Xavier Ray’s Reviews > All the Pretty Horses > Status Update
Xavier Ray
is on page 240 of 302
Doña Alfonsa’s question: “If fate is the law then is fate not subject to that law?” She’s not being philosophical for its own sake, she’s speaking as someone whose life was already shaped and broken by forces older and larger than desire. In her world, love can be real and still be impossible. That single line carries the whole tragedy of the book: there was never another version of this story.
— 5 hours, 42 min ago
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Xavier Ray
is on page 67 of 302
I stopped when I hit this passage and just sat with it.
“As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.”
McCarthy writes a storm not as weather but as something cosmic, as if creation itself is still being hammered out above us. Moments like this are why I read him slowly — the world gets very still, and I feel something ancient and familiar open up.
— Nov 07, 2025 08:54PM
“As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.”
McCarthy writes a storm not as weather but as something cosmic, as if creation itself is still being hammered out above us. Moments like this are why I read him slowly — the world gets very still, and I feel something ancient and familiar open up.
Xavier Ray
is on page 61 of 302
There’s a homesick ache in this book for a world I never quite lived in, but somehow recognize in my bones. McCarthy writes the West not as myth, but as memory — of silence, land, and a way of being that feels both gone and still living inside me. Reading this slowly, for the soul, felt like riding out into a familiar country I’ve only ever known in dreams.
— Nov 07, 2025 08:23PM
