Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1347 in Books
• Published on: 1993-06-29
• Released on: 1993-06-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 301 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780679744399
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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.

From Publishers Weekly
This is a novel so exuberant in its prose, so offbeat in its setting and so mordant and profound in its deliberations that one searches in vain for comparisons in American literature. None of McCarthy's previous works, not even the award-winning The Orchard Keeper (1965) or the much-admired Blood Meridian (1985), quite prepares the reader for the singular achievement of this first installment in the projected Border Trilogy. John Grady Cole is a 16-year-old boy who leaves his Texas home when his grandfather dies. With his parents already split up and his mother working in theater out of town, there is no longer reason for him to stay. He and his friend Lacey Rawlins ride their horses south into Mexico; they are joined by another boy, the mysterious Jimmy Blevins, a 14-year-old sharpshooter. Although the year is 1948, the landscape--at some moments parched and unforgiving, at others verdant and gentled by rain--seems out of time, somewhere before history or after it. These likable boys affect the cowboy's taciturnity--they roll cigarettes and say what they mean--and yet amongst themselves are given to terse, comic exchanges about life and death. In McCarthy's unblinking imagination the boys suffer truly harrowing encounters with corrupt Mexican officials, enigmatic bandits and a desert weather that roils like an angry god. Though some readers may grow impatient with the wild prairie rhythms of McCarthy's language, others will find his voice completely transporting. In what is perhaps the book's most spectacular feat, horses and men are joined in a philosophical union made manifest in the muscular pulse of the prose and the brute dignity of the characters. "What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them," the narrator says of John Grady. As a bonus, Grady endures a tragic love affair with the daughter of a rich Spanish Hacendado , a romance, one hopes, to be resumed later in the trilogy.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Set in the southwest, McCarthy's sixth novel is the first volume of "The Border Trilogy." With the death of his grandfather, John Grady Cole must find his own way in life and come to terms with his manhood. In evocative language, McCarthy recounts John Grady's adventures in discovering the world: its cruelties, its kindnesses, and its justice. With its strong masculine point of view, lyric language, and thematic interplay of honor and survival, the story is often reminiscent of Hemingway. The reader may be put off by the unconventional punctuation (McCarthy eschews apostrophes and quotation marks for direct dialog), and the plot is occasionally confused by imprecise character identification. And, in the literary tradition, McCarthy expects us to be bilingual or come prepared with our Spanish dictionaries. For literary collections.
- Linda L. Rome, Middlefield P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Ascent into Hell
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.

Grand Tale, Wonderfully Rendered
I didn't realize until I looked at the Amazon site that Frank Muller has narrated so many books. They have 84 Muller listings here, primarily for Stephen King, John Grisham and other best-selling authors. The only other Muller audio-book I was familiar with was his rendition of King's , which was excellent. Muller surpasses that here, however, as he renders McCarthy's prose faultlessly. He captures the accents, whether they be Texan or Mexican, faithfully and unaffectadly. This is a great acting-job, natural, unassuming, perfectly in-flow with the narrative. His shift from character to character is seemless. Muller is the latter-day role model for anyone wishing to narrate books. There is ample reason why he is so prolific.

The story itself lends itself to being told orally. It is a myth of the west, but I mean that in the greatest sense of the word. Mythic here does not mean unrealistic. Far from it. It is mythic because it represents higher truths, but tells a human story in as truthful a manner as possible. I hate to use a hackneyed term like "describing the human condition," but it does. There are other high-school terms I could use, such as "coming-of-age story," "piquaresque novel," "story of initiation," etc. , but they would all short-change McCarthy's accomplishment here. McCarthy represents what is increasiningly scarce in modern American letters. He is a truly original novelist. Yes, we can trace his roots, but he has acquired his unique voice by dint of much effort, trial, delving, maybe even bloodshed. He is one of those authors that after reading one of his works, we are left to ask "How did he come by that knowledge?" He doesn't just research a work. He must have, at least in part, lived it. For instance, in this work, I was left wondering how he could have aquired such an encyclopedic knowledge of all things having to do with horses. I worked on the backstretch of racetracks for five years and didn't know my nomenclature with anything like the authority he does.

It would appear that Muller, like McCarthy has thoroughly done his homework. Never once in the course of this unabridged audio does he stumble over a word, much less a passage. He speaks Spanish almost as fluently as English, which is important for this work. In fact I would suggest that if you do not comprehend Spanish readily, you refer to the text-form of the book and maybe a Spanish dictionary before listening to this tape, though you can still appreciate most of it.

My estimation of McCarthy, which was already high, as well as my opinion of Muller, were greatly enhanced by the experience of listening to these tapes.

(This review refers to the unabridged audio-tape version of . I prefer printed versions of good books, but see nothing wrong with listening to books when we dont have our hands free. Cars, obviously. I know what you were thinking!)

Wonderful
I found this book on an empty, dusty bookself at the back of my high school library, it's cover and first few pages torn away and the corners burned round. I thought that either someone was very bored and destructive or frustrated by the difficulty of the first few chapters (this only after flipping it open to find out it's title, the side being illedgable). After reading it I realize it could even more easily have come from the frustration of wanting more! This book kept me reading from cover to cover and still awake enough to wish it were double it's size. While reading it I had no clue as to it's popularity or award, but I knew it deserved one. John Grady Cole is an amazingly believable hero. I found myself trusting him and not the author to carry the book, knowing that he would come through no matter what. Even as the dialogue turned increasingly to spanish I felt that there wasn't a need to understand every word, I knew Grady enough to know what he would say. After getting a friend to translate a bit I found that this was true. I can only hope the movie is even half as good! I'm going to buy my school a copy to replace the destroyed version that I found.