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From Amazon
Part bildungsroman, part horse opera, part meditation on courage and loyalty, this beautifully crafted novel won the National Book Award in 1992. The plot is simple enough. John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick--a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins--encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance. Readers familiar with McCarthy's Faulknerian prose will find the writing more restrained than in Suttree and Blood Meridian. Newcomers will be mesmerized by the tragic tale of John Grady Cole's coming of age.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
This is a novel so exuberant in its prose, so offbeat in its setting and so mordant and profound in its deliberations that one searches in vain for comparisons in American literature. None of McCarthy's previous works, not even the award-winning The Orchard Keeper (1965) or the much-admired Blood Meridian (1985), quite prepares the reader for the singular achievement of this first installment in the projected Border Trilogy. John Grady Cole is a 16-year-old boy who leaves his Texas home when his grandfather dies. With his parents already split up and his mother working in theater out of town, there is no longer reason for him to stay. He and his friend Lacey Rawlins ride their horses south into Mexico; they are joined by another boy, the mysterious Jimmy Blevins, a 14-year-old sharpshooter. Although the year is 1948, the landscape--at some moments parched and unforgiving, at others verdant and gentled by rain--seems out of time, somewhere before history or after it. These likable boys affect the cowboy's taciturnity--they roll cigarettes and say what they mean--and yet amongst themselves are given to terse, comic exchanges about life and death. In McCarthy's unblinking imagination the boys suffer truly harrowing encounters with corrupt Mexican officials, enigmatic bandits and a desert weather that roils like an angry god. Though some readers may grow impatient with the wild prairie rhythms of McCarthy's language, others will find his voice completely transporting. In what is perhaps the book's most spectacular feat, horses and men are joined in a philosophical union made manifest in the muscular pulse of the prose and the brute dignity of the characters. "What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them," the narrator says of John Grady. As a bonus, Grady endures a tragic love affair with the daughter of a rich Spanish Hacendado , a romance, one hopes, to be resumed later in the trilogy.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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First Sentence
THE CANDLEFLAME and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
THE CANDLEFLAME and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Achingly beautiful book,
By Scooter Girl (Victoria, BC CANADA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: All the Pretty Horses: Border Trilogy (1) (Paperback)
Cormac McCarthy is an amazing talent. This is a book that will be read hundreds of years from now. It is the coming-of-age story of a young cowboy who is caught in a transition of his own life as well as the end of the era of cowboy ranching. McCarthy's style is sparse but, like the men it describes, communicates a lot, with aching beauty. The main character is uncommonly honest, principled and moralistic, and offers hope for those who believe that such a code of honour will prevail in a world that is often cruel and violent.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Literary Fiction With a Heart,
This review is from: All the Pretty Horses: Border Trilogy (1) (Paperback)
If you're sick of overrated literary fiction that's well-crafted but contrived, cleverness without a heart, I suggest "All the Pretty Horses" by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy writes precise, clean prose and has a perfect eye for detail. The sky isn't full of stars, but rather of named constellations. He knows the names of each piece of equipment used to saddle a horse. McCarthy's lack of punctuation took a few pages to get used to, but once into the book I couldn't stop. "All the Pretty Horses" concerns two Texan teenagers in the 1940s who go down to Mexico and encounter various adventures, and its themes are good and evil, courage, and friendship. It's McCarthy's moral sense--what I'd call an ethical compassion--that transforms his well-crafted prose into great fiction. I wouldn't classify this book only as a western. I'd recommend this novel to anyone who loves great fiction written with a heart.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Well, at least the movie had Penelope Cruz in it...,
By
This review is from: All the Pretty Horses: Border Trilogy (1) (Paperback)
Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, RI, in 1933 and saw his first novel - "The Orchard Keeper" - published in 1965. "All The Pretty Horses" was first published in 1992, is the first book in his Border Trilogy and was adapted for the big screen in 2000."All the Pretty Horses" opens in the late 1940s, not far from San Angelo in Texas. John Grady Cole is sixteen years old and everything he has ever known is coming to an end. His parents are divorced and he doesn't appear to have much of a relationship with either one. With his grandfather's recent death, the ranch on which John Grady was brought up is to be sold - depriving him of the only lifestyle he'd ever wanted. With nothing left for him in Texas, Cole decides to cross teh border into Mexico and seek work on a ranch there, He doesn't leave alone, however - he's joined on the trip by an old friend, Lacey Rawlins. The pair meet another teenager on their way, one who introduces himself as Jimmy Blevins. The pair recognise his instantly as trouble and have little doubt that the horse he's riding is stolen. Nevertheless, they allow Blevins to travel with them for a while - a decision that leads the pair further into trouble than they could've forseen. Although I can see "All the Pretty Horses" is so highly thought of, the style and approach McCarthy adopted didn't always work too well for me. In fact, I felt that - at times - the style hindered the story, rather than helping it along. The lack of punctuation is often commented on and, while it helps establish the sort of characters that feature in the book, it occasionally left things a little unclear as to who was saying what. Similarly, some sentences featured five or six 'ands' and ran beyond the length of a standard paragraph. As a result, there were times I couldn't stop myself from drifting off and absent-mindedly turning the page. Overall, I'm glad I read it - I'll just not be in much of a rush to read books two and three of "The Border Trilogy"...
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