All the Pretty Horses : Border Trilogy 1 (National Book Award Winner)

Amazon.com Review Part bildungsroman, part horse opera, part meditation on courage and loyalty, this beautifully crafted novel won the hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance. Readers familiar with McCarthy's Faulknerian prose will find the writing more restrained than in 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. In All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy begins his Border Trilogy with a coming of age tale that is a departure from the bizarre richness and mysterious violence of his early novels, yet in many ways preserves the mystery and the richness in a more understated form. Like Blood Meridian, this novel follows a young man's journey to the regions of the unknown. John Grady Cole, more heroic than the protagonists of McCarthy's earlier novels, confronts the evil that is an inescapable part of the universe as well as the evil that grows out of his own ignorance and pride. His story is told in a style often restrained and simple, embedded with lyrical passages that echo his dreams and memory. In the spring of 1948 on a small Texas ranch, sixteen year old John Grady Cole attends the funeral of his grandfather, with whom he has lived since his parents' separation. The grandfather's ranch has been left to John Grady's mother, a small-time actress who has no interest in it and will sell it. John Grady's father, psychologically damaged by World War II and now physically ill as well, tells his son goodbye. With no apparent future in Texas, and sensing the threat of the new era to the traditional life he values, John Grady urges his old friend Rawlins to accompany him to Mexico. There, John Grady will find that his innocence, or ignorance, will ultimately lead him close to destruction. Before reaching the border they meet Jimmy Blevins, a dangerous young boy on a magnificent horse. Even though Cole and Rawlins do not trust Blevins and are sure his horse is stolen, they allow him to join them despite their doubts. As they ride into Mexico, they realize that they are no longer in a world that they can understand. When Blevins' clothes and horse disappear during a thunderstorm, they search a nearby Mexican town, where they find the clothes and finally the horse. p { line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: 0.25cm; background: transparent } All the Pretty Horses is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It was a bestseller, and it won both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Along with The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998), it constitues McCarthy's "Border Trilogy", an elegy for the American Frontier, written in an unconventional format which omits traditional Western punctuation (such as quotation marks) and makes use of polysyndetic syntax in a manner similar to that of Ernest Hemingway. The book was adapted as a 2000 eponymous film, starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton. (main source EN.wikipedia)

with The 1998 Publication Of cities Of The Plain, Cormac Mccarthy's Acclaimed Border Trilogy Is Now Complete. The First And Most Admired Book Of The Series Is Mccarthy's National Book Award-winning all The Pretty Horses. In Highly Evocative Prose That Puts The Reader Firmly In The Saddle, all The Pretty Horses Follows The Progress Of Laconic 16-year-old Texan John Grady Cole, His Pal Lacey Rawlins, And The Mysterious Young Sharp Shooter Jimmy Blevins As They Ride Across The Border Into Mexico In Search Of Adventure.

newsweek

a True American Original.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The first volume in the Border Trilogy, from the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The RoadAll 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.Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. 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 ±All the Pretty Horses? cuenta sobre el joven John Grady Cole, el último de una larga lista de rancheros de Texas. Al otro lado de la frontera, México atrae, hermoso y desolado, robusto y cruelmente civilizado. Con dos compañeros, se embarca en una aventura idílica, a veces cómica, hacia un lugar donde los sueños se pagan con sangre Teenager John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers, has nothing left to stay for. Across the border Mexico beckonsbeautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. With neighbor Rawlins, and scruffy boy, he rides toward an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Cut off from the life of ranching he has come to love by his grandfather's death, John Grady Cole flees to Mexico, where he and his two companions embark on a rugged and cruelly idyllic adventure