did not and I was greatly rewarded. This is a fantastic book. A book that will stick with your memory for a long, long time.

I have a couple of biographies to read but I am looking forward to finishing the series soon. It is something to be on a shelf with Hemingway.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the more polarizing of the " great" twentieth century authors. To be honest I have never been a fan of his work. I have attempted to read a story here or there and have often found him too out there for my taste.

Recently I did read a couple of short story collections that were free on Ibooks, included in those were Harrison Bergeron. This story, which I reviewed earlier, was one that I originally read in college. After reading these stories recently I was more receptive to trying Vonnegut again and where better to begin than with his most popular and certainly his most controversial work Slaughterhouse Five. Our friends at Amazon made this easy by making this book the Kindle Daily Deal a couple of weeks back.

The story centers on Billy Pilgrim. An optometrist from Illium, Illinois Billy is a former prisoner of war who survived the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany at the end of World War II. Billy has come unstuck in time. The story is told in a non linear fashion because Billy's life is anything but linear.

Throughout the story we see Billy as a young boy, we see him in the war, we see his capture, his time in a POW camp with British soldiers, and of course his fateful time in Dresden. This experience in Dresden changes his life and haunts him. Billy returns home and marries a successful optometrist daughter, he goes to college and unexpectedly becomes a very successful optometrist. Billy is the only survivor of a plane crash and perhaps strangest of all Billy is captured by aliens. The aliens treat him well but put him in the zoo on their planet and mate him with an Earth female.

Throughout the book Billy visits these scenes in his life as well as others. It takes some getting used to. I had tried the book before but at the time needed it to be more literal and less of a satire. However taken now the book is actually quite good.

Vonnegut himself was a prisoner of war in Europe and he was greatly affected by the firebombing of Dresden, perhaps the most controversial part of the European War on the Allied side. The book uses some interesting techniques including Vonnegut addressing the reader in both the first and last chapters.

The most striking and recognizable part of the book is the authors use of the phrase " So it goes." This is used any time the subject is death or dieing. Over 100 times do we see this.

This book takes a little work but it is not a hard read. Nothing like the Cormac McCarthy book I am currently reading and hope to finish very soon. This book just requires you to let the story come to you as it comes to you.

Once you do this you surely see the appeal of a book that by attempts to show that there is no way to write a coherent book about a massacre which is what he considered Dresden to be.

I am glad I attempted it again.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

I believe I attempted to read this book over a decade ago. At the time it could not hold my interest. My reading habits have changed greatly in the last ten to fifteen years and with a more literary bent now I wished to try again.

In this book by McCarthy we meet John Grady Cole a sixteen year old in Texas in 1949. His Grandfather has died and his Mother, now divorced from his father has no interest in keeping her Father's ranch. Cole has never wanted to be anything more than a rancher and implores his Mother to let him run the ranch to no avail.

Faced with moving to town Cole instead sets off with his best friend Lacey Rawlins traveling by horseback south through Texas. Crossing into Mexico they intend to travel South to work as cowboys.

Just before crossing the Rio Grande they meet a young man who calls himself Jimmy Blevins. He rides a big bay horse which it seems doubtful is his and though he claims to be sixteen does not appear to be past 13. Eventually he falls in with the boys, much to Lacey's disgust.

After losing his horse and gun in a thunderstorm Blevins convinces the boys to go with him into a nearby town to see if his horse landed there. He did, they steal it back and are chased. The boys and Blevins split and they continue South eventually finding work on a large ranch. Thier expert horse skills find them both work, Cole as a horse trainer.

The ranch owner's daughter the bueatiful Alejandor tempts Cole and they fall into an affair.

The story continues. Betrayal, prison, proving oneself, love, love lost, revenge and eventually isolation.

McCarthy writes beautifully. His prose is as descriptive as will be found. It reminded me instantly of Hemingway. Short declaritive sentences and then again the description of nature and scenery so evocative as to place you there. I was pleased to see after reading and having the Hemingway thoughts that other reveiwers mentioned the same thing. Certainly anyone with experience with both can see the similarity. For my money being compared to Hemingway is never a bad thing.

One unfortunate in the book was the use of Spanish conversation with no translation. Not knowing Spanish I am sure I missed a few things. I do not believe it was integral to the story, often it seemed to be very simple conversation.

Still that in itself lent an air of additional authenticity to the book and the story itself is a strong one. Always liking Western imagary this was a book I greatly enjoyed. I look forward to the rest of The Border Triology.

The Angel Esmerelda by Dom Delillo

Dom Delillo is considered one of the best novelists of his generation. I have read a couple of his books and was particularly impressed with Underworld. Still, even in reading that I was not overwhelmed thinking this was the voice of a generation.

With the recent release of the above named collection of short stories and with my being a big fan of short fiction I was pleased to get this from the library.

I was sorely disappointed. It was not bad, it was just not interesting. I read five of the stories and here two days later can remember nothing of import. Having learned that with so much out there to read that is good that I must be ruthless I have tossed it aside.

At the same time I am reading Cormac Mccarthy and Sullivan's Pulphead and Delillo suffers in comparison.

So much good to read and Delillo suffers terribly in comparison.