Cormac McCarthy
Oltre Il Confine

This book fell into my hands almost by chance. I was wandering among the shelves of a bookstore in search of a book to devour, when after picking up several, I stumbled upon a book with a white cover. There was a wolf and a vast white expanse in the background. I did not know the author of the book, and I was generally very prejudiced against contemporary American literature, which I found simplistic and a bit commercial. However, the review on the back of the book (published by Einaudi) spoke of the author as the new Melville and described the book as a "miracle in prose." Well, I thought to myself, let's give it a try! Never had my instincts been as right as on that occasion: "Oltre il confine" is an extraordinary book, a true gem.

Through the adventures of Billy, the very young wandering knight who leaves his home at only 17 to accompany a wolf that was raiding the family's livestock and had been crippled in a trap, back to her mountains in Mexico. The author describes a world halfway between his imagination and reality. A world, straddling the United States and Mexico, that unfolds amid snow-capped mountains, vast expanses, salt lakes, forests of bandits, epic characters, and a temporal dimension suspended between timelessness and a quest, that of young Billy and his brother Boyd, which has no end other than the quest itself. The descriptions of the landscapes at sunset as at dawn are stunning, and especially splendid are the descriptions of the epic characters that intersect on the path of the two young brothers: the wolf, an old hermit, a philosopher bandit, a blind man. In the book, except for the central part which is the least engaging, there is not a line out of place, nor a single banal part. It is devoured in one gulp. The stories told are almost all dramatic, but the narration is never pitiful or sentimental; instead, there is that touch of cynicism that sometimes turns an event into a myth, a character into a legend.

What fascinated me most about the book is certainly the suspension of time and often of emotions that it contains. The reader plunges into the world and imagination of this writer as into an abyss, embarking on a journey that will lead him to a metaphysical and timeless place where everything is myth and nothing is banal.