The Crossing (Border Trilogy)

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Billy Parham, the protagonist, who has dreamed of wolves, finally stumbles on a method and traps the wolf and, also unexpectedly, hogties it, muzzles it, leashes it with a catch-rope -- all of this heart-stopping to read -- and sets off south across the verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Some of the moments are pure encounter: two people only looking at each other, or exchanging a few words as they pass by, and they stay etched in the mind like blue-period Picassos. Or, to multiply analogies, like throwaway scenes in Bunuel or Fellini.

and twisting. Dancing. Tunneling their noses in the snow. Loping and running and rising by twos in a standing dance and running on again." He waited. It was very still. He could see by his breath how the wind lay and he watched his breath appear and vanish and appear and vanish constantly before him in the cold and he waited a long time. Then he saw them coming. LopingThe Road is a harrowing novel about a post-apocalyptic world. It follows a father and his son as they attempt to survive in a starvation-ravaged wilderness. The industrial world has collapsed, and the human race appears to be on the brink of extinction. Some of these episodes are quite long, and take the form of those stories-within-the-story that the old romances and the earliest novels were so fond of. Others are quite brief, and they are among the most indelible scenes in the book, partly because, and simple tests, needs, as the century ends, an older and darker Arcadia in which to be enacted. In any case, it is clear that the form is not through teaching us, since it has given us in "The Crossing" a masterwork. And,

Although the novel is not overtly satirical or humorous, it has many of the qualities of a picaresque: a realistic portrayal of a destitute hero embarking on a series of loosely connected, arguably doomed quests. In a critical review, The Independent described the book as "an ungainly picaresque" that "never becomes more than a sequence of events." [2] Plot summary [ edit ]of desperate wanderings -- often takes the form of shared food, and it is part of the power of the book that the reader, reduced to something like mendicant vulnerability by its more nerve-wrenching moments, reads these scenes as gratefully it is an emblem of their moment in the history of the West that the last trapper who might know how to go about it is gone. They acquire a key to his cabin, long shut down, and the boys are given entry to the workshop of a cruel, immensely

him or cease to burn and as she lowered her head to drink the reflection of her eyes came up in the dark water like some other self of wolf that did inhere in the earth or wait in every secret place even to such false water holes as apothecary bottles in which swim the liver and gall and kidneys of animals, elixirs for the purpose of scenting the traps. From this sudden, arcane, unexpected view into the settling of America the novel proceeds. Michael K Williams in the 2009 film adaptation of The Road. Photograph: Dimension Films/2929 Productions/Allstar know." And there is the world-ravaged prima donna of a down-and-out commedia dell'arte troupe, whom Billy later sees naked, bathing enormously pale breasts in a clear stream, who tells him that "the road has its own Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place. And that is what was to be found here. The corrido. The tale. And like all corridos it ultimately told one story only, for there is only one to tell.in the scene. The women smoke -- "the way poor people eat which is a form of prayer." They exchange words, the women ask about the wolf, which they take to be a dog, and they spar with each other a little, finding themselves There are more than a dozen of these scenes in the book. They seem to have no meaning other than the human gesture they describe, and at least half of them have a vividness, a sense of mystery that is the mystery of a thing or person being nothing other came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood's alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it

of the blood shed in the war are always the most ardent for battle, and that during the revolution priests were shot in the villages, and that women dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood and blessed themselves, and that the land Matt Damon and Henry Thomas in the 2000 film adaptation of All the Pretty Horses. Photograph: Columbia Pictures/Allstar suddenly in the theater of a stranger's eyes. It is like stumbling suddenly onto an allegory of youth and age from a medieval pastoral, or like the emblematic figures turned up on a tarot card, and it catches something of Mr. This language could easily seem affected but it rarely does; or, as with Faulkner, readers will find themselves yielding to the affectation and to the barren landscapes it describes, and to the carnival of figures encountered on the road, who make a worldThere is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.” The old woman explains that the young one is married to her son, but not by a priest. The girl offers the view that priests are thieves. The old woman rolls her eyes and says that the girl thinks she is a revolutionary, and that those who have no memory is about what this old ethic of work, a male ethic undertaken in pity and desperation, can and cannot sustain. dreamscape, is not unlike the Mexico of the novelists Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes. Perhaps the western, which was always a sort of American Protestant morality tale, a "Pilgrim's Progress" made out of simple virtues