Cities of the Plain
-
- 5,99 €
-
- 5,99 €
Publisher Description
Two men marked by boyhood adventures now stand together, forced to confront a country changing beyond recognition. Cities of the Plain brings Cormac McCarthy's legendary Border Trilogy to its brutal, inevitable conclusion.
'The completed trilogy emerges as a landmark in American literature' – Guardian
1952, New Mexico. John Grady Cole, last seen in All the Pretty Horses, works as a ranch hands alongside Billy Parnham, of The Crossing. These are the dying days of the American frontier.
From the north, the military encroaches upon the ranch. To the south are the mountains of Mexico, the pull of which prove irresistible to John Grady. And so it is that, when he falls in love with a sex worker south of the border, events are set into motion that will prove as dangerous as they are unstoppable.
'This haunting, deeply felt novel completes one of the literary masterworks of the 1990s' – Telegraph
'Like a slow-acting hallucinogen, the book has managed to transform a Texas boy of sixteen looking for adventure into a mysterious figure that augurs the destruction of the world' – Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room
Cities of the Plain is the final novel in the Border Trilogy. It is preceded by the first two volumes: All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing.
Praise for Cormac McCarthy
‘McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute’ – Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren
'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' – Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series
'[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' – Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain
Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This volume concludes McCarthy's Border Trilogy--the first two books being All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award in 1992, and The Crossing, published to great acclaim in '94. Devoted McCarthy readers will know not to expect any neat or dramatic resolution in Cities of the Plain, for the author is more of a poet than a novelist, more interested in wedding language to experience in successive moments than in building and setting afloat some narrative ark. Cities, like the other books, takes place sometime shortly after WWII along the Texas-Mexico border. John Grady Cole, the young, horse-savvy wanderer from All the Pretty Horses, and Billy Parham, who traveled in search of stolen horses with his younger brother in The Crossing, are now cowhands working outside El Paso. John Grady falls in love with Magdalena, a teenage prostitute working in Juarez, Mexico; determined to marry her, he runs afoul of her pimp, Eduardo. That is basically the narrative. Along the way, McCarthy treats the reader to the most fabulous descriptions of sunrises, sunsets, the ways of horses and wild dogs, how to patch an inner tube. The cowboys engage in almost mythically worldly-wise, laconic dialogues that are models of concision and logic. Although there is less of it here than in the earlier books, McCarthy does include a few of his familiar seers, old men and blind men who speak in prophetic voices. Their words serve as earnest if cryptic instructions to the younger lads and seem to unburden the novelist of his vision of America and its love affair with free will. If a philosophy of life were to be extracted from these tales, it would seem to be that we are fated to be whatever we are, that what we think are choices are really not; that betrayals of the heart are always avenged; and that following one's heart is a guarantee of nothing. There is not much solace in McCarthy-land; there is only the triumph of prose, endlessly renewed, forever in search of a closure it will not find save in silence. 200,000 first printing; BOMC alternate; simultaneous audio, read by Brad Pitt.
