Border Bildungsroman

I purchased All The Pretty Horses and The Worst Hard Time for my dad as Christmas presents this year. He's an on and off reader but I thought these two stories might appeal to him. He plowed through each of them and sent Horses to me. My only previous exposure to Cormac McCarthy was my reading of No Country For Old Men right before I saw the movie. I thought the story was interesting but not captivating; it seemed to me like nothing much more than a dialogue. A reviewer at Salon summed it best when he said that if someone decided to write a screenplay of the novel, they would have a fairly straightforward task ahead of them.

Anyway, I had heard good things about the Border Trilogy from Wayne so I started Horses with high expectations (I also had a hankering for fiction since I'd been spending much of my time with Rousseau and William Whyte, both of whom are extremely interesting but a little dry). It started out a little slow and the accents irritated me somewhat, as did the terse broken, but grammatically correct, Spanish. But soon after the boys crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico, I was embroiled. I think it was during Blevins' account of his family history of being struck by lightning that I really started paying attention. All of a sudden the book was elevated to mythological proportions. Themes of life and love and morality continued throughout the remainder of the novel. If I were writing bylines, I'd say something like "they crossed the river as boys; they returned as men."

I'm going to Elliott Bay tomorrow to sell back this copy and use the credit to by the Trilogy in one volume. When I finish it, my count for the year will be to 26 books.