Looking forward to the film | The Road

High water mark | The Road | Cormac McCarthy

books:


	• The Road Cormac McCarthy Knopf, 2006 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 1622 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return

Unto Adam God said, "Because thou hast eaten of the tree, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

The Road is the path a man takes from birth to dusty death. The road is populated by the dust of the past, in the form of the ashes of men, their achievements, their coroporeal remains, and our memories of them. The end of the road is our own dusty death.

The Road is a daily struggle for existence, avoiding the Evil that can engulf us, searching wistfully for the Good, which is the fire that we carry with us in our bellies, and experiencing the incredible depths of starvation and murder, as well as the delerious highs of a full stomach and a secure place to sleep out the night.

The fire in our bellies, for McCarthy, is compassion and love. The man experiences this fire for his son, but his will to survive does not permit him to extend this love beyond this lone individual to others in need. The fire in the boy's belly is pure love, for his father, for a desolate dog who will surely be eaten if left to its own devices, and for the poor souls whose Road to dusty death appears to be a bit shorter than his own. Only the wisdom of the man prevents the boy from sacrificing his life on the alter of compassion.

The Evil in this books are the people who lack this fire, and treat others as pure instruments towards meeting their own pitfully selfish needs. The Evil in this book are cannibals, but the literary allusion is much less concrete.

The final scene of this fine novel sees Good triumphing over Evil, as the boy is taken in by others, strangers, who have the means of behaving compassionately, as his father could not. This is a deep message of hope for us all.

The unrelenting intensity with which the above message is worked into the words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages of this book is reinforced by spareness and repetition of themes. Spareness: there are no colors in this book, there is no emotion except love and fear, there is no satisfaction except full stomach and security from external threat, there is no joy except in the mutual love of the man and the boy, there is no nature except ash and dust, there is no wisdom except the value of the love and the danger of Evil. Repetition: the theme is set up in the first ten pages and repeated with little variation until the final paragraphs of the book. This reminds me of Robbe-Grillet, with his mesmerizing repetition of themes, or perhaps Ravel's Bolero without the increasing volume and tempo. Perhaps it is trite to recall Shakespeare, but it is nevertheless apt, because it doubtless informed McCarthy's vision of The Road: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death."

My advice to Cormack McCarthy is: hey, fella, cheer up a bit. There's lots more to life than your philosophy ever dreamed of, including music, and flowers, and philosophy. And even Nintendo.

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Looking forward to the film

It took me a while to get into The Road, but once I did I was hooked. The unnamed father and son have an incredibly close bond that becomes more and more evident the further you get into the book.
It's bleak and at times a tad depressing but its never less than engrossing. Well worth a read and I can't wait to see the film.

High water mark

Among the great "journey stories" I have read. Beautiful in the ugliness of this end world, and in the hopeful allegory of man's inner struggle to remain humane though the struggle that is life. I have read other works by Cormac McCarthy and am frankly stunned by the depth and imagination of the book even if Oprah likes it.

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You will not be able to put this book down until you finish reading it.

This is a disturbing book about a man's journey with his young son in a world that has lost civilization. You feel like you are on a roller coaster ride moving from anxiety to relief than going back to anxiety not knowing where the ride will end up. The characters are not just any two companions on a journey. In this journey the father is helping the child understand a strange world that the father himself is not familiar with. The readers will be haunted by the dialogs between the father and the son. The author uses simple sentences so effectively that it feels like poetry. He does not give the readers too many details about the characters, but the readers still feel like they understand the characters well.

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A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy?s masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don?t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food?and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, ?each the other?s world entire,? are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

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