Seventh meeting of the seventh edition of the Reading Group "The Garden"
"Beyond the Border" by Cormac McCarthy.
Reading and commentary by Angelo Australi
The work:
When fate offers him a chance to cross the border, young Billy Parham makes his choice and directs the horse to Mexico. In a fateful moment, like Conrad's Lord Jim, Billy ushers in his own story. It is the threshold of World War II, and Billy and Boyd are the sons of a small, authoritarian, taciturn New Mexico rancher. Inside them the memory of their maternal grandmother, a Mexican, is still alive, and the country across the border draws them both with an irresistible allure. Capturing a she-wolf that is pouncing on the family's livestock, Billy decides not to hand it over to his father, who would kill it, but to bring it back to the Mexican mountains to return it to its world. Thus begins, as anunusual and poignant love story, the long adventurous journey that will lead Billy and his brother Boyd to reunite, lose each other, and find each other again. A story of apprenticeship and the eternal wanderings of horses and riders, through salt deserts, snow-capped mountains and plains of tall grass.
Author:
Cormac McCarthy, born in Rhode Island in 1933, grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he attended college and returned several times throughout his life. He currently lives in Texas. All of his books have been published in Italy by Einaudi: The Guardian of the Orchard, Son of God, The Darkness Outside, Blood Meridian, Sunset Limited, Suttree, the so-called Frontier Trilogy (consisting of the novels Wild Horses, Beyond the Border, and City of the Plains). The novel No Country for Old Men was brought to movie screens by Joel and Ethan Coen. The Road, with which he won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, was brought to screens in 2009 by director John Hillcoat.
Texts and event by The Garden Social Center