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All the Pretty Horses (Border Trilogy, Vol 1)
by Cormac McCarthy

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/469571.All_the_Pretty_Horses?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="All the Pretty Horses (Border Trilogy, Vol 1)" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1204745310m/469571.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/469571.All_the_Pretty_Horses?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">All the Pretty Horses</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4178.Cormac_McCarthy">Cormac McCarthy</a><br/><br/>
  <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7931375?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
  rating: 5 of 5 stars<br/>A perfect western, a perfect homage (or should that be "chevalage"?) to horses, and one of my new all-time favorite novels... Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole journeys into la frontera to seek that fenceless freedom promised but never fulfilled in western fantasies in which the dream is always "vanishing" or vanished, from J.F. Cooper to Louis L'Amour to Annie Proulx (if she didn't read Cormac McCarthy before writing "Brokedown Mountain" and her other Wyoming stories, i'll eat my stetson). Set at the end of the 40s but hard to tell--it could be the 20s or 30s b/c there are automobiles and radios--but we don't really know for a while and it all has a feeling of timelessness in part because travels on horseback erase time: it could be the Middle Ages, or Middle Earth; the horse transports us to a mythic elsewhere.  In part also it's the geography, that vast emptiness of northern Mexico, in part the chivalric quest Cole and his buddy undertake, imagining/hunting some world that barely exists anymore.  (In a scene late in the novel Cole rides out of the desert into a small border town in Texas and has to ask two guys fixing a car what day it is.  They reply "Thursday," and he says no, what date in the year. Turns out it's Thanksgiving Day--McCarthy's symbolism can sometimes be a wee bit on the heavy side.)  In the twentieth century, it would seem, the American frontier of romantics was (quite often) Mexico; but, of course, the whole adventure is as quixotic as Huck's lighting out for the territory and the boys' magical wanderings south of the Rio Grande must come up against hard reality: Mexican history, society, a macho code that trumps their own ranch-hand ethos, the violence of chance and cirumstance (McCarthy's specialty). 
  <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/348966?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Mark's review
rating:
bookshelves: recentlyread
recommended for: Stu

A perfect western, a perfect homage (or should that be "chevalage"?) to horses, and one of my new all-time favorite novels... Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole journeys into la frontera to seek that fenceless freedom promised but never fulfilled in western fantasies in which the dream is always "vanishing" or vanished, from J.F. Cooper to Louis L'Amour to Annie Proulx (if she didn't read Cormac McCarthy before writing "Brokedown Mountain" and her other Wyoming stories, i'll eat my stetson). Set at the end of the 40s but hard to tell--it could be the 20s or 30s b/c there are automobiles and radios--but we don't really know for a while and it all has a feeling of timelessness in part because travels on horseback erase time: it could be the Middle Ages, or Middle Earth; the horse transports us to a mythic elsewhere. In part also it's the geography, that vast emptiness of northern Mexico, in part the chivalric quest Cole and his buddy undertake, imagining/hunt...more

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