All the Pretty Horses

Product Details

Author : Cormac Mccarthy
Binding : Paperback
EAN : 9780679744399
Edition : Reprint
Number of Pages : 320
Product Group : Book
Publication Date : 1993-06-29
Publisher : Vintage
Release Date : 1993-06-29

ASIN : 0679744398

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Editorial Reviews

From 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.

Customer Reviews

Literary Fiction With a Heart (2008-04-15)

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.

Well, at least the movie had Penelope Cruz in it... (2007-04-14)

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"...

Stunning Novel (2004-06-11)

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. I loved the main character and, unlike some other McCarthy books, the plot is easy to follow. The rhthym of his writing is amazing and after a while you get into a steady pace when you read it. This is by far his best...

All the pretty Horses (2004-05-07)

McCarhty paints a wonderful landscape across the border In All The Pretty Horses. This book by Cormac Mccarthy is a great book about the coming of age of 16 year old John Grady Cole. Like most coming of Age stories it is not particulary fast pased or thrilling. It is instead a book that slowly draws you into the characters journey and lets you along for the ride.It dosen't take long for you to cheer for the good hearted characters the McCarthy brilliantly portrays in his book. a would recommed this book to anyone as long as you have a little patience, as they will find that could things come to those who wait in all The Pretty Horses.

Cormac McCarthy's Teenage Fantasy (2004-04-05)

Over the weekend, I determined to read this National Book Award winner. The first 100 pages were about as much fun as a forced march with the Marines through a swamp.

Mc Carthy, the author, introduced characters by pronoun, created mystery by obscurity, and chose to thumb his nose at Strunk and White. Quotation marks were absent, capitals, nearly so, apostrophes hit and miss in his contractions. He writes: cant, couldnt, but restores the ' in I'll, I've. He sprinkled Spanish over the desert description, which made me wonder how a reader from Wisconsin without an "enchilada" in his vocabulary might lose the picture. All the Pretty Horses relies on a comic book plot of teen-age fantasy. Tough, abandoned 16 year old boy and his cousin meet up with Annie-Oakley-sure-shot idiot who's some kind of a metaphor for Del Rio religious lightning, grunts his was to romantic tryst with Mexican beauty who slides into his bed nightly without waking up the hacienda, then finds himself an incarcerated horse thief, knives a Mexican hit man in the heart, is rescued Mexican style (jailer paid off) by feminist angel who lectures him in a 10 page monologue.

His girl calls it quits in deference to her family but gives him one last lusty bed bounce in Zacatecas before a tearful goodbye.

Our hero recovers his horses, fights his way home, is absolved by father-figure judge and I felt like the Indians when he passed the Yates Field, "They had no curiosity about him at all."

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