Quite moving, beautifully written and hearkening back to the laconic, profound and lonely cowboy images of nostalgic America. McCarthy can tell a story with no extra words while creating indelible images briefly drawn, getting to the heart of the matter without feeling rushed. Truly astonishing.

I love how McCarthy varies sentence length, the longer ones some of my favorites, such as "He said that those who have endured misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness."

The strength of the boy/man, John Grady Cole, at the center of the story is sometimes unbelievable, but his moral fiber is undeniable. His depth of feeling and search for what's good in people, circumstance and the world overall, without regard to wealth, class, reputation, or any other arbitrary labels typically separating people, is just lovely.

In many ways, this is a romance, but at many levels- between men and women, man and horse, buddies, man and landscape, person and family and family history. Beautifully rendered. Four and half stars.

(My 2 years of Spanish was useful!)

3/5 Estrellas

Después de incursionar con relativo éxito en el género del western con "Valor de Ley", decidí dar un pasito más y atreverme con esta obra de Cormac McCarthy que forma parte de su trilogía de "La frontera".

Demasiado atrevido por mi parte, teniendo en cuenta que el autor en este libro nos presenta una cara un poco light, bastante alejada de la apocalíptica "La Carretera" o de la brutal "No es país para viejos". De hecho, la novela también tiene sus toques románticos, lo cual la aleja todavía más de mi zona de confort. Ha sido llevada al cine y protagonizada por Matt Damon y Penélope Cruz.

Ambientada en las tierras fronterizas entre Texas y México, hacia finales de la primera mitad del siglo XX. Un chico joven, 16 años, acaba de perder el rancho donde ha vivido toda la vida, ya que su abuelo ha muerto y sus padres, separados, lo han vendido. Amante de los caballos y del viejo mundo de los vaqueros, decide pasar a México de forma ilegal, en compañía de un amigo, y probar a buscar trabajo en las grandes haciendas que existían en los estados norteños del país centroamericano, donde los usos tradicionales de cría y manejo de ganado sobrevivían en mayor medida que en los más industrializados EEUU.

Evidentemente las cosas no podían ir bien. Sin papeles, demasiados jóvenes, gringos, malas compañías, no tardan en meterse en líos. Si, además, encuentran trabajo en una estupenda hacienda, donde la hija del hacendado es de su misma edad y monísima, pues ya sabéis lo que puede pasar......pues que o corres o te cortan las pelotas.

Excesivamente descriptivo, muy lento por momentos. En otros momentos, con rápidos y lacónicos diálogos, que debes repasar para adivinar quien está hablando.

Imagino que esta lectura, para el público angloparlante debe ser especialmente difícil, ya que hay cientos de palabras en español en el original, muchas de ellas localismos, que hasta a nosotros nos cuesta entender.

No es una mala lectura, evocadora, pero que no me ha llenado plenamente.

Lo mejor, los paisajes, el paisanaje, los desiertos, los amaneceres, los pasajes donde se habla de los acontecimientos sucedidos en México en los años recientes, con el breve interludio revolucionario y social de Francisco Madero (1911-1913). El inmovilismo de la clase dirigente, entre los que se encontraban los grandes hacendados de la zona. Supongo que estas grandes haciendas, muchas de ellas con antepasados españoles, habrán desaparecido o estarán en manos del Narco.

Curioso que en dos de mis últimas lecturas me haya dado un paseo literario por el estado mexicano de Coahuila de Zaragoza (aquí también se ambientan algunos elementos de la trama en "Salvar el fuego"), del que desconocía su existencia.

Creo que me voy a ahorrar el idilio cinématográdico del Damon y nuestra Penélope.

This might not reach the blood and horrors of Blood Meridian, but this still contains Cormac McCarthy's trademark blood and violence. Published in the early 1990s, it is the first in the border trilogy, a post-WW2 setting in 1949-1950, an epic bleak, philosophical and melancholic coming of age story, located in Texas and Mexico, a western depicting a dying era. Beautifully written, it centres on 16 year old John Grady Cole, gifted in his ability to connect with horses, who upon his grandfather's death, is forced to leave the ranch that is to be sold. Making the decision to ride to Mexico, he is accompanied by his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, on the challenging idyllic, yet dangerous journey and adventure, hoping to secure work on a ranch. A young boy claiming to be older than he is, Jimmy Blevins, unlikely to be his real name, with an expensive horse joins them, destined to bring them trouble.

Becoming ranch hands in Mexico, Cole falls deeply in love with the rancher's daughter, Alejandra, a doomed love affair. This is an enthralling, evocative, vibrant and captivating read that makes an emotional impact, with its skilful changes of pace and layers of meaning, pain and horrors, and the hostile beauty of the landscape. McCarthy's sharp, complex and astute characterisations are the means through which he explores fundamental issues of what it is to be human, life and death, and the grim harshness of actual realities against which dreams, ideals and love founder. There is the inherent darkness, the repercussions of decisions made, romance, the magical connection between man and nature, in this case, the horses, friendship, loyalty, courage, resilience, love and loss. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher.

My first Cormac McCarthy book and not what I expected, better in fact. Excellent writing as one would expect from this acclaimed writer. It's the story of three young men, teenagers actually, not happy with their lives in 1949 Texas, so they decide to strike out for Mexico. What they find is a landscape, a culture, and a social system far different than what they left behind. There is a starkness to this novel, combined with a romanticism that McCarthy molds perfectly into the story and the characters.

4+ stars

Update: I have now also read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Very good but totally different feel than this one.

I want to like Cormac McCarthy. But he bugs me. What bugs me about him is the sentiment many of his readers have that goes basically: "I was worried this was going to be a Louis L'Amour western but was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't." Well, people, it IS a western, but McCarthy is too pretentious to just write a western. He lifts out all the punctuation, drops in verbose descriptions and senseless figurative language and some faux-philosophical musings on horses and calls it "literature".

Unfortunately, buried in all the mucky-muck here is a really good story, and the passages describing landscape that don't trip over themselves are truly amazing. The good parts of this book are worth the awful parts, but lets not pretend that there aren't awful parts.

Probably 4.5

Looking forward to reading more by Cormac McCarthy. Stunning novel

Discovering this author was like hitting a vein of gold. This wasn’t as nihilistic as Blood Meridian and sometimes waxed philosophical, but was still pure talent and gripping.

.کتاب مقدس" می‌گه بردباران وارثـان زمین‌اند و من حدس می‌زنم احتمالا حقیقـت داره"
.آزاداندیش نیسـتم، اما بذار یک چیزی بهت بگم
.خیلی بعید می‌دونم اونقــدر هم که می‌گن چیز به دردخوری باشه

Que montaña rusa de emociones!
Que manejo de lenguaje tiene este señor, para recrear paisajes y llevarnos a recorrer un México(Norte del país) de los años 40. Historia cargada de Aventuras, caballos, Desierto, Amor, Vaqueros, Crimen y, Amistad.
Ha habido un momento de la novela, quizá la segunda parte, donde decayó un poco para mí, por la vanidad juvenil, pero después se recompone y nos da un cierre lleno de nostálgia; de deseo de aventura y de anhelo por la búsqueda de identidad.

"[ ...] ya tenían el aspecto de las fotografías antiguas. En el monocromo sepia de un día lluvioso en aquel pueblo perdido habían envejecido instantáneamente."

"[...]dio media vuelta, se puso el sombrero y volvió el rostro húmedo al viento y por unos instantes extendió las manos como para guardar el equilibrio o para bendecir aquel terreno o tal vez para retardar el mundo que se iba rápidamente y parecía no preocuparse en absoluto por jóvenes o ricos o pobres u oscuros o pálidos o él o ella. Nada en absoluto por sus luchas, nada por sus nombres. Nada por los vivos o los muertos."

"Cabalgaba con el sol cubriéndole la cara de cobre y el viento rojo soplando del oeste sobre la tierra crepuscular [...], y caballo, jinete y caballo pasaban de largo y sus largas sombras pasaban en tándem como la sombra de un solo ser. Pasaban y palidecían en la tierra oscurecida, el mundo venidero."

On the surface, this book is a cowboy adventure. A gritty story in which childhood doesn't exist and two teenage boys, John Grady and Lacey Rawlins, are alone riding in a land foreign to them. They speak when they only truly have something worth saying. They sleep under the stars. Their only possessions are often the clothes on their back, a razor and a toothbrush. Oh, and their horses.

This life is sometimes idyllic, but more often, dangerous. It becomes complicated when they run into Blevins, a kid whose fate entwines with theirs, with disastrous consequences.

As in other books by this author, themes of fate and inevitability echo. Several lines have a prescient quality to happenings later on in the book. And, similar to No Country for Old Men, the wheels of the story are pushed down the hill by one single decision. It's pretty brutal (cauterizing a bullet wound using a heated gun barrel is just one of the cringe-inducing scenes), though truth be told, this is decidedly gentler than other McCarthy books.

So yes, wild west saga. But between the lines, the book couldn't be more romantic. Not Nora Roberts romantic, no, although there is a love story here too. But within this book pulses a heart that beats passionately for the past. This heart is broken for the loss of a time that no longer exists. The ticking clock has left John Grady in a country he doesn't recognise, and to which he no longer belongs.

Set in 1949, he is witnessing is the death of an era. People will watch movies about cowboys, instead of living like them. Elvis and television, office jobs and jello-molded salads - an artificially sanitised culture is around the bend. We don't glimpse the new world in the pages of this book, but we readers know what is ahead, and we know this guy on his horse will be the square peg, a ghostrider, a bewildered and bewildering sight.

This yearning nostalgia is reflected in unbelievably lyrical prose. McCarthy outdoes himself here in lush descriptions that convey a deep romance, while at the same point writing with zero sentimentality. It's a magical mixture of the bleak and the heartfelt.

This novel isn't perfect. The ending, just as in No Country, slows significantly from a galloping story to a series of rambling speeches. But, I just couldn't give it less than five stars. I guess I like romance more than I thought.

At the end of the day, there are few things John Grady can count on. One is his profound solitude. The other: those horses, those pretty horses - time cannot touch them.

Cormac McCarthy is so good at making you care deeply about his characters and then keeping you on tenterhooks of dread about what horror of bloodletting he's going to lead them into.
Two young boys, John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins, decide to leave their homes in Texas and ride to Mexico. Early on, McCarthy sets up a heartwarming friendship between them. And between Cole and his horse. Then they are joined by another boy even younger than they are who is riding an expensive horse. There's always a sense in this novel the horse is like an extension of the individual's will, a direct connection to what's both poetic and primal in an individual's soul. Both have an uneasy feeling about Blevins but despite efforts to drive him away the boy follows them. It seems to be a recurring motif in McCarthy's books that one individual will personify ill fortune which will infect all those attached to him.
During a thunderstorm the bringer of ill fortune, Blevins, loses his horse and leaves to hunt for it. For a while all seems to be going well for the two boys. They find work with horses on a ranch in Mexico and Cole falls in love with the owner's daughter. Follow lovely moving love story. Then Blevin returns and the idyllic veneer of everything is brutally ripped away.
Tremendously moving and well written. I'm now about to start my next McCarthy.

Ascent into Hell
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You read the first sentence of a Cormac McCarthy novel and you know that this is not Grisham or Connolly or Child or Crichton or King, certainly not Patterson, or anyone else writing fiction today. And before the first page is turned he has launched into one of his frenetic poetic riffs that lurches and rambles and stops and starts and doesn't care about punctuation and you can almost hear your high school English teacher scolding about grammar and run-on sentences but you know that she could never even hope to string words together like this even if she dared. And then you realize that maybe you've actually never really understood the English language at all because no one before has ever ripped it and bent it and twisted it as beautifully as McCarthy does while making it all look so easy.

So were it not for McCarthy's ferocious prose, "All the Pretty Horses" may have been just another coming of age story. But in McCarthy's special corner of hell, along with the obligatory introduction to "young love", passage to adulthood may include exile in a foreign country, being hunted on horseback across a barren desert, variously stabbed, shot, tortured, or imprisoned. John Grady Cole is a sixteen year-old son of a Texas rancher who, up until his grandfather's death, worked the ranch and developed an uncommon kinship with horses. With his grandfather gone, his father dying, and his mother flitting around the cultural scene in post-WWII San Antonio, John Grady sets out on horseback for Mexico with buddy Lacey Rawlings. What follows is an odyssey of restless youth across a rugged country, a bleak and sometimes bloody journey that is not without the humor and easy banter of young teenagers on their own; the "road trip" that turns nightmarish and accelerates the process of growing up into hyper drive.

John Grady is an endearing character; there are no Holden Caulfields in the Texas borderlands. A stoic young cowboy, he has had the youthful innocence to which he is entitled ripped out too early, replaced by a work-hardened cynicism and homespun wisdom of the Texas plains. The reader cares for John Grady in the way of the classic Greek heroes, watching helplessly as the protagonist stone-by-stone lays the foundation of his own downfall. This is Cormac McCarthy, and therefore not a fairy tale; the reader would be naïve to expect an ending with a smiling John Grady riding into the sunset with his girl's arms around his denim shirt. But since it is Cormac McCarthy, you can expect unparalleled prose that delivers its message with the power and subtlety of a cattle prod. An American classic - required reading.