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A review by shimmery
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
5.0
An astonishing book. I have only read one of McCarthy's other books -- The Road -- and found that to be so bleak that I couldn't appreciate the writing style. This however I loved.
The first hundred pages had me wishing I was a 17 y/o cowboy run off from home in the mid twentieth century, even though I don't care for either horses or camping, though as the plot progresses I did decide I wouldn't like that life after all...
This is such a beautiful book driven forward by an engaging plot and endearing hero, which balance out the poetry of the writing and the descriptions of the wildnerness on the border between Texas and Mexico. I like how there are really deep passages on the human condition, which come naturally to anyone who is faced with vast expanses of nature as the characters in this story are. 'He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.'
Another favourite passage:
'That night I thought long and not without despair about what must become of me. I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That courage what a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.'
The first hundred pages had me wishing I was a 17 y/o cowboy run off from home in the mid twentieth century, even though I don't care for either horses or camping, though as the plot progresses I did decide I wouldn't like that life after all...
This is such a beautiful book driven forward by an engaging plot and endearing hero, which balance out the poetry of the writing and the descriptions of the wildnerness on the border between Texas and Mexico. I like how there are really deep passages on the human condition, which come naturally to anyone who is faced with vast expanses of nature as the characters in this story are. 'He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.'
Another favourite passage:
'That night I thought long and not without despair about what must become of me. I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That courage what a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.'