Cormac Maccarthy

The border trilogy

All the pretty horses

Edward Steel

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... nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

Cormac McCarthy

Cut off from the life of ranching he has come to love by his grandfather's death, John Grady Cole flees to Mexico, where he and his two companions embark on a rugged and cruelly idyllic adventure

All the Pretty Horses

Patrick Book

This guy fucking LOVES horsies!

I'd go as high as 3.75 on this one. This seems kind of like the inverse of 'Blood Meridian,' presenting a perfectly accessible (and even romantic) story about a teenager that exists in the wrong time, the world's progress rendering his abilities and desires obsolete right out from under him. His adventure to another country lands him in a heap of trouble, but at least he has the horses he's so enamoured of to keep him company. I'm more drawn to McCarthy's dark stories, but it was a bit refreshing to see him writing about nice people -- though I assume the remainder of the trilogy gets darker, otherwise I'll be really confused.

The real draw is the writing moreso than the story. The bleak and foreboding landscapes of 'Blood Meridian' have given way to pastoral, loving descriptions of all sorts of locales. Deconstructing the rambling sentences could take all day, but you're going to enjoy it.

Evan

While not my favorite McCarthy book, I do think "All the Pretty Horses" is pretty close to flawless and deserving of the 5/5 stars.
 
My only complaint would be there are conversations here that are simply difficult to interpret who is currently speaking. McCarthy's style is not new to me but boy, this is it at its roughest. When Rawlins and John Grady speak to one another, especially a long back and forth, it can be very tough to understand exactly what's happening. I suppose you don't "need" to? The contextual clues that are there are not as good as they could be. I think this is much less of an issue in both "Blood Meridian" and "The Road".
 
What did I like? Other than that occasional speedbump -- everything, really. I liked John Grady Cole, a very noble character and likable young man; I liked Rawlins as his friend and ally, a committed brother-in-arms in a foreign country through VERY thick and thin; I like Blevins and his whacky antics; I liked the romance, the descriptions of Mexico, and the frequent Spanish usage. I enjoyed picking up my phone to read aloud some of the Spanish for it to be translated, sometimes I read words to my Hispanic coworkers for them to translate and they loved it all, especially some of the more rare word choices McCarthy found -- only the older Hispanics knew what an "hacendado" or "cuchillero" were, which I found really interesting. I'm happy to have learned from them.
 
Just a really beautiful coming-of-age tale. I'm glad this is the start of a trilogy and that there'll be more John Grady Cole in my future. I highly recommend "All the Pretty Horses".

Louis Norton

Sick. obviously much less action-packed than Blood Meridian or The Road but really succeeds at imparting huge feelings of drama in the smallest moments. Appreciated how insular it feels as a neo- Western (set in the 40s) in the first two thirds of the book- where John Grady and Lacey dive into a lawless and primitive world- just for them to come back to Earth (Texas) by the third act and be contextualised in the modern world, at the beginning of our era and the end of theirs.

elizabeth

In anticipation of The Passenger and Stella Maris, I wanted to revisit this book, one of my favorite from my collection of McCarthy books. This book feels so stylistically unique within the McCarthy canon with its adaptation of generic elements of the courtly romance, yet it feels so emblematic of McCarthy's borderlands work thematically, exploring the dissolution of freedom in the borderlands among motifs of postwar technologies and ideologies.

I've been thinking a lot about Bildungsroman. This is almost always true, but it was top-of-mind when I read Mary Jane right before this. (You really couldn't read two more different coming-of-age novels back-to-back.) All the Pretty Horses really challenges the traditional Bildungsroman for two main reasons that I'll discuss more below, but the tl;dr of it all is that by subverting the traditional Bildungsroman, McCarthy creates one of the greatest Bildungsroman ever (or at least one of my favorites!). And by reading the novel as Bildungsroman, the reader can accept John Grady’s status as a wanderer at the novel’s end as fully rationalized and highly significant for the following novels in the trilogy; modernity is enveloping even the open plains, and the only options are submission or refusal. 
(view spoiler)[
First, his quest does not seem truly transformational, which is fundamental to the Bildungsroman. But John Grady does transform. At the beginning, he operates with blind optimism that the world will and must have a place for him, untouched by modernity. But by the end of the novel, he rides “into the darkening land, the world to come." The modern world, he realizes, is actively coming; it's inescapable, as “cattle ranches give way to oil fields and highways bury the ancient traces of the Comanche.” He is left with unlikely hope that perhaps some corner of the world might last long enough or modernize slowly enough for him to survive a while longer as an anachronism in the changing world. 

Second, John Grady's maturation does not come with a definite physical settlement, or even settlement into established society, which is an element that kind of defines Bildungsroman. For any other Bildungsroman protagonists (at least the ones I can think of), their transformation is characterized by the trade freedom for happiness, and this trade is embodied in establishing a physical settlement. But for John Grady, freedom is happiness, and his transformation is embodied in his identity as a wanderer. To discover the west in all its wildness and impermanence, he must embody impermanence himself. 
 (hide spoiler)]

Tobias V. Langhoff

The only McCarthy I’ve read is The Road, so I’m not exactly ready to give a final judgment, but I see how that book incorporates themes from his earlier novels. This book gave me an interesting view of how his non-post-apocalyptic novels can also be bleak, at least.

And, of course, I realized that the strange style of punctuation and quotation marks that really helped give The Road its voice, aren’t unique to that book. I liked the style there, but not as much here. It’s mostly jarring and distracting.

I elected to listen to it as an audiobook instead, narrated by my favorite narrator Frank Muller, knowing that the next audiobook in the series is narrated by my other favorite, Richard Poe. Good choice. Muller gives this novel the voice it needs. His Spanish and Texan accents are also on point.

I wish I knew a little Spanish before reading this book, though. I don’t think I missed any big plot points from my lack of Spanish knowledge, but some dialogue was lost on me.

The story failed to captivate me early on, and it is pretty slow and (dare I say) boring for a while, but it does culminate in some pretty good stuff. Around halfway, after some of the main story was over and a certain speech happened, I started liking the book quite a lot.

I actually had 2 hours left so I need to re-borrow this but I’m confident my rating wouldn’t drop. Recommended to me by my old high school librarian several years ago! 

Jeremy Boyd

Cody Degen

Don’t think it quite reaches Blood Meridian’s heights for me but damn it’s really good

Derek Graf

A remarkable coming-of-age story that simultaneously romanticizes and challenges Wild West sentiments and the American cowboy mythos. McCarthy weaves together elegant prose, punchy dialogue, comical characters, and an interesting plot to craft a story that is both tragic and beautiful. Arguably the "lightest" of McCarthy's major works, and may be the best starting point for new readers. 

Brandon

Michael Springer

For my review of the whole trilogy, see "Cities of the Plain."

Gavin

Wonderful. About two boys who are not boys, mostly because they don't want to be. They are only 16 but already have the skill and stoicism which actually constitute adulthood, rather than mere age. It is also about law and morals and power and the chasms between these things. Also suddenly, bizarrely, about pre- and post-revolutionary Mexico. 

  They were zacateros headed into the mountains to gather chino grass. If they were surprised to see Americans horseback in that country they gave no sign... They themselves were a rough lot, dressed half in rags, their hats marbled with grease and sweat, their boots mended with raw cowhide... They looked out over the terrain as if it were a problem to them. Something they'd not quite decided about.



  They pulled the wet saddles off the horses and hobbled them and walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before... something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.



  The country rolled away to the west through broken light and shadow and the distant summer storms a hundred miles downcountry to where the cordilleras rose and sank in the haze in a frail last shimmering restraint alike of the earth and the eye beholding it. 



  Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.


I remain amazed by McCarthy's ability to use the most hollow and worn-out tropes - horse whispering, the stableboy and heredera, cowboys and varmints, injustice and redemption, the climactic shootout - and make them new, blasting through your cynicism with sheer force of prose. It's a dark book, but I laughed a lot, mostly at the boys' philosophising, which natural creasing I recognise from most boys I have known, educated or not.

  My daddy run off from home when he was fifteen. Otherwise I'd of been born in Alabama. 
You wouldn't of been born at all. 
What makes you say that? 
Cause your mama's from San Angelo and he never would of met her. 
He'd of met somebody. 
So would she. So? 
So you wouldn't of been born.
I dont see why you say that. I'd of been born somewheres.
How? 
Well why not? 
If your mama had a baby with her other husband and your daddy had one with his other wife which one would you be? 
I wouldn't be neither of em. 
That's right.
Rawlins lay watching the stars. After a while he said: I could still be born. I might look different or somethin. 
 If God wanted me to be born I'd be born. 
And if He didnt you wouldnt. 
You're makin my goddamn head hurt. 
I know it. I'm makin my own hurt.


You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins.
About what?
I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease.
Sometimes. If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways.
Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasnt supposed to be and didnt know it?

You are disoriented when John goes home, to 1950s Texas; the rest of the novel operates with early nineteenth century logic and props. You wake up from a long nightmare into the modern dreamtime.

Ryan LaFerney

All the Pretty Horses is an odyssey set on the Texas-Mexico border that focuses on a sixteen year old boy becoming a man through the trials and tribulations of his adventures. All the Pretty Horses is a tragic romance and coming-of-age story, set in a land that is harsh, unforgiving, and deadly. John Grady Cole is a sixteen year old cowboy in Texas a few years after World War II who was raised on his grandfather’s ranch after his parents split up. After his grandfather dies, the ranch is being sold off. With no where else to go, John and his best friend Lacey Rawlins ride off for Mexico. Along the way they hook up with a runaway kid who is nothing but bad news. After getting work on a large ranch, John catches the owner’s eye with his skill working with horses, but after being promoted, John falls in love with the owner’s daughter which leads to trouble for him and Rawlins. Finding himself imprisoned, beaten, and struggling to survive, John is eventually freed, loses his love, regains his horses, and returns home to Texas to realize there is nothing left for him and rides off into the sunset, alone.

All the Pretty Horses is a beautiful, lyrical, and at times, harsh, novel of the realities of the cowboy/bandit life. It is also a tragic coming of age tale about a boy losing everything and the pains of first love.

Excellent.

Jayme Bosio

I'm a firm believer in giving up on a book if it doesn't grab you in the first 50 pages. Life is too short, and full of too many great reads, to struggle with a book. When I first picked up All the Pretty Horses I was underwhelmed. Couple of teenage boys leave home to travel down to Mexico for...well, I was never really clear on the reason. Perhaps because they're young they don't need a reason. They find work and one falls in love with the ranch owner's daughter. Naturally, that doesn't go over well yada yada yada. I almost gave up. Almost.

The thing that finally sucked me in was the character development. Our protagonist, John Grady, learns about life in a hard way. It doesn't destroy him or scar him or anything. It just teaches him. He has been one of the most interesting and solid characters I've read in a story in a long time. I look forward to meeting up with him again in Cities of the Plain.

Emily K McCullar

i wish there were more men like john grady cole in the modern world. never thought i'd actually relate to a paula cole song.

Rebecka S.

Trevor Berrett

Cormac McCarthy is, perhaps, the best American writer today. I think The Road is his best work, but All the Pretty Horses is also a masterpiece.
His writing is so exact and efficient. At the same time his sentences can be long and are alwaysfluid. However, that's not the only thing good about this book. The story moves quickly and took turns I didn't expect but that were perfect. I looked back at the turns and thought, that is exactly what had to happen--it was perfect. 
Also, McCarthy's has complete control of the tone. The book felt great to read.
Highly recommended. And if you're new to McCarthy, this is probably a good place to start.

For my complete review, go here:

http://mookse.wordpress.com/2008/10/1...

I.m. ruzz

A good read full of interesting characters, like all McCarthy novels, but I found this one more an exercise then a statement. There were a number of elements missing from this novel that I've come to rely on in his work. The foremost, the usual collection of sentences sprinkled throughout which literally stop my reading mid thought to roll them around in my mind and savour how those words fit together. And, at least once per novel he convinces me that a sentence is "the" best thing ever written. Such beautiful enclosures were hard to come by in All the Pretty Horses.

It's worth noting that an average McCarthy book is still worth two of most author's best books. That is, after he stopped trying to be Faulkner.

All the pretty horses The border trilogy

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