All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy's books were one of those too popular with hip people items I ignored during my school and university days - which I guess makes me a hipster really, except that I take care not to be hip enough to be a hipster, so where ever that leaves me. In this case I was terribly wrong. All the Pretty Horses easily was one of the better books I have recently read. McCarthy portrays a 16-year old boys quest for a life in the past, leading him and a friend on horseback into Mexico, in their backs a much more modernized United States. The novel is heavily populated with characters such as him - Faulknerian I would say or maybe simply human? - who act in a certain way not so much because they should or even - sometimes - want to, but because they simply have to and the consequences of these actions are nothing but an accepted byproduct. A beautiful novel about a man's (boy's) essential loneliness, his incapacity to fit in his own world, and his attempts to lead the kind of life he wants elsewhere.