December 23, 2012

All the Pretty Horses

I have just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. I would have thought that the sequence of stark dialogue and world-encompassing metaphor is a sure recipe for kitsch, but he manages to pull it off every time. And some of the sentences are as polished as one of Menashe's poems, with subtle rhymes, consonances and alliterations. This is how the last paragraph starts:

The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led.

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