On Billy Parham’s second journey into Mexico, where he spends most of his time between the northern town of Casas Grandes and the southern town of Santa Ana de Babícora, these two relatively large towns have remained constant and verifiable between 1922 and the present. The smaller villages (or pueblos) had to be hunted down on Google Maps by "flying" close to the ground along the indicated route. Through this means, the pueblos of Mata Ortiz, San Jose (judged to be the existing pueblo of San Jose de Ermita), and La Pinta were located. The landscape is beautifully rendered and as active an agent in the narrative as any of the characters Billy and Boyd meet with. I'm leaving a big chunk of the action undescribed, most of it in fact, not because I believe in spoilers (I don't), but because I think that no nimbleness of paraphrase on my part could ever capture the emotional richness, vivid imagery, and sheer narrative power of this fine novel.

An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once. I gatti si muovevano, il fuoco scoppiettava nella stufa. Fuori, nel villaggio abbandonato, il silenzio più profondo. Fate exists, but it is also possible to shape it. We are not left without some control. In this there is implied a smidgen of hope.Alzó los ojos. De tan pálido su pelo parecía blanco. Por el aspecto parecía tener catorce años camino de una edad que nunca alcanzaría. Era como si hubiera estado allí sentado y Dios hubiese hecho los árboles y las rocas alrededor de él. Por encima de todo parecía estar lleno de una tristeza terrible. Como si albergara noticias de cierta pérdida horrenda que solo había llegado a oídos de él. Una inmensa tragedia, pero no debido a un hecho, un incidente o un acontecimiento, sino por el modo de ser del mundo.”

What role does hospitality play in this book? Is there any relation between the novel’s scenes of hospitality and its moments of violence? The Crossing is a novel that succeeds in giving meaning to an existence that typically goes unnoticed as we move through our scheduled lives. We may, on occasion, sense this way of life as we force our presence on the physical world. It’s life as it always was but humanity has pushed it aside into a part of the world that now only exists between our beliefs and our actions. It is within this part of the world that life exists, for the sake of life itself. This is where we began, during the time that preceded our understanding of things, before things had names. Ambientato negli stessi territori del precedente, il confine col Messico: anche se questa volta la parte americana è un po’ più a ovest, il New Mexico, invece del Texas (anche se poi la copertina direi che mostra Zabriskie Point – ma magari all’Einaudi pensano che tutti i deserti sono uguali). The people in The Crossing are characterized by a kind of psychological opaqueness. Since we rarely know their direct thoughts, we must infer their motives from their words and actions, which often seem cryptic or irrational. How do we come to know these characters? What vision of human nature does their opaqueness suggest? 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 ]

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Stavo cercando prove dell'intervento di Dio nel mondo. Ero arrivato a credere che quell'intervento fosse dettato dall'ira e credevo che gli uomini non si fossero mai interrogati a sufficienza sui miracoli della distruzione. Sui disastri di una certa grandezza. Credevo vi fossero prove del fatto che tutto ciò era stato tenuto in scarsa considerazione. Pensavo che Lui non si sarebbe dato premura di cancellare tutti i segni del proprio intervento. Avevo molta voglia di sapere. Pensavo che magari Lui si divertisse addirittura a lasciare degli indizi. Bill Parham sale a cazar una loba, y cuando vuelve a casa, semanas o meses después, el mundo que él conocía como tal, está hecho trizas. Éste es quizá un resumen exagerado de todo lo que acontece en una novela como ésta, totalmente desbordante y antológica, donde ocurren muchas más situaciones límite, pero es este principio entre la loba y Bill, el que sentará las bases de todo lo que tendrá que vivir este chico a lo largo de la novela. Voglio solamente dire a chi è arrivato fino in fondo, che questi libri vi distruggono. Non vi cambiano la vita, non vi salvano. Vi distruggono. La bellezza ha quest'effetto. Sono qui a causa di una certa persona. Sono venuto a ricostruirne i passi. Forse a vedere se per caso vi fosse un percorso alternativo. Ma qui non si trova niente. Le cose separate dalle loro storie non hanno senso. Sono semplici forme. Di una certa dimensione e di un certo colore. Di un certo peso. Quando ne abbiamo perso il significato, non hanno più neppure un nome. La storia, d'altro canto, non può mai venir separata dal luogo al quale appartiene, perché essa è quel luogo. Ecco che cosa si poteva trovare qui. Il corrido. La storia. E come tutti i corridos, in fin dei conti raccontava soltanto una storia, perché ce n'è solo una da raccontare.

Critics disagree about the greater significance of Billy's encounters with the wolf. Wallis Sanborn argues that “[a]lthough noble, Parham’s mission to return the captured she-wolf to Mexico is abjectly flawed . . . [it is] nothing more than a man violently controlling a wild animal through the guise of pseudo-nobility” (143). [4] Raymond Malewitz argues that the wolf's "literary agency" becomes visible when Billy's way of thinking about the wolf conflicts with the way the narrator describes the creature. [5] Billy’s furthest trek south was to the town of Cuauhtemoc, which was verified as once being called San Antonio. San Antonio is plotted on the 1922 map. Billy’s path to Cuauhtemoc and subsequently to La Nortena, however, are speculative. Non so. Qualcosa. Qualcosa di imprevisto. Qualcosa fuori posto. Qualcosa non vero o improbabile. Una traccia nella polvere. Un gingillo caduto a terra. Non una causa. No di certo. Non una causa. Le cause non fanno altro che moltiplicarsi e conducono al caos. Volevo sapere cos'aveva in mente. Non potevo credere che distruggesse la propria chiesa senza alcuna ragione. When Billy finally catches the animal, he harnesses her and, instead of killing her, determines to return her to the mountains of Mexico where he believes her original home is located. He develops a deep affection for and bond with the wolf, risking his life to save her on more than one occasion.For the enmity of the world was newly plain to him that day and cold and ameliorate as it must be to all who have no longer cause except themselves to stand against it. The tone is dark. Billy suffers many hardships. His motivations are not always apparent. Sometimes he just “decides to do something” without thinking it through, and the consequences are dire. Agli uomini sottrae parole, li racconta in maniera silenziosa, sia perché sono sempre umani laconici, sia perché risparmia descrizioni: eppure, lasciando il lettore a intuire, approfondisce più che con l’uso delle parole. Enormously affecting. A boy and his father set out to trap a wolf that is preying on their cattle. The man who had trapped them in the past, who opened the plains for countless thousands of cattle to graze is now dead, and the wolves have begun to return to their old hunting grounds from their retreat in Mexico. The father and son try to take up the trapping in the manner of the past master. The Crossing is about many things: the three journeys over four years into Mexico taken by the young Billy Parham; his own crossing into manhood; the crossing of the dead into ever-lasting life, etc. The series of tests Parham sets himself suggest any number of Old World quest narratives. There are some rough scenes in this book: man’s cruelty to man, man’s cruelty to animals, and man’s cruelty to himself. Those are themes that run through this novel, but in the people’s stories and in their actions there are also many acts of kindness, of compassion, and of caring.