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Holistic Guidance - All the Pretty Horses
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List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $10.17
Your Save: $ 4.78 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Customer Rating:  
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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: 1993-06-29
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 1993-06-29
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Reviews:
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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.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking and... breathless
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: guess I'm not ready for this yet?
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Definitely a Acquired Taste
Comment: 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 and puzzling out the construction of some sentences, but I did it with the same pleasure a sports fan looks at a replay of a spectacular play. This is a book for the patient. Not every book pays off like a James Bond novel.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hauntingly Beautiful Search for the Dead West
Comment: Cormac McCarthy seems to be everywhere right now--Oprah's book club, a recent Coen Brothers film adaptation, one of the top novels of the past quarter-century. I decided it was time to check out his work, since he's considered the modern Faulkner, and a great depicter of the violent and beautiful American southwest. All the Pretty Horses both lives up to my expectations and kind of frustrates them. The novel starts out gloomy with the funeral for the protagonist John Grady's grandfather, turns comedic when Grady and his friend cross the border into Mexico in search of adventure, then shifts into a semi-melodramatic romance, finally returning to a state of pitch-black gloom and despair. All throughout, McCarthy retains a distance from the world of the novel, coldly surveying the raw beauty of the Mexican landscape and stubbornly refusing to enter the heads of his equally stubborn characters. In some ways, this narrative distance works quite well, amplifying the frankness and simplicity that Hemingway is known for. But it also prevents the novel from striking home on any real emotional level.
The most problematic part of the novel is Grady's passionate love for a ranch owner's daughter, Alejandra. The two are a sort of Romeo and Juliet pair, deeply desiring one another, but knowing that their love can never be allowed to flower. The romance, however, is jarringly out of place with the events in the rest of the novel, and feels a little bit contrived. Especially irritating is the lack of insight into Alejandra's character; she is given no more than a handful of lines, and it is never really clear what she sees in run-down, dirt-poor Grady.
Minor criticisms aside, the icing to top off this striking novel, however, is McCarthy's metaphysical musing that underlies all the events of the novel. Most profound is his consideration of the workings of Fate in human activities. One of the best passages in the novel occurs when Grady confronts Alejandra's grand-aunt for the second time. She is determined to prevent him from stealing off with her protégé, but respects him enough to deliver a haunting and thorough account of her reasoning. She expresses her deep frustration with the randomness of life, describing a coin minter who arbitrarily decides which way to press each coin he makes, blindly affecting countless coin flips down the road. She laments the inability of mankind to ever know the alternative course that their actions could have taken; for a history that never sees the light of day, and can never be judged against what actually transpired. Building off this theme is Grady's fascination with the long-dead frontier of the American West. Early in the novel we see him wistfully imagining the hunting parties of the glorious and departed Native American tribes, disappearing in the red light of the setting sun. At the end of the novel, Grady likewise disappears, fading into history like so many movements whose splendor the world will never see.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Western for the 20th century
Comment: Adventure, full-hearted love, revenge, the majestic wilderness, and of course horses: the western-movie staples are what moves this novel. Yet if All The Pretty Horses is a classic cowboy story, it is also that of a dying world, and all the more accessible to us that it is set in the post-war era.
John Grady Cole, a young man of 16 years, leaves the country for Mexico together with his friend Lacey Rawlins, both on horseback, in search of a life that has become inaccessible to them in Texas. A cruel but romantic saga of tests and tribulations awaits them - which I won't spoil by giving too much of it.
The dialogues are suitably laconic. The characters are frank and unambiguous, except for one key exception. Nature is reserved the richer, more complex, and admiring language. While the novel begins at a slow pace, making the reader wonder whether this is really a back-to-the-wild story, the action later quickens to a satisfyingly gripping climax. One warning: a good part of the dialogue is in Spanish, untranslated; though this won't throw you off the plot, if you don't understand Spanish, it may get annoying.
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