Cities of the Plain
1998
- french fiction
- littérature western
- histoires d'amour
- ranch life
- fiction
- new mexico, fiction
- texas, fiction
- fiction, men's adventure
- fiction, westerns
- fiction, general
The story
A Texas cowboy falls in love with a Mexican prostitute, only to discover he has a rival, her pimp. The pimp refuses to let her go because he will lose money and the stage is set for a violent confrontation.
What it’s like
Spare, incantatory sentences run long and unpunctuated across dusty grassland, with the heat and wind of the New Mexico border country pressing on every page: sunbaked mesas, horses in dawn cold, the smell of woodsmoke and cheap cantina liquor. The voice is grave and biblical, all parataxis and ritual dialogue with little quotation-mark signposting, so reading it feels like listening to old men talk around a fire. The mood is elegiac and tender, a slow melancholy of men who know the open range is closing, with the romance unfolding in quiet, almost wordless gestures. Pacing is deliberate and meditative, a long unhurried drift before a violent climax that arrives suddenly and lands hard. Intensity is significant: brutal, unflinching violence and some sexual content, rendered plainly rather than lurid, with death treated as weighty and unsentimental. It suits a slow, unbroken evening alone with a strong coffee, or a stretch of reading when you want literary Western prose that rewards patience. It is for readers who love Cormac McCarthy's style and the mythic weight of the frontier, and who can handle grief and bloodshed without relief.
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