Do you have a sub-clinical fear of commas and, especially, quotation marks? Then Cormac McCarthy's your author and All the Pretty Horses is the book for you! There's not a quotation mark in 302 pages and very few commas. It's an interesting and stylized type of writing, and McCarthy uses it in some of his other books. Here's a typical sentence:

He dismounted and unrolled his plunder and opened the box of shells and put half of them in his pocket and checked the pistol that it was loaded all six cylinders and closed the cylinder gate and put the pistol into his belt and rolled his gear back up and retied the roll behind the saddle and mounted the horse again and rode into the town.(. 257)

The limited use of commas, I think, makes the story develop organically. In other words--like a plant uses a minimum but perfect balance of nutrients--the writing uses only a minimum of grammar, punctuation, and narration to achieve a natural, living story, uninhindered by needless stops or pauses, unencumbered by inconsequential thoughts or ideas, unburdened of superficial style or format. The writing is pure, essential. The writing is simple, but not simple-minded. It's free to grow naturally, like vines across a fence. The writing occurs as if it was happening now, and when you experience something 'now,' you aren't cognizant of commas or quotations. It appears like stream-of-consciousness literature, but it goes farther. It's not random; instead, it grows purposefully, in a direction, like new growth extending last year's reach. Every word is certain, purposeful, clean.

I enjoy this type of writing, but it must be used for a specific kind of story. The story has to be tied to the land. It has to be imbued with life, with organism. It has to show how nature both constrains and restrains character action and development. In this way, the writing bursts forth out of the story and is not simply a vehicle--using words, commas, and quotations--to tell the story. McCarthy uses horses, the living desert, the verdant jungle, water and scent to drive his story. The story is certain, purposeful, clean, and is, consequently, natural and believeable.

McCarthy does something else with his writing that I haven't read anywhere before. He combines two words into one. It's an adjective-noun combination and it's systematic throughout the book. Here's some examples, pervasive, as I simply thumb though the book in reverse and spot them immediately: sidestreet, huntingknife, fieldhands, bankside, doorkey, gaslamps, orangewater, trenchspoon, roadsign, motorsmoke, windowlights, nickleplating, beltholster, violetcolored, oilportrait, thighbones, streetsweepers, creampitchers, fineboned, holdingpens, tortoiseshell, hotsauce, shavingbrush. At least one adjective-noun combination per page.

Why? Why combine these words? Well, to make them a specific noun. It's like using the article 'the' instead of 'a;' for example, the toy versus a toy. It makes the toy more specific. It's not just a door key, but a doorkey; it's not just motor smoke, but motorsmoke; it's not just an oil portrait, but an oilportrait.

This book is also stuffed with descriptive Spanish words that, unless you're willing to continuously consult a dictionary, you accept in context without really knowing exactly what it means. It's just another way McCormack selects an exact word. Regardless of interpretation, it's as if he'll chose a Spanish word when an English word is insufficient. It's a book about Mexico, so this is to be expected on some level. But, instead of translating and easing the reader through the book, it's as if McCarthy wants his reader to do a little homework and learn some Spanish along the way. If there was a character from Italy or Poland, I wouldn't put it past McCarthy to break out some Italian and Polish, just because there are words from these languages that would lose exact meaning in translation to English.

I award 4-stars because, although it was well-written, genuine, and timeless, it didn't provide the page-turning action that I usually require for 5-star novels.

New words: traprock, stereopticon, abrazo, increate

Well, this was light years better than ‘Mud Meridian’.

This is a story about John Grady, a teenaged boy from Texas who loves horses and the ranch life and when this way of life is threatened after his grandfather dies, together with his friend Rawlins, rides to Mexico. In this journey they have deadly adventures, face imprisonment, and John Grady falls in love and suffers heartbreak. A broad and long adventure.

There are books which when finished feel as though I have emerged from a wrestling match exhausted. It's never really clear who won, and it's not always that the book is bad or particularly difficult. And this book felt like that.

This is the fourth McCarthy book I've read and at this point there are certain things I expect when I open his books. Among them: a wonderful description of the landscapes the story is set in; periods and the few commas being all the punctuation there is; some adventure of some kind; and some violence. It's for these reasons that McCarthy's writing is often described as "masculine prose" by some critics. For me, habituation has made some of these things less interesting, especially the violence. There's only so many times knife fights and shootouts can excite me. In fact what maintains my interest in his books is his brilliant depiction of human connection and parts of the human experience, which of course isn't mentioned as much in the blurbs and on the covers of his books, maybe because it's less exciting than horse rides and shootouts and also because it might contradict the "masculine prose" statements.

But take this bit of dialogue I think is really good for instance:
"....That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

Parts like this, as well as the telling of the struggle to do what is right, and friendships and human connection is what I like best from McCarthy's work. Maybe it's just personal taste and if I liked horses and guns and fights and adventure I would have liked this even better.

‘Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.’

The world is made of stories and these stories form cultural ideas about a place and time, such as all the mythos of the American West with ideas of heroics in hard times, gunfights, horses and living close to nature. But striping away the romanticisism reveals the reality beneath and the hard facts of life one must inevitably confront. Cormac McCarthy’s National Book Award winning novel, All the Pretty Horses, blends the brutality and beauty of life in a stunning bildungsroman that strips away the mythos of the American West as the old world gives way to the modern one. 16 year old John Grady Cole is ‘like a man come to the end of something’ when, distraught by his family selling the family ranch to the corporatization of oil, highways and industry creeping across the land, crosses into Mexico with friend Lacey Rawlings with his heart set on the adventure and heroisms of the cowboy mythos. But have they found paradise or have they entered a hell from which they will not make it back alive? Told in McCarthy’s ornate, signature prose and set in a threatening landscape that is practically a character on it’s own, All the Pretty Horses is a fantastic journey about border crossings: from one land to another, from naivety to understanding and from adolescence into adulthood.

When All the Pretty Horses was published in 1992, buoyed by the win of the National Book Award it outsold all of McCarthy’s previous novels combined and brought the author finally into the spotlight. Not that there was anything lacking in his previous works—Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is often cited as a favorite—but the combination of McCarthy’s exquisite prose in a more plot-forward and less dense work has wowed critics and fans alike and it works well as an entrypoint into his works for that reason. This is a book that is difficult to put down, the writing which is practically a protagonist to overshadow his own characters takes hold on the reigns of your mind and sends you galloping into the action and intrigue that never lets up. While a few parts many feel a little over the top, such as the multi-day prison brawl and climactic showdown, the writing and imagery is so engaging and engrossing that you’ll hardly notice. McCarthy’s prose often reads like a cross between the Old Testament and William Faulkner, often with a lush loquacity that can also drive succinct and direct images into the reader’s mind and also expand their vocabulary. It moves as if with the natural world it describes, never being unnecessarily verbose but always a formidable force of language.

‘I knew that courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it.’

As the novel opens, we find John Grady Cole mourning the loss of his grandfather, losing his girlfriend and also knowing that soon he will lose the family ranch he always hoped to inherit. While he is full of gusto and confidence, we find him to still be a starry-eyed youth constructing the facade of being ‘a Man’ than actually having achieved maturity. During his break-up when she offers to remain friends he accuses her of being ‘all talk.’ When she responds that everything is just talk he says ‘not everything’, an early indication that he values action above all else but it is contained in a scene where he displays a lack of maturity. The novel functions as a coming-of-age tale, with Grady learning to take responsibility for his actions as he moves towards maturation.

‘It may be that the life I desire for her no longer even exists.’

A major part of his coming-of-age, however, is the waking from the dream of the American mythos. He is drawn to Blevins, the young horse boy they meet early on in Mexico, despite Rawlings not trusting him. Grady see’s him as someone of action, something wild and embodying the cowboy mythos of living in communion with the land.

‘What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.’

With Blevins, however, we see the tough cowboy act as a quick ticket towards disaster and cracks in the mythos begin to reveal itself as juvenile. The horrific end this leads to is enough to shock anyone awake into the reality of life and death, and suddenly posturing is shown to have deadly consequences ready to snatch you from this world. It’s a scene I’ll never forget, blunt as a gunshot, and told in such a way as to leave you teeming with details that suddenly become muted in the aftershock.

Much of this novel is about border crossings, a multi-functional metaphor that encompasses both physical and emotional spaces. There is also the crossing from idealization into acceptance of reality. Grady resents the loss of the myth of the American West as industrialization and modernization take over, idealizing Mexico as a fresh wilderness full of adventure he can live out his cowboy fantasies within (which, okay, a bit problematic in the ‘savage Others’ way). When Grady and Rawlins reach the ranch upon which they work, it is a sort of found Paradise to them, the promised land they had been chasing. Though along the way the land echoes different tones, depicted as threatening and violent (think the birds caught and dying in the thorns they pass). Grady’s actions, a metaphorical feasting on the forbidden fruit that is Don Hector’s daughter, Alejandra, quickly has them thrown from Paradise for their descent into Hell: prison. The book is rife with religious imagery and the crossing from Heaven into Hell, with a purgatory session in recovery later, adds a dramatic weight that comes alive and sinks its fangs into you through McCarthy’s prose.

The prose does a lot of heavy lifting in this novel, where even a single word in Spanish in the dialogue is used to denote the ethnicity of a character. ‘The truth is what happened,’ says John Grady, ‘it ain't what come out of somebody's mouth,’ and in keeping with this belief, and that of action mattering more than words, McCarthy’s prose shows us what the characters are made of through how we see them respond and through the metaphorical language around them. Just as the landscape is a character in the novel, so is the language itself.

‘Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.’

Perhaps the greatest lesson in accepting reality and waking from the dream of idealism comes from Dueña Alfonsa, who tells of the failed revolution and the reality that hit hard to those clinging to ideals. It isn’t to say that ideals aren’t worth fighting for, but the understanding of what can be done, what must be done to do it, and that some borders can not be crossed. ‘It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it,’ we are told, ‘I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood.’ Evil is real and will lead to death, and those familiar with McCarthy know that the unstoppable force of evil is often embodied in his novels. For Grady, this is learning that the Paradise he idealizes can never be his, but learning to love what can be his all the same. Which is the most meaningful part of this novel, that even amidst all the violence and darkness, Grady always holds on to believing in good and beauty.

‘He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heartbeat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.’

I enjoyed that there were so many strong women in this novel too, and that it was from women that the young men learn the truths of life. Dueña Alfonsa is a strong character, and so is Alejandra. True, much of her character exists for romantic purposes, but she is also a highly capable and strong character that even shows up the boys at riding.

‘Don't fear Death. Its only gonna help you die faster, its not gonna help you live.’

It can be seen that All the Pretty Horses adheres to the Joseph Campbell narrative of the Hero’s Journey, with the boys setting out, meeting helpers, mentors, temptors and falling into the abyss where rebirth and transformation occur. The prison sequence, with Grady and Rawlins fighting for days on end, functions as the hellish catalyst for transformation. Once Grady has killed a man, heroics no longer seem so heroic. It is no longer something you do to be brave or be a hero, it is something you do because it is what you have to do. The romanticization of heroes and cowboy myths dissolve under the crushing weight of reality, life and death, and in this way we see Grady return home with a lesson under his belt. He left a youth, returned as an adult with a new found sense of self and purpose.

‘The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community is one of sorrow.’

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is a wild ride that tears at the fabrics of myths and tugs at our heartstrings all the same. Violent, brutal, yet deeply beautiful, this is a fascinating coming-of-age tale that goes about it in unexpected ways while teaching lasting lessons. But most of all, it is a lot of fun and has a few scenes that are forever burned into my memory. ‘In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments,’ writes McCarthy, ‘those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.’ May the world be a place where we can thrive and appreciate the beauty even amidst all the darkness, and may you enjoy this novel as much as I did.

4.5/5

‘He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.’

“He stood at the window of the empty café and watched activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all."

I think you either love McCarthy or hate him. I had seen the movie “No Country for Old Men” and while I really liked it I never wanted to see it again or even read the book. Way too dark. I didn’t want to read “The Road” either for the same reason. Then I read that he had won a Pulitzer Prize for it, so I had to read it. I loved it and his writing.

For a western this was a really good book. It isn't boring like those I used to love in my youth; instead, it was so captivating, except for the brief time that he was breaking horses, and I was feeling bad for the way he broke them. Even his life on the ranch was boring. Still, his time on the ranch didn’t last long beforee he was back on the road but now into trouble with the law.

Many of McCarthy's books take place in Mexico, so I decided to look at his biography. He was born in Rhode Island, moved to Tennessee, and then to El Paso, Texas and now lives in Tesque, New Mexico-all close to the Mexican border. I imagine that he has traveled often to Mexico, and that he is fascinated with it as much as I have been.

Update, March 25, 2028: I read No Country For Old Men. Nothing like the movie, so I liked it. Also read Blood Meridian, and now that was hard to read.

“Every dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it.”

“He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.”

“They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”

“That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid neither horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.”`

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.
*
They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pasture-land. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.
*
HE SAT on his bunk in the dark with his pillow in his two arms and he leaned his face into it and drank in her scent and tried to refashion in his mind her self and voice. He whispered half aloud the words she'd said. Tell me what to do. I'll do anything you say. The selfsame words he'd said to her. She'd wept against his naked chest while he held her but there was nothing to tell her and there was nothing to do and in the morning she was gone.
*
But some things aint reasonable.
*
[...] a man leaves much when he leaves his own country. They said that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other and they said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise.
*
In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
*
He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.
*
He slept that night in a field far from any town. He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.
*
He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

Duro, come un pugno nello stomaco, ma terribilmente realistico e coinvolgente. Il Messico descritto da Dueña Alfonsa; la figura del pacato giudice texano così vicino a quelle descritte dai vecchi film americani in bianco e nero; il dialogo surreale tra il gruppo di ragazzini messicani e John Grady; la variegata galleria di personaggi minori, confermano tutti come McCarthy sappia efficacemente ricordarci che something is rotten anche nella nostra… civilissima società.
«Pensò che la bellezza del mondo nascondeva un segreto, che il cuore del mondo batteva ad un prezzo terribile, che la sofferenza e la bellezza del mondo crescevano di pari passo, ma in direzioni opposte, e che forse quella forbice vertiginosa esigeva il sangue di molta gente per la grazia di un semplice fiore.»

If you're familiar with Cormac McCarthy's work, you know that his books are dense. I don't know how correct it is, but apparently, I started reading this in December of last year. Maybe it's the pandemic, maybe it's the fact that I'm always reading like 5 other books, but to say this was a difficult read would be an understatement. I started this over at least three times. The story is simple enough, but my god, the writing...
Still, even in saying all of that, I have to admit that it is brilliant. The violence is unflinching but what kept me reading (and re-reading) is the gorgeousness of the prose. McCarthy is a writer's writer. Read any of his books and you can see this. He writes as if his pen has literally been touched by God. This man does not play with his words:

He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.

Also:

When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all of history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

As good as the writing is, though, a difficult book is a difficult book which is why my rating isn't higher than a 4. If you're not into Westerns or long, unpunctuated sentences then this probably won't be the book for you. Also, I wasn't always able to keep track of who was talking during stretches of dialogue. As a fan of McCarthy, though, I can't say that I was disappointed and I'm definitely looking forward to The Crossing, the next book in the series.

This is a widely popular and beloved book and author, so it comes as quite a surprise to me that I didn’t like it one bit.
The beginning of “All the Pretty Horses” was the best part. While it was a jumpstart to a pretty simple story about two boys escaping to Mexico, it was intriguing to read, and I appreciated the western feel that we get.
However, from there onwards the story went downhill for me. The plot was too constructed with epic themes such as romance and shooting mingled with horses, and I felt too detached from both the story and the characters. The dialogue was very hard to follow because McCarthy doesn’t use punctuation - which is fine with me; that’s his thing! But it frustrated me that I oftentimes didn’t know who was speaking. I ran into a metaphorical wall when we are provided with a page-long monologue from a grandmother; a monologue that told everything this book was really about instead of letting us experience it for ourselves. From then onwards, I decided to skim-read the pages of a book that ultimately didn’t interest me at all.
I know that I’m very solitary with this opinion, and I know that a lot of people love this book and the trilogy as a whole. I think that’s wonderful! It’s just one of those books that didn’t work for me at all, and it’s a shame because I really wanted to fall in love Cormac McCarthy and his story-telling as so many other people have.

Siamo nel 1949 e due giovani di belle speranze (ma quello che interessa all'autore è solamente John Grady, l'altro fa solo da spalla, proprio come nei film di quegli anni) si mettono in viaggio (a cavallo !) verso il Messico.
Cammin facendo si viene sapere che hanno 16 anni, ma sono sgamati e tosti come veri cow boy. Ovviamente sono armati fino ai denti, anche se nel 1949 gli indiani erano stati sterminati già da un pezzo ed i terroristi islamici non erano ancora apparsi, ma non si sa mai. Durante il tragitto si aggiunge un terzo giovanotto, che però uscirà presto di scena, non prima di aver estasiato i compagni di strada bucando al volo un portamonete tirato in aria da uno dei due. Ci viene risparmiata la scena del revolver rimesso nella fondina dopo tre o quattro giri attorno all'indice del pistolero, ma ce la immaginiamo.

Al termine della perigliosa cavalcata John Grady e scudiero arrivano in Messico dove trovano lavoro in una hacenda dimostrando ineguagliabile perizia nell'addestrare i famosi cavalli selvaggi del titolo. Al latifondista il Nostro elargisce perle di sapienza in genealogia equina, di cui il proprietario farà tesoro, mentre conquista il cuore della di lui figlia, Alejandra, bella, altera e ribelle, come si conviene alla donna di un cow boy. Riguardo a questa storia c'è l'intervento della vecchia zia di Alejandra, anche lei in gioventù ribelle e passionale, a colloquio con la quale il Nostro si dimostra un piccolo lord compito e cerimonioso, immaginiamo capace di trasformare all'istante l'afrore di stalla nella migliore acqua di colonia. Ad un certo punto gioca a scacchi con la vecchia nobildonna, che si ritiene molto abile. Ma il Nostro, a sedici anni, oltre ad ammansire mandrie di cavalli bradi praticamente con uno sguardo, è anche un novello Kasparov e la sconfigge nettamente.

Nella seconda metà del romanzo, tra qualche sprazzo leggibile i punti salienti sono: la cauterizzazione con una canna di pistola arroventata della ferita riportata in uno scontro a fuoco contro gli sbirri messicani (sudaticci !) e l'ultimo convegno con Alejandra a suggello del loro impossibile amore. In Hotel, il teen ager cow boy è macho ma all'occorrenza sa essere bon vivant.

Una volta tanto bisogna spezzare una lancia in favore delle note di copertina che recitano: ” Con una narrazione che all'asciuttezza stilistica di Hemingway unisce la ritmicità incantatoria di Faulkner, McCarthy strappa al cinema il sogno western e lo restituisce, con sorprendente potere evocativo, alla letteratura” . Ecco appunto, lasciando stare i due premi Nobel che immagino si stiano rivoltando nella tomba, proprio il cinema western è il referente costante di Cavalli selvaggi in particolare quello in cui il John Wayne di turno, mascagna cotonata, sbarbato di fresco e camicia inamidata, guarda dall'alto il paesaggio del selvaggio west (di cartapesta dipinta), su cui l'uomo bianco ha già imposto la sua signoria.

A me lascia sgomento poi rilevare che il libro esce nel 1992: si è appena finito di bombardare Baghdad e ci si sta accingendo a bombardare Belgrado, De Lillo ha da poco scritto Rumore bianco e e tra poco ci darà Underworld, Philip Roth sta per sfornare la mitica trilogia americana. E questo McCarthy non trova niente di meglio da fare che baloccarsi fuori tempo massimo con l'icona americana più logora, fasulla, posticcia ed ideologicamente costruita, con una considerazione della verosimiglianza ed una mancanza di ironia che sconfina nello sprezzo del ridicolo ?

Mi domando come abbia potuto mietere riconoscimenti illustri e favore di masse di lettori, ma leggendo in questi giorni della marcia trionfale di Donald Trump alla Casa bianca, qualche risposta me la do.

Set in 1949, between the frontier lands that separate Texas from México, McCarthy introduces the legendary John Grady Cole when he is barely sixteen years of age. Destitute of state and home after his grandfather’s death, the boy starts a journey of personal growth that will bring him face to face with the harsh violence and crudity of life among bandits, cowboys and outlaws.
“All the pretty horses” is my first contact with the epic Cormac McCarthy, and even though I can’t deny the rugged artistry of his dry and somewhat archaic style, I confess I won’t hurry to read the following installments of the “Border Trilogy”.

Don't mistake me. There are noble sentiments in this novel that shine naturally by the sheer force of its characters. Honor, courage, romantic love and loyalty are ever present in spite of the hopelessness that seems to rule McCarthy’s world, a world that is fading out in front of the reader’s eyes. Still, I was left with the feeling that John Grady was chasing something all the way down from Texas to México that he couldn’t find; a place, an ideal, a dream that was never found or accomplished. There is only a kind of calm desperation, an accepted surrender to one’s place in a senseless world, a silent admission that life is worthless, that happiness or contentment can’t exist in a world where violence and abuse are so random, so arbitrary.

As a reader, I am generally uncomfortable with such a dark, despairing vision of life, but at the same time, I marveled at McCarthy’s sensitivity in portraying the profound connection that man can develop with nature, which in this book is represented by horses. These majestic, elegant animals are somehow presented as superior to man, they provide spiritual dimension to McCarthy’s characters and evoke the Native American ancestral belief that man and horse can merge into a single soul through exertion and suffering.
And so, there you have beauty even in the gloomiest portrayal of this conflicted, incongruous world. The shadow of man and horse united against fate, standing tall and dignified, never defeated, ready to keep walking relentlessly towards the setting sun. Who can resist such an iconic sculpture? Not even me.

4.5 stars. McCarthy never misses. Loved this book and am looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy!