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All the Pretty Horses

Audiobook
16 of 16 copies available
16 of 16 copies available
Cormac McCarthy is a quiet, unassuming presence in American fiction today, but like the slow, measured voices of many of his characters, he speaks with an authority and conviction that demands an audience. All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy's sixth novel, is a cowboy odyssey for modern times. Set in the late 1940s, it features the travels and toils of a 16-year-old East Texan named John Grady Cole, caught in the agonizing purgatory between adolescence and adulthood. At the start of the novel, Cole's grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico. In spite of its hard realities and spare telling, All the Pretty Horses is a lyrical and richly romantic story, chronicling-along with the erosion of the frontier-the loss of an era.
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  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 20, 1992
      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.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      A perfect balance of text and narrator is achieved between McCarthy's story, the winner of the 1992 National Book Award, and Muller, the versatile narrator. Muller selects a pace echoing the horseback riders, who are the central focus. At this pace, the listener can savor all the eloquent descriptions of Texas and the Mexican landscape. The dialogue is handled with great ease in both Spanish and English. Characters, drawn with voice and speech patterns, are distinct but never overplayed. With Muller's narration the text is truly enhanced and given added dimension. R.F.W. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
    • AudioFile Magazine
      In this lyrical, coming-of-age story set in the forties, a young man rides to Mexico from Texas to find work with cattle and horses. Haunting music introduces each cassette and provides background for Brad Pitt's dramatic narration. His even cadence and soft, Southern drawl match the setting. Pitt is especially talented in dialogue, and John Grady Cole and all the people he encounters vividly come alive. Although the presentation begins slowly, Pitt's wonderful narrative style captures the tone and emotion of the author's words and moves the audience along to the story's sad conclusion. A powerful presentation. A.A.B. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • Lexile® Measure:940
  • Text Difficulty:4-6

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