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All the Pretty Horses
by: Cormac Mccarthy

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Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679744399
ISBN: 0679744398
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: June 29, 1993
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: June 29, 1993
Studio: Vintage
Sales Rank: 3204

Related Items:

No Country for Old Men (Vintage International)

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

Editorial Review:

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.

Amazon.com Review:
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

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- A beautiful masterpiece of Western literature
Sometime in the 1940s, John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins, two Texan teens, head off to Mexico on horseback. Their journey is one of laughter and horror, as these two boys are forced to grow up fast and hard.

That's about the best I can give you for a plot summary. It's amazing that "All the Pretty Horses" runs just over 300 pages. It feels more epic in nature. It IS epic, I suppose; just a short one. McCarthy's prose is as rich and vibrant as ever, though it's a bit more restrained here than in other of his works--I can see why this book is among his more commercially successful novels. Indeed, it's an odd companion to his other great Western piece, "Blood Meridian" (which is arguably a superior book; but then, that's like asking which gold medal shines brighter--there's ... Read More

Rating:

- a raw yet elegant coming of age story; hablas espagnol?
'All the Pretty Horses' is a very well written saga of a teenage boy from Texas, circa 1940s, wandering off down to Mexico with his buddy. Both guys are horsemen. Their Mexican adventure turns sour very quickly and they are then thrust into a mix of love, death and everything in between. The author's prose and characterizations are perfect. The only reason I don't give this book five stars is because I found the heavy use of Spanish dialogue to be very distracting. Although oftentimes one can get the gist of what was being said, too many times I was left puzzled. Yes, the use of Spanish did add quite a bit to the feel of the story. I think it would have been helpful if the author supplied translations (in footnotes, for example).

Bottom line: quite an amazing story, ... Read More

Rating:

- Breathtaking and... breathless
I can read English, French, Italian. This novel ranks with Proust's La Recherche du temps perdu, and Manzoni's Promessi sposi. Breathtaking scenes follow more breathtaking scenes and the whole leaves the reader breathless. Magnificient, none like it.

Rating:

- guess I'm not ready for this yet?
I found this book an effort to read. Confusing at the start, yet did grab me midway but I was ready to discard with about 1/3 left, but thought better of it and completed. Yes, his writing is very descriptive and captures the essence of every sense the reader needs to be placed within the story. However, it just seemed to skip and jumble along, the ending wasn't anything like the many my mind conjured up, it wasn't really anything special at all...Grady continued on rambling as did the book. I perhaps need to read another of his works to get a better grasp of the talent of this writer, as so many have applauded his style.

Rating:

- Definitely a Acquired Taste
I have looked at some of the reviews here, and am a bit surprised as the number of people who hated this book. It is a challenge to read, but this is no "Ulysses." The main themes can be understood with a little careful attention. Some have compared McCarthy's style to Hemingway's but this is not a fair comparision. McCarthy's prose is far more complex. Hemingway wrote arresting prose, but at times his minimalist style was cartoonish. McCarthy is simple the way Picasso is simple -- that is to say, only if you do not look hard enough.

McCarthy's skill with language is unequalled among living American authors. It is the language that is the star of this book, and if you cannot appreciate the language itself the story will not bear the weight. Yes, I found myself re-reading passages ... Read More

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