All the Pretty Horses

Our March assignment for reading the classics was All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. I was looking forward to reading this book because it is billed as "a modern-day Western full of horses and gunplay and romance" and I grew up reading (and enjoying) Louis L'Amour with my dad.

The book is about a young man who leaves his Texas ranch to live the "romantic" life of a cowboy in Mexico with his buddy. He is a laconic (I just had to use this word because it's a fun word and it's fitting) cowboy-type who is exceptionally good with horses and gets hired on a Mexican ranch. He falls in love with the rancher's daughter, rancher doesn't approve, yadda, yadda, he ends up in a Mexican prison. . .

I am so sorry to say I simply did not like this book. I *made* myself finish it (the rest of the girls were reading it, you know!), but it just did nothing for me. Give me a Louis L'Amour book over this any day!

Firstly, I had a hard time with the crazy writing style. Here is an example of two "sentences" (loosely defined) which were back to back:

"Standing by himself across the little gravel path near the fence." (Yep, that's it! Hang on for the next one. . .)
"When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives."

Now, in the author's defense, a Boston Globe reviewer said his "elegiac rhythm captures the badlands of Texas and northern Mexico with a passion most writers either couldn't muster or wouldn't dare." According to the dictionary, 'elegiac' refers to "expressing sorrow for something now past" (as in the cowboy age) or "two dactylic hexameter lines the second of which lacks the arsis in the third and sixth feet". A-hem. Apparently it's a poetic or literary device. I still don't like it. It got slightly easier to read as the book progressed and I started to get the rhythm of it, but it's still disconcerting when you come across something like this:

Still in country they knew. Crossing the old Mark Fury ranch in the night where they'd dismounted at the crossfences for John Grady to pull the staples with a catspaw and stand on the wires while Rawlins led the horses through and then raise the wires back and beat the staples into the posts and put the catspaw back in his saddlebag and mount up to ride on (30).

Maybe it's just me. Then too his use (or lack thereof) of punctuation drove me crazy. He didn't use quotation marks at all. That is not very friendly to the reader. Add to that his frequent use of Spanish. . .

No, I'm not kidding. I would guess 10% of the book is written in Spanish! (I might be exaggerating a little bit, but it's a LOT!). My Spanish is more than 20 years old. Admittedly, it was fun when I knew what it said, and many times I knew enough of the words that I could figure out those I didn't know by context, but sometimes I had to actually get off the couch to google translate my book!! That's a lot of work to put into reading, which is supposed to be FUN!

The writing style might have been worthwhile if the characterization had been outstanding or the plot had been riveting, or. . .something. But alas, nothing redeemed this book.

I pulled a few little nuggets out of this book which made me think or would be interesting to discuss with someone.

• His mother basically abandoned him in order to act in "the city." I found the following sentences interesting and wondered how our children would view the things which take our time from them. Surely only something important would take us from our children. . .

He watched the play with great intensity. He'd the notion that there would be something in the story itself. . .but there was not. There was nothing in it at all. When the lights came up there was applause and his mother came forward several times and all the cast assembled across the stage and held hands and bowed and then the curtain closed for good and the audience arose and made their way up the aisles. (21)

• Interesting aphorisms:

Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it (79)

A goodlookin' horse is like a goodlookin' woman, he said. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done (89).

scared money can't win and a worried man can't love (247).

• This made me chuckle as my husband wore hogrings in his cowboy boots back in high school. Not. even. kidding.

The sole of his right boot had come loose and he'd fastened it back with hogrings stapled through the welt (118).

• A sad lesson learned by the lady love in reference to her father when he found out about their love affair:

I didn't know that he would stop loving me. I didn't know he could. Now I know (252).

• A thought-provoking observation of life in a Mexican prison

Underpinning all of it like the fiscal standard in commercial societies lay a bedrock of depravity and violence where in an egalitarian absolute every man was judged by a single standard and that was his readiness to kill (182).

• Interesting commentaries on life from the cynical elderly aunt of the lady love

I'd of thought maybe the disappointments in your own life might of made you more sympathetic to other people.
You would have thought wrongly.
I guess so.
It is not my experience that life's difficulties make people more charitable.
I guess it depends on the people (229).

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on (231).

Those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness (235).

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. . .courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily (235).

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a think that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change (239).

In January I will be seventy-three years old. I have known a great many people in that time and few of them led lives that were satisfactory to them. . .I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful it will make little difference whether she lives at all. And by true I do not mean what is righteous but merely what is so (240).

Our April read is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley which I've never read! I'm a few chapters in and really enjoying it. Anyone want to read along??? :)