By all accounts, I shouldn't like Cormac McCarthy's novels. I have little patience for stylized prose. Violent imagery sends me over the edge. Books set in the American West or South are not my first—or even fourth—choice, as a general rule.

But I'm helpless under McCarthy's pen.

All the Pretty Horses is McCarthy's most accessible novel and I'm glad I didn't start here, because anything which followed would have been an horrific shock. In contrast to his other works that seem to roll out in fugue states or unravel like dreams in which you are falling falling falling, novels that feature violence so absolute you are left hollowed out and irrevocably altered, All the Pretty Horses is a baptism in hope. The sharp edges of the story's existentialism are softened by a classic buddy tale—the achingly lovely friendship between John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins, given a sepia patina by John Grady and Alejandra's romance, and can even be ignored entirely when Cole is practicing his horse whisperer magic on a wild pack brought down from the hills of northeast Mexico.

John Grady and Rawlins are only sixteen when they take off on horseback from west central Texas and cross the border, lured by the romance of Mexico. And one of them is searching for something deeper than adventure. The rapid pace of cultural change as the 1950s approaches is becoming too much for an old soul like young John Grady Cole. His parents have divorced, his father is drinking himself to death, his mother is selling off the family farm. John Grady is searching for home.

John Grady and Rawlins find adventure indeed, becoming ranch hands at an estate in Coahuila. Cole shows his quality and is soon promoted to trainer and horse breeder. They also find a mountain of trouble. John Grady tumbles into star-crossed love with Alejandra, the estate owner's bewitching daughter, and well, you just have the read the rest your damn self.

See how easy that was? A romantic premise made for a curl-up-and-sink-in reading, all atmospheric with velvet-black skies pricked by stars made of diamonds, and beautiful girls with green eyes and flowing black hair, and cowboys that in my mind look like the young and gorgeous Robert Redford and Paul Newman.

Ah, but remember, this is Cormac McCarthy we're talking about here. Nothing is that simple in McCarthy's world. And rarely is writing ever as good as his:

"In his sleep he could hear the horses stepping among the rocks and he could hear them drink from the shallow pools in the dark where the rocks lay smooth and rectilinear as the stones of ancient ruins and the water from their muzzles dripped and rang like water dripping in a well and in his sleep he dreamt of horses and the horses in his dream moved gravely among the tilted stones like horses come upon an antique site where some ordering of the world had failed and if anything had been written on the stones the weathers had taken it away again and the horses were wary and moved with great circumspection carrying in their blood as they did the recollection of this and other places where horses once had been and would be again. Finally what he saw in his dream was that the order in the horse's heart was more durable for it was written in a place where no rain could erase it."

Jesus H. Christ. It's so good, it's ridiculous.

Maybe you've already determined that McCarthy's writing isn't for you-the whole lack of punctuation and all that. Fine. Whatever. What I hear is music, music created by nature, ordained by a higher power, released into the atmosphere by one man's imagination. All the Pretty Horses made me a little less afraid of Cormac McCarthy, less uncertain of the soul that lives within him. I know from reading The Road that he is a writer of tremendous empathy and vulnerability, but this lovely, sad, sweet tale showed a sense of humor and a tenderness that I hope to find again, the next time I venture into one of Cormac McCarthy's worlds

They rode out along the fence line and across the open pastureland. 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'.

6.5/10

Cormac McCarthy must have been abused as a child. Abused in such a despicable way that all these years later he is still suffering deep down. The abuser – “The Apostrophe”.



I can’t think of any other valid reason for this style of writing. The apostrophe is a great friend of mine; I use it all the time on a day to day basis. Sometimes I even throw them in sentences where they don’t belong! Obviously Cormac doesn’t believe in using them and he just plumps for adding in “and” every now and then to keep that epic, page long, sentence going. It might be an artistic style, but it’s one that doesn’t work on this reader. It took me out of my comfort zone. I need those apostrophe’s god damn it! But then again, I’m not an award winning reader whereas Cormac is an award winning writer with multiple best selling misery fests. So who am I to judge?!

On a serious note though, I’m glad I got past my initial reaction to the style of writing and gave this a chance. The story was engaging overall, a main character with enough about him to make you want to read on and also his friends/acquaintances added enough intrigue and plot points to keep things moving. The plot is simple enough and seen as a coming of age tale. There are parts where this drags, such as the long descriptive moments where a sentence consists of my nights reading. But there are also moments which flow smoothly and the interactions of some of the characters work really well allowing you to get caught up in the atmosphere and the feelings of the characters.

Unfortunately it was too much of a mixed bag of the good and the bad for me to rate any higher. I have the trilogy to read and will gladly complete it, but at my own pace with a sizeable gap between each novel. This is also supposed to be one of Cormac’s “fuzzier” novels; I knew he was a master of grim but if this is his fuzzy side I dread some of his heavier, bleaker work such as “The Road”. The outcome of this trilogy may decide whether I read any more of his work.

If you enjoyed this: Look up the term enjoyment and go to a theme park for some actual fun.

Solid melancholy western with gorgeous prose. I love how McCarthy lulls you into a rhythm with short, succinct sentences only to shock you out of it with absolutely beautiful passages peppered throughout.

n  “He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites 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.”n

The first novel in McCarthy's celebrated Border Trilogy tells the story of a young man searching for the romantic idealistic notion of an American West that is ceasing to exist or may never have existed at all. The plot is largely ancillary as the narrative centers primarily on the youth's Quixotic quest while McCarthy's exquisite prose lingers solemnly on the austere landscape and its quirky denizens. As usual with McCarthy's works a pat, happy ending is unlikely to be in the cards for anyone, and the best that can be reasonably anticipated is the avoidance of portentous tragedy.

n  “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.”n

Cormac McCarthy is one of our greatest writers. Reading him, though, can be intimidating because of the harsh bleakness of his world view and vision. He definitely does not write feel good books. All the Pretty Horses, then, is a great place to begin reading McCarthy. That bleak world view is present, but muted. Tragedy happens, but not on every other page. He doesn’t give you hope, but he leaves you somewhere short of hopelessness.

And his prose! McCarthy’s prose is the reason you take the ride. He weaves short, nearly staccato sentence together to create a lyrical spell that will first capture and hold you, then sear into your memory. It is a thing of beauty.

What he has done in All the Pretty Horse is to adroitly combine a coming of age tale with a story of a world that is passing away. His juxtaposition of youthful protagonists with the fading world of great, hereditary cattle ranches serves to make both more poignant, more beautiful.

Finally, McCarthy’s characters are hyper real. Perhaps no one ever spoke in exactly this way, gave such long and elegant monologues, but if they didn’t, he convinces you that they should have. These characters have blood in their veins, you can feel their breath. You will come away feeling you knew them.

All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1), Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published in 1992.

Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It is also the first of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy".

The novel tells of John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old who grew up on his grandfather's ranch in San Angelo, Texas.

The boy was raised for a significant part of his youth, perhaps 15 of his 16 years, by a family of Mexican origin who worked on the ranch; he is a native speaker of Spanish and English.

The story begins in 1949, soon after the death of John Grady's grandfather when Grady learns the ranch is to be sold.

Faced with the prospect of moving into town, Grady instead chooses to leave and persuades his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, to accompany him.

Traveling by horseback, the pair travel southward into Mexico, where they hope to find work as cowboys. ...

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز دوم ماه ژانویه سال 2014میلادی

عنوان: همه اسبهای زیبا؛ نویسنده: کورمک مکارتی؛ مترجم: کاوه میرعباسی؛ تهران، نیکا، 1390، در 416ص؛ شابک9786005906448؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م

داستان در سال 1949میلادی، در «تگزاس» آغاز میگردد؛ و درباره ی کابویی شانزده ساله، به نام «جان گردی کول» است، که در آغاز داستان، با مرگ پدربزرگش، عزادار میشود؛ در این بین، مادرش تصمیم میگیرد، تا املاکشان را بفروشند، و مهاجرت کنند؛ اما «جان»، که رویای گاوچرانی، و آزادی را، در سر دارد، خانه را ترک، و به همراه دوستش، راهی «مکزیک» میشوند؛ «جان گردی کول»، و «لیسی رائولینز»، که نمی‌توانند رویاهای ماجراجویانه‌ شان را، در «آمریکا»ی پس از جنگ جهانی دوم، واقعیت ببخشند، «تگزاس» را ترک، و به سوی «مکزیک» می‌تازند؛ این دو نوجوان، در آرزوی جشن مدام، در دل طبیعتی دست نخورده، به دوردست می‌روند؛ اما این سفر پرامید، که می‌بایست درس زندگی، و تجربه به آنان بیاموزد، به کابوسی دوزخی بدل می‌شود...؛

تاریخ 19/11/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 01/07/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

I seldom abandon books after reading just a couple of pages, but in this case I had no choice. Two pages into the book I was so annoyed by McCarthy's random use of apostrophes and near-total lack of commas that I felt I had better stop reading to prevent an aneurysm. I'm sure McCarthy is a great storyteller, but unless someone convinces me he has found a competent proof-reader who is not afraid to add some four thousand commas to each of his books, I'll never read another line he's written. I can only tolerate so many crimes against grammar and punctuation.

The ending is so very nice. It pushed my rating from three to four stars. But let me state clearly, never did I ever consider giving the book anything less than three stars.

The ending left me smiling. After the bad, horrible things we must get through as we travel through the story, the ending, although not sugar sweet, is very, very nice. I didn’t know how much I needed this ending until I had it here in my lap. In this book, the bad is bad and the good is good and this is just as it should be!

OK, what else should I tell you?

The central protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a lad of sixteen living in western Texas. It’s 1949 at the start, and his grandfather has just died. His mother has decided their cattle ranch is to be sold. She owns it. She and John Grady’s father are at odds and have been so for years and years. His mother, preferring the more glamorous and exciting environs of California, John Grady had been raised by the family’ s Spanish housekeeper at the ranch. As a result, he is at home in both Spanish and English. Not permitted to take over the running of the ranch, John Grady decides to travel southwest to Mexico. Persuaded to follow along, John Grady and his longtime friend and companion Lacey Rawlins head off on horseback to Mexico. Before crossing the border, they meet up with a thirteen-year-old mounted on a beautiful bay. Was it his? Could this majestic horse really be the rightful possession of this miserable scrap of a boy? We read about the events that play out in Mexico. The book is about these men, not just what they do but what makes them who they are personality wise. Their journey takes a couple of months.

The prose has a simplicity, a straightforwardness and strength. Reading this story, you feel the West in your bones. Humor is thrown in too. The strange ideas in the head of the thirteen-year-old boy I spoke of have got to put a smile on your face. This helps balance out against the grueling reality of the West. The conditions in a Mexican prison are not played down. They shouldn’t be. The reading here isn’t easy!

I like how the men in this story behave as men often do. It is not hard to intuit their thoughts and their emotions through their actions. Words are sparse but laden with meaning. Emotions are right there on the surface, but you must look and listen to catch how the men are feeling.

William Roberts reads the audiobook very, very well. Every word is clear. I don’t know a word of Spanish, so I cannot judge how well he captures that which the Mexicans say. Although the Spanish is not translated, I could understand enough from the context to never be confused. In very tense moments, Roberts’ intonation is perfect. He does not overdramatize, but you do definitely feel the tension and angst. Four stars for the narration. I decided against five stars only because his intonation for Alejandra’s great aunt sounded a bit too domineering in my ears. Yeah, I am a real stickler with my star ratings!

If you read a book, a really popular book by an author, and you don’t like it, give the author another try. Many times, the first book I’ve read by an author has failed me. W. Somerset Maugham and Cormac McCarthy are two examples of many. I will definitely be reading the two remaining books of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy! The prose and the ending have won me over.


*********************

n  The Border Trilogyn
*All the Pretty Horses 4 stars
*The Crossing TBR
*Cities of the Plain TBR

*Suttree 1 star

April has clearly become the month of my best readings of the year so far, and after finishing All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, it seems very unlikely that that fact may change in a while.
Since this book and I seem to be connected in a way that it is difficult for me to explain, I would just like to say why it is actually my favorite book of the year and one of my best reads of my life.

To begin with, the writing style and its own beauty. I believe you don't find a book with such a poetic prose every day; there is a powerful, beautiful narrative in the whole book – it is like poetry written in prose form, telling you a story. Poetry, poetry and just poetry. You can feel each word, each phrase, where every single thing together makes complete sense; besides, our characters' feelings and thoughts are constantly depicted using this poetic style, which is an indescribable experience.
Dialogues without quotation marks: not a problem anymore for me; now I can notice the difference between a bad writing style and a good one, and see why it was a huge problem in my last reading experience and like a blessing in this one here.
In addition, another aspect that really surprised me was the fact that there are characters who are constantly speaking Spanish, and even the narrator is 'speaking' Spanish (mostly words, not complete sentences) in order to describe some scenes; if you are both a Spanish and an English speaker, you are probably going to love this fact, and of course, if you like to read in both English and Spanish, I encourage you to read this one in its original language, not in translation (I think it might lose its own soul in translation). For example, dialogues such as this one:

Digame, he said. Cuál es lo peor: Que soy pobre o que soy americano?
The vaquero shook his head. Una llave de oro abre cualquier puerta, he said.

In my opinion, I don't know if McCarthy speaks Spanish fluently, I think he does since he was able to use this resource perfectly in his novel. The characters who are Mexican speak real Mexican Spanish (I found one, maybe two expressions in the entire novel which are not Mexican at all, but from Spain, which is completely acceptable), and the author is truly respectful of Mexican culture. In short, I found a small part of my country in this book, but a real one, and that fact, just that one, made me love this novel quite a bit.

Secondly, the story and the characters. Even though there is a gloomy, ominous atmosphere every now and then in the story, the plot itself is absolutely emotional, moving. The story is set in both Texas and mainly the north of Mexico, in the state of Coahuila, and it follows the life of John Grady, a 16-year-old boy who grew up on a ranch in San Angelo, Texas and who speaks both Spanish and English. After his grandfather's death, he and his best friend Lacey Rawlins leave their place and set off together in order to find a job as cowboys in Mexico.
The whole journey, my friends, the whole extraordinary journey means beauty, wonder, passion. I can't describe how much I loved reading this story, joining the characters on their own trip; obviously it was not only a physical journey, but also a symbolic one. The development of the protagonists is completely noticeable and more than impressive, the dialogues are quite thought-provoking and some of them are still stuck in my head, and the beautiful, rather symbolic ending.... I just felt like another notch on my belt after finishing it.
The horses!, please don't forget the horses whose parts in the novel—almost the entire novel—are sublime; in short, I don't know if I will find another novel such as this one soon. It was my first McCarthy, but certainly it won't be the last one.

Lastly—I know I am breaking my rule of three paragraphs only, but I just have one more thing to say—there is one monologue in this novel that really impressed me, and still now, while I'm writing my review, it is in my mind so vividly and profoundly. A 70-year-old woman, talking about an episode that she lived during the Mexican Revolution, and how she comes back to that precise moment while she is talking... Wow! I am not lying if I say that I felt this part so close to me as a Mexican. I had the fortune to meet my great-grandmother, and although I don't remember her so well (I was merely 5 years old when she passed away in 2000), my grandmother used to tell me what her mother lived during the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, and how her family had to overcome the whole situation, how they got through the consequences of the war.
Obviously I couldn't help but cry while I was reading these memories, but also I couldn't be happier with the descriptions, thoughts and true, deep feelings that McCarthy depicts in this scene, and of course, in the entire book.

Society is very important in Mexico. Where women do not even have the vote. In Mexico they are mad for society and for politics and very bad at both.

The following paragraph is another example of how shocking the effects of the revolution were for children, being quite heartbreaking:

There were so few restraints upon them. So few expectations. Then at the age of eleven or twelve they would cease being children. They lost their childhood overnight and they had no youth. They became very serious. As if some terrible truth had been visited upon them. Some terrible vision. At a certain point in their lives they were sobered in an instant and I was puzzled by this but of course I could not know what it was they saw. What it was they knew.

In a nutshell, All the Pretty Horses is an absolute masterpiece, a great piece of literature that I am pretty sure everyone can enjoy and live at once. Obviously I'd wholeheartedly recommend this book, and I hope you love it as much as I did.

Favorite/Remarkable quotes:

He said that war had destroyed the country and that men believe the cure for war is war as the curandero prescribes the serpent’s flesh for its bite.

She smiled. I believe you, she said. But you must understand. This is another country. Here a woman’s reputation is all she has.
Yes mam.
There is no forgiveness, you see.
Mam?
There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.

Anybody can be a pendejo, said John Grady. That just means asshole.
Yeah? Well, we’re the biggest ones in here.

Evil is a true thing in Mexico. It goes about on its own legs. Maybe some day it will come to visit you. Maybe it already has.

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change.

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.

A young hired hand is warned against getting close to the beautiful, haughty daughter of his ranchowner employer, but her haunting beauty zzzzzzzzzz.........

Rawlins put the knife in his pocket and sat inspecting his hat for nopal stickers. A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin women, he said. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that gets the job done.

Horses, best friends, the ranchers' daughter, cowboys, and gunfights what more could you ask for in a book. Not my favorite McCarthy book, but with that said, it's still better than most of the other trash out there passing for good books. McCarthy has a way of pulling you into the story. He sets a scene so vivid and full of life that you can't help but be amazed.

McCarthy has a very interesting way of writing, and it's sometimes hard to get into and sort out, but once you do, its well worth it. If bad Grammer and punctuation, or lack thereof, will bother you I'd say steer away from this book, and for that matter all of McCarthy's works, but if you want to experience some amazing stories written by one of the best American authors ever try McCarthy.