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Title: Has anyone else here read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" Post by: trekgeezer on February 26, 2009, 09:11:56 AM This book by the author of "No Country for Old Men" won the Pulitzer. It's an excellent post apocalyptic tale of a Father taking his son to Southeast US and hopefully to a safer place.
The catastrophe that destroyed the world is never explained other than everything is covered with ash and there is evidently no life left but humans. On their trip, they have to scavenge for food and constantly be on the look out for roving bands of cannibals. At it's heart though, it is a love story. The movie of the book , starring Viggo Mortenson will be out sometime this year. Title: Re: Has anyone else here read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" Post by: akiratubo on February 26, 2009, 11:17:53 AM I tried but I couldn't stand the prose.
Quote When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark. Gack. Title: Re: Has anyone else here read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" Post by: Ed, Ego and Superego on February 26, 2009, 04:17:43 PM I thought about reading it, but I have trouble with end-of-the-world books. They just disturb me no end.
-Ed Title: Re: Has anyone else here read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" Post by: trekgeezer on February 26, 2009, 07:31:02 PM This would be a disturbing one.
Title: Re: Has anyone else here read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" Post by: ER on February 27, 2009, 12:18:39 PM Yes, and all in all I thought it was hugely overrated, not because its story wasn't good but because so frustratingly little was ever explained. I have heard a lot about the depth of its characters but I finished that book thinking the man and his son were little more than stick figures. I bet the film version ends up being a big improvement.
Title: Re: Has anyone else here read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" Post by: Neville on March 01, 2009, 04:40:45 PM I read it and I liked, but I can understand akiratubo: McCarthy's prose is often off-puting. On one hand, its own simplicity makes it both concise and elegant, but on the other one you can't read for too long without feeling like you need to rub your eyes with your knuckles.
I've read some of his books before, like "All the pretty horses" and "Meridian of blood", and they all have this "problem". Still, I'd say this one is worth the reading, and its easily the most accesible of the ones I've read so far and only "Meridian of blood" surpasses it. |