No Country for John Cole
Frank Muller does an excellent job narrating this novel by Cormac McCarthy. Moreover, listening to the Audio CD allows the listener to sidestep the McCarthy's liberties with the punctuation e.g. the absence of quotation marks. This isn't to demean McCarthy's prose; far from it, he presents a nostalgic picture of Texas and Mexico in the 1940's. Indeed, one of themes seems to be how this `country' is disappearing and being replaced by a modern, industrial one. The hero of the novel, John Grady Cole, is depicted as near mythical; we are left with the impression that such a young, courageous man would not exist today-if he ever did it all. This parallels a theme from a recent novel of McCarthy's, No Country for Old Men. Actually, the two novels ... Read More
Nice story but way too artsy writing
Just read All the Pretty Horses. Like all of McCarthy's stories, this one pulls at your heart. A superman cowboy falling in love with the perfect senorita in Mexico. But in my humble opinion, the writing is too deep, too artsy, too ambitious. It's like he's trying to win a trophy for elegance. I found myself reading many of his sentences over and over and over trying to figure out what exactly he was saying. For many of the sentences, I still don't know. Clueless. One sentence took up half the page, and rambled on and on and on about the sky and the mountains and Lord knows what else. Don't get me wrong, I love his stories. The Road still haunts me to this day. Read it if you haven't. But sometimes I think his writing could be more succinct without losing its ... Read More
A compelling story that sacrifices some of its insight, in favor of action and adventure
I really enjoyed this novel, although it's probably more highly praised than it deserves to be. You can tell its serious literature because of the general lack of punctuation and unconventional composition. McCarthy's writing style is likely to be off-putting to some, but there is a lot to like about this novel. While novels that are branded (rightly or wrongly) as works of serious literature generally have something to say, they often don't have a story to tell. This is something that I really appreciate about McCarthy as an author. There are issues and themes that he clearly wants to explore in his fiction, but he builds his novels (at least the one's I've read) on the foundation of a compelling story.
A Masterpiece
McCarthy is a great writer, and this a great American novel. The novel is conventionally plotted and very readable. Like "The Road", it is a book that one can love; it does not require the effort that the novels of writers like Pynchon or Dellilo do, nor does it tax the reader's patience. Reader-friendly fiction is a good thing, and the novel's accessability makes it no less literary or substantial.
McCarthy's prose is breathtaking. His descriptions of the landscape, his dialogue (including dialogue between the American hero and a variety of Mexican characters) is flawless, and every now and again McCarthy will deliver lines with the force of a shot to the solar plexus. Literary critics compare him to Faulkner, though sometimes he ... Read More
The word And
I agree with mr. niceguy. What is with McCarthy and his excess use of word 'and'? Admittedly, the word 'and' is very important in the English language, however, excessive use of this word is outrageously ignorant, not to mention very distracting? You hear 'and'quite a bit in everyday speech, I admit. But no one really use 'and' like a gazillion times in one sentence, like McCarthy attempts in all of his books, not just in 'All the Pretty Horses'. The first McCarthy's book that I read is 'The Road'and I have to say, it wasn't a bad read, although not very original. Nevertheless, I read on to his other books and it was uncanny how much he tries to be Hemingway, except he does not use the apostrophe for a word like 'didn't' (he writes didnt, how about ... Read More
