Great descriptions and atmosphere… I love the sense that the horses conscious state is present there with the cowboy’s. But I liked less how dumb the cowboys are, the decisions seem unrealistic at times, the world they are in is a bit heightened both in goodwill and bad.

Quite a memorable wotk, no matter, and non traditional narrative structure. ( )

Cormac McCarthy at his finest. A re-read after twenty years. Read also "Blood Meridian", "The Road", "No Country for Old Men" and others. Everything McCarthy wrote shines with a gritty presence. ( )

There's a lot of empty dark landscape and red blood in this book. And there are mesas and tortillas and saddles and sheetiron stoves and knives. The light in the sky is a character itself. The story weaves through Texas and Mexico, and through themes of fate and choice, care and violence, love and loss, as we follow a couple of young cowboys looking for . . . something beyond the life they were brought into, and which is disappearing in any case. It's an adventure and a romance, with a foreboding and sombre backdrop of the inevitability of suffering and betrayal. The writing is by turns pacy and lyrical, with passages of beauty and resignation mixed with page-turning thrills.

Some favourite quotes:

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

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.

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.

. . . 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 horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.

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All the Pretty Horses is an odyssey set on the Texas-Mexico border that focuses on a sixteen year old boy becoming a man through the trials and tribulations of his adventures. All the Pretty Horses is a tragic romance and coming-of-age story, set in a land that is harsh, unforgiving, and deadly. John Grady Cole is a sixteen year old cowboy in Texas a few years after World War II who was raised on his grandfather’s ranch after his parents split up. After his grandfather dies, the ranch is being sold off. With no where else to go, John and his best friend Lacey Rawlins ride off for Mexico. Along the way they hook up with a runaway kid who is nothing but bad news. After getting work on a large ranch, John catches the owner’s eye with his skill working with horses, but after being promoted, John falls in love with the owner’s daughter which leads to trouble for him and Rawlins. Finding himself imprisoned, beaten, and struggling to survive, John is eventually freed, loses his love, regains his horses, and returns home to Texas to realize there is nothing left for him and rides off into the sunset, alone.

All the Pretty Horses is a beautiful, lyrical, and at times, harsh, novel of the realities of the cowboy/bandit life. It is also a tragic coming of age tale about a boy losing everything and the pains of first love.

Excellent.

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A grim but beautifully-written book about people whose motives I struggled to understand. I liked it best as a window into Mexico of the mid-twentieth century. You'll get the most out of it if you have an annotated version for translating the intermingled Spanish and expanding on the Mexican history. ( )