Cities of the Plain (Tpb) by Mccarthy Cormac (EPUB)

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User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The first thing you notice about this book is McCarthy’s language. Ignore the lack of quotation marks, etc., and just enjoy his back and forth conversations between *cowboys* – an utterly fascinating glimpse into a world of its own. It took a number of pages to “get” McCarthy’s cadence, and then I’d often go back and read sentences or even passages over for their perfect phrasing, all in a language readable but at the same time foreign to me. It’s a world fading in post WWII and the point is made a bit too bluntly by having the Army take over the ranch that serves as the main setting.Unfortunately, I read All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing quite a while before this book, so I didn’t remember John Grady Cole and Billy Parham. But they are strong central characters. I found John Grady particularly fascinating, feeling a bit wistful that he connects with horses more naturally than people.A sense of foreboding builds throughout the book about John Grady, and his mission – indeed, his obsession – to save and love Magdalena, a prostitute he meets across the border, a frail soul too young, frightened, damaged both physically and psychically. Mistakes are made, terrible mistakes, in John Grady’s plan to spirit her out of Mexico that propel the novel towards its truly gripping, dramatic finale. I won’t hint at any spoilers, but the action scenes are superbly rendered.For me, the book could have ended a bit before its actual conclusion. I frankly lost interest in the final conversations in which McCarthy philosophizes, post narrative so to speak. Nevertheless, I’m compelled to go back and re-read the first books in his exceptional trilogy.

⭐In this final book of of Cormac MacCarthy’s “Border Trilogy”, the author unites John Grady Cole of “All the Pretty Horses” and Billy Parham of “The Crossing.”He gives the reader what they previously wanted for both; then come the twists.The culmination is satisfying if not ideal.If you want ideal: read a fairy tale.In John Grady Coles culminating scene, MacCarthy’s depiction of the Mexican culture as viewed thru North American eyes is the most astute depiction of the fantasy North Americans project onto Mexican culture I have heard.This third book is an satisfying and worthwhile read.Hats off to MacCarthy.

⭐”Quinquagesima Sunday in the predawn dark she lit a candle and set the candledish on the floor beside the bureau where the light would not show beneath the doorway to the outer hall.”In the historic calendar of western Christianity, the Sunday before Ash Wednesday – the beginning of Lent – is known as Quinquagesima (50 days). From antiquity the church has assigned an episode from the life of Christ as recorded in Luke chapter 18 to be read on that day. Here, in so many words, Jesus tells his disciples that it’s time for his work to end; he will go to Jerusalem, confront evil and be killed. For their part, the disciples fail to grasp his meaning, though the fault it would seem is not entirely their own. Luke writes, “This saying was hidden from them.”Throughout his Border Trilogy, McCarthy has been examining the nature of things which are unable to ever be fully known, things hidden from view. Those things which, despite our inability to put a name to them or our best failed attempts to measure them, possess an ancient power. “Immanence” is what the ancients came to call it: the thought that a thing can somehow be real in the world and yet transcend that world. The idea has been troubling the minds of mystics of every progressive culture for at least five millennia, if the record is to be believed. From Abraham through Hesiod and Homer, first-century Buddhist holy men, through the ante-Nicene Fathers up through Spinoza and finding its way into the lyrics of Tom Waits. Things which are even if you can’t quite put a finger on them. Cormac McCarthy captures this spirit with an eloquence rarely witnessed in American letters.”A man was coming down the road driving a donkey piled high with firewood. In the distance the churchbells had begun. The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of the claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transiencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.”Just prior to that incident in Cities of the Plain, John Grady has left a Mexican bordello where he has – he is convinced – found love. It is characteristic of the Border Trilogy that characters cross boundaries both geographic and mythic, leading to encounters both real and transcendent of reality. Transgression, by definition, is the result: borders crossed that must otherwise remain inviolate.And one begins to question whether this miracle of a writer is going soft; McCarthy’s view in Cities of the Plain is an unapologetic and steadily backward gaze at a world that once was, though perhaps, in reality, a world that never was and could never be. The novel is surely his most romantic work, inhabited by a protagonist resolved to fulfill a calling, quixotic as it may be. What calling? Beauty and its redemption from that which would corrupt it into something unrecognizable. In other hands this would turn into unbearable melodrama. McCarthy lets it be what it is, and lets the wheels of his characteristically dark-hearted mill grind out its result with the material it’s fed.And so John Grady sets out, determined to free a Mexican prostitute – Magdalena, by name – take her to wife, and set up home in the Jarilla hills of west Texas. His heroism, in a decidedly Greek cast, is marked by the sense that perishing in battle for a noble cause is a fate preferable than that of having one’s convictions called into question after death.Hamlet’s admonition to Horatio – “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” – echoes here, as McCarthy balances masterfully the slow burn of a Texas ranch hand attending to the mundane, yet all the while permeating this with the understanding that more vital matters await. Indeed, once John Grady’s rescue plan has been hatched the intervening episodes transition into that inevitable ticking clock of subject-verb-object prose. Sentence after sentence the likes of “he swipes the plate with the last of the tortilla and eats it and takes his breakfast dishes to the sink”. Time passes audibly. The cowboy’s “almost blunted purpose” is palpable. McCarthy stokes the urge to jump up from one’s chair in frustration and shout at the book “go get the girl already”, though the suspicion – if not the knowledge – is strong of where that will lead.And so we are left with the quite intentional imagery of Quinquagesima Sunday, the final preparation of the devout for the hell about to be unleashed upon both the evil and the just, of lambs led to slaughter.The urge to ask why the world is this way is nearly as old as the world itself. McCarthy’s encouragement here comes with the act of dogged perseverance that marks those who inhabit his worlds. In Cities of the Plain it is clear through their actions that the desire is strong in these characters for those things which might represent order , yet the writing is never sentimental. The naturalism of McCarthy’s prose provides us with characters of a hard reality, men familiar with suffering, women acquainted with grief. Characters caught in the insularity of an impersonal universe, a persistent, dark night of the soul, but one marked by fleeting sparks of light of an ineluctable beauty.There is so much in this universe, which despite our righteous desire to uncover its meaning, can only be known when it is set to be known, set to be revealed. Only a fool would set himself to believe otherwise. Highly recommended.

⭐Cormac McCarthy is one of our greatest American writers, if not one of the greatest writers in prose period, in the tradition of Faulkner and Conrad. His fluidity and mastery of the language are unexcelled, as well as his sense of locale and character. His languaging will make you see life and narrative in a new way. Some of his descriptions are beyond description! This particular book is charming, with lots of touching sequences, as well as some harrowing ones, and, as always with Cormac, not for the faint of heart. The ending is poignant and moving, tying together a whole life and a whole subculture of late American cowboys in a subtle and beautifully moving manner. A masterpiece. But what else would you expect from this author? (I also highly recommend All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, No Country for Old Men (which produced the impactful and faithful adaptation by the Coen Brothers in the movie of the same name) and, for the really courageous, Blood Meridian, undoubtedly his unparalleled masterpiece, possibly the most disturbing as well as the most beautiful book I have ever read).

⭐Cities of the Plain concludes McCarthy’s much-lauded Border Trilogy. Once again we are in the sparse, unforgiving territory of the US/Mexico border, bringing Billy Parham’s story into the 1950s and the wider social change that took place. As usual, it is a book of brilliant, cinematic writing, steeped in the power of landscape and animals, but also spoiled in places by semi-religious and surreal pontificating that takes the story nowhere.

⭐Frrom boyhood when I used to watch Westerns with my Dad on a 12″ screen B&W TV I have been a lifelong aficionado of novels and films about the American West. I love Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, having read each of the 3 novels in sequence, I have no doubt that I will re-read them. McCarthy’s use of language is brilliant, poetic, and my advice is to savour his writing, resisting the temptation to turn the pages too quickly while following the action. The novel deals with time-honoured themes of loyalty, courage, love and death. Buy Cities of the Plain.

⭐As the final book of the trilogy, Cities of the Plain is perhaps slighter than the first two stories – but no less moving and tragic for that. McCarthy offers us little hope in the stories of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, both essentially good characters who suffer for their love of horses and the cowboy way of life. The ending is somewhat arcane and you need to stick with it to discover the message of the entire trilogy. I can give this work no higher endorsement than to say that I started riding lessons as a result of the way he describes man’s complicated relationship with the horse!

⭐This is the concluding book in the trilogy, and is a superbly eloquent telling of the final part of the story of the central characters. It is achingly beautiful in the simple language and un fussy prose used to tell the tale of exhausting physical work, grand landscape, and men of few words. I was lost when it was finished.

⭐McCarthy brings everything to life, I have never been there and probably never will, but I see the countryside and feel its emptiness and small kindnesses and daily struggle

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