All the Pretty Horses
1992
- fiction
- ranch life
- horsemen and horsewomen
- prisoners
- cowboys
- americans
- national book award winner
- award:national_book_award=1992
- award:national_book_award=fiction
- national book critics circle award winner
The story
*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 C*ities 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: Wikipedia)
What it’s like
Long, unbroken sentences roll across the page like wind over grassland, linked by "and" instead of commas and stripped of quotation marks, so dialogue arrives unannounced inside the narration and the prose feels like it is always moving. The sensory world is sun-bleached and vast: dust, scrub, night campfires, the smell of horses and leather, the pale glare of the Chihuahuan desert and the cold dark of mountain country. The vibe is elegiac and wistful, with a yearning, lonely dignity that never tips into melodrama. Its rhythm is slow and rolling, built for long stretches of reading in one sitting, a quiet afternoon or a late evening with the lamp on. Violence exists, sudden and matter-of-fact, but it comes in brief bursts rather than lingering gore, and there is some prison brutality and a few hard deaths. Its tone is tender and melancholic, following two young men who ride south into Mexico and find that the old world they love is already slipping away, with a romance that is hopeful but never sweet. It suits readers who want a lyrical, rhythmic novel about landscape, loyalty and loss, and who don't mind a spare, unfussy voice that sounds like oral storytelling.
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