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| All the Pretty Horses | 
 enlarge | Author: Cormac Mccarthy
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (291 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1771
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0679744398
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679744399
ASIN: 0679744398
Publication Date: June 29, 1993
Release Date: June 29, 1993
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
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.
Product Description
Now a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Matt Damon, produced by Mike Nichols, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.
The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself.With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 286 more reviews...
Hauntingly Beautiful Search for the Dead West June 30, 2008
Cormac McCarthy seems to be everywhere right now--Oprah's book club, a recent Coen Brothers film adaptation, one of the top novels of the past quarter-century. I decided it was time to check out his work, since he's considered the modern Faulkner, and a great depicter of the violent and beautiful American southwest. All the Pretty Horses both lives up to my expectations and kind of frustrates them. The novel starts out gloomy with the funeral for the protagonist John Grady's grandfather, turns comedic when Grady and his friend cross the border into Mexico in search of adventure, then shifts into a semi-melodramatic romance, finally returning to a state of pitch-black gloom and despair. All throughout, McCarthy retains a distance from the world of the novel, coldly surveying the raw beauty of the Mexican landscape and stubbornly refusing to enter the heads of his equally stubborn characters. In some ways, this narrative distance works quite well, amplifying the frankness and simplicity that Hemingway is known for. But it also prevents the novel from striking home on any real emotional level.
The most problematic part of the novel is Grady's passionate love for a ranch owner's daughter, Alejandra. The two are a sort of Romeo and Juliet pair, deeply desiring one another, but knowing that their love can never be allowed to flower. The romance, however, is jarringly out of place with the events in the rest of the novel, and feels a little bit contrived. Especially irritating is the lack of insight into Alejandra's character; she is given no more than a handful of lines, and it is never really clear what she sees in run-down, dirt-poor Grady.
Minor criticisms aside, the icing to top off this striking novel, however, is McCarthy's metaphysical musing that underlies all the events of the novel. Most profound is his consideration of the workings of Fate in human activities. One of the best passages in the novel occurs when Grady confronts Alejandra's grand-aunt for the second time. She is determined to prevent him from stealing off with her protege, but respects him enough to deliver a haunting and thorough account of her reasoning. She expresses her deep frustration with the randomness of life, describing a coin minter who arbitrarily decides which way to press each coin he makes, blindly affecting countless coin flips down the road. She laments the inability of mankind to ever know the alternative course that their actions could have taken; for a history that never sees the light of day, and can never be judged against what actually transpired. Building off this theme is Grady's fascination with the long-dead frontier of the American West. Early in the novel we see him wistfully imagining the hunting parties of the glorious and departed Native American tribes, disappearing in the red light of the setting sun. At the end of the novel, Grady likewise disappears, fading into history like so many movements whose splendor the world will never see.
Western for the 20th century June 19, 2008
Adventure, full-hearted love, revenge, the majestic wilderness, and of course horses: the western-movie staples are what moves this novel. Yet if All The Pretty Horses is a classic cowboy story, it is also that of a dying world, and all the more accessible to us that it is set in the post-war era.
John Grady Cole, a young man of 16 years, leaves the country for Mexico together with his friend Lacey Rawlins, both on horseback, in search of a life that has become inaccessible to them in Texas. A cruel but romantic saga of tests and tribulations awaits them - which I won't spoil by giving too much of it.
The dialogues are suitably laconic. The characters are frank and unambiguous, except for one key exception. Nature is reserved the richer, more complex, and admiring language. While the novel begins at a slow pace, making the reader wonder whether this is really a back-to-the-wild story, the action later quickens to a satisfyingly gripping climax. One warning: a good part of the dialogue is in Spanish, untranslated; though this won't throw you off the plot, if you don't understand Spanish, it may get annoying.
 Life, death, love, horses and hand rolled cigarettes May 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I can't believe I've waited this long to get into Cormac McCarthy. We Texans have always known him to be one of the great Texas western writers, right up there with Larry McMurtry, earning a place in our hearts. But Cormac is bigger than that. Bigger than Texas, you say? His craft has been compared to Faulkner and Conrad. We're talking about literature here.
After I saw the movie, "No Country For Old Men," I knew I should read this guy and I'd start somewhere near the beginning. I picked "All The Pretty Horses," the first in a series of novels called "The Border Trilogy." John Grady Cole, last of a long line of Texas ranchers is sixteen years old and from San Angelo, Texas, takes off with friend Lacey Rawlins, on an adventurous hero's journey by horseback across country, over the Rio Grande and south into Mexico.
Even though the time period is in the late 1940s and on the cusp of modern life, with cars, trucks and radios, the story is basically a western, with horses, cowboy coffee made over an open fire, guns, and hand rolled cigarettes. I like the sprinkling of Spanish throughout, even though I didn't comprehend it all. It was a nice touch.
I'm not sure if it's the lack of some punctuation such as quotations and apostrophes, or the ultra long sentences, or the full to the brim characters, but it puts this novel in a class of its own. The writing is beyond good, it's classic. For all us regular folks who can't take the high-literary of Faulkner, here's a true and gritty albeit well written western. I plan to read the next two books, and find I can't wait to get into volume two. "Pretty Horses" was haunting, it's emotion and realism hard to stop thinking about.
Enchanting for the Brave at Heart April 26, 2008
I had never read any of McCarthy's books before until I saw this one sitting on the shelf at the book store. Once I started to read it, I couldn't put it down. I'm a busy college student, but I always looked forward to reading this book because I had no idea what was going to happen.
This is a great book for anyone who loves adventure. I'm a lover of horses, and so I enjoyed soaking in McCarthy's descriptions. The random spanish phrases throughout the story may get on some peoples nerves, but I found them very interesting as I am learning spanish right now and I could interpret them.
Overall, a very beautifully written story, packed full with adventure and desire, horses and blood, and even some romance. It has everything to keep a reader thinking long after it has been finished.
 All the Pretty Horses April 19, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
I read the book, but don't recommend it. Why the two cowboys took off was not clear to me. They weren't doing anything constructive, like cattle drive, and had no destination in mind. Just took off and endured the desert.
I did not like the way he broke horses. I've seen horses broke to saddle by the great Ray Hunt NEVER anything like hobbling them. I thought it was a pointless adventure. The more I read the less I liked the characters.
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