Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2876 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1056 pages

Synopsis
"The Border Trilogy" chronicles the coming-of-age of two young men in the south west of America. John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, two cowboys of the old school, are poised on the edge of a world about to change forever. Their journeys across the border into Mexico, each an adventure fraught with fear and pain, mark a passage into adulthood, and eventual salvation. McCarthy's clean, hard language evokes the physicality of an unforgiving landscape, the determination of the characters who roam within it, and the vanishing world of the Old West, where blood, violence and dying are conditions of life. Beautiful and brutal, filled with sorrow and humour, "The Border Trilogy" is both an epic love story an exhilarating elegy for the American Frontier. "In these three fierce, desolate, beautiful novels, McCarthy has created a masterpiece" - "Sunday Times". "A landmark in American literature" - "Guardian".

Customer Reviews

Just plain wonderful
As others have said the lack of punctuation is odd to begin with but does make sense.
The stories just flow and you find yourself "held" as with all good books.
However, the stories capture the bleakness of the life. You will not find Hollywood in these pages. The characters are real, often frightening, even if they are doing apparently little. The potential for violence is there, though these books are far from blood lettings.

I know that a film was attempted of one of these books, with Matt Damon but never gained much box office success. A bit like Lord of the Rings in that various attempts were made before the Peter Jackson Trilogy. I suspect that for the right director these stories will become a fantastic film but at the moment the books themselves are astounding.

The Border Trilogy
Cormac McCarthy is a unique voice in American fiction. His flowing polysyndetic prose forms a poetic vision of the American West that is almost Biblical in its rythmns. The Border Trilogy is a fable about a last generation of cowboys - John Grady Cole and Billy Parnham - drawn into Mexico on dark odysseys that belie the bloodthirsty beginnings of their own country. It is a voyage that goes way beyond a revision of the Western genre and the re-evaluation of its good vs evil paradym, but into the heart of myth and legend itself - in particular that rooted at the heart of the American experience. Its use of parable, its sense of impending apocalypse and its strangely histrionic dialogue amount to a kind of imagined Biblical testament to the evolution of American culture. A landmark work of literature that left this reader feeling forever changed.

one of my best books ,ever!
all the pretty horses is incredibly irritating at the beginning- a lack of all punctuation -but you very quickly get used to this, and subsequently all the other books you read seem overloaded with it.this book has the very best fight description (though the prison scene in tom wolfe's 'a man in full' runs a very close second), of any book i've read. this is an incredible, exhilarating read; people who object to the spanish bits they don't get.....well, that's probably the point-the book is not meant to be obvious.