PlowedNovember 22, 2008 I'm not really big on reading novels. Outside Hemingway, Vonnegut, and a handful of others, I find most of today's fiction full of clever prose, but ultimately spoon-feeding and ponderous. However, I found this book not ponderous, but ponderable. And the pondering comes from me. With every page I found myself filling in the all the blanks. Agonizing over what would I do at this point? What if my child saw that? Would I be that courageous? Or would I cave? This story puts you front and center into a meditation of hopelessness. Unenviable, but cathartic. The Man in the story is the ideal of the best we could ever hope to be. That we would be strong enough to save that which we love so much. Messianic in the most human sense. Trudging imperfectly into a full on hell, armed with nothing but a single bullet and his hope against hope for nothing else but the sake of his child. I know some didn't think much of this story, and I respect their opinion. I only hope the upcoming film does the story justice, so maybe those who couldn't take something true from the pages will find what's meaningful to them in a more visceral environment. I actually had to stop about six pages from the end to gather myself, which I have never done. I was caught completely off guard, that a book could ever bring me to such a place. But when all you have done for nearly 300 pages is carry your own child through the nightmare of nightmares, then getting to that place comes pretty easy.
PureNovember 21, 2008 I don't normally review products or books on Amazon but there are a few here and there that seem to force my hand. I am not sure where 'real' critics or Cormac McCarthy himself would rank this book but to me its right there at the top. In most of McCarthy's books the protaganist has a singular thing that seems to drive them, "the fire inside". And for those that understand "it" it is an amazing thing to behold. For the father of this story "the good guys carry the fire", this thing that he finds and nourishes within his own son, at every step afraid of its extinction, and even at the end succeeds at keeping it alive in a landscape where it shouldn't even exist.
A book that somehow captures what every parent feels for their children and no where is it more poignant than in a situation where the stark realities have driven it to be abandoned by almost everyone else.
Truthfully, an astonishing read.
Deeper than you'd thinkNovember 21, 2008 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I just finished this book after two days of frenzied reading. I knew it was going to be good, as it was very highly recommended, but I didn't realize how good a short book without a single quotation mark could be. I know that there is a movie coming out, I saw the stills as I started the book. While I think that the casting is perfect, I cannot see the dreamlike narrative of the book translating to the screen as well as it deserves.
I was eagerly anticipating the ending of the book, and while I think that it was a bit awkward (it should have been a BIT shorter or a BIT longer), I was very happy the author didn't see fit to go into a metaphorical allusion involving the boy and his father (trying hard to avoid spoilers). A good example of a classic work going to metaphorical and not enough physical is Albert Camus'es The Plague. I enjoyed The Road much more for this reason, while there is little doubt that the simple plot and characters can fit a large number of stand-ins, the book is much more readable and easy to follow.
Carrying the Fire Through The DarknessNovember 18, 2008 1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Published in 2006, Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD has been among the most widely praised novels of the era, receiving numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It has also been extremely popular with the reading public--something of a surprise, for it would be difficult to imagine a novel that is more relentlessly bleak than this one.
THE ROAD presents us with a nameless father and son, the latter about ten years old, who have survived an unspecified environmental disaster and who are now traveling south in an effort to escape the ever-intensifying cold that seems to grip the landscape. The journey is horrendous: they push a grocery cart through a seemingly endless sea of gray ash beneath a gray sky, cold, wet, hungry, and very fearful of other people--and with good reason, for in the absence of other food many survivors have turned to cannabalism. Cities are empty with the occasional corpse; rivers and streams are dead; the forrests and fields are dead; they have no certainty of what they will find when and if they reach the sea.
McCarthy writes in a style that is sparse to the point of painfulness, and the narrative is repetitive in the same sense of a reoccurring nightmare. At the same time, however, the darkness of serves to set off the one golden glow: the father's love for his son. "We carry the fire," the father tells his son. "We're the good guys." And so they struggle on together in the hopeless hope of finding a means to live.
As THE ROAD progesses it acquires a certain mythic quality: the concept of a heroic journey into the unknown to win a great prize; the idea of a light in darkness; the imagery of carrying the fire to the sea. At the same time, however, heroism is in short supply and the great prize is simple survival in a barren world. McCarthy does ultimately offer a grain of hope, but only of the most tenative kind imaginable.
I would be remiss if I did not state that this is easily one of the most profoundly depressing works I have read. Recommended--but you might want to keep a couple of Zoloft handy.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
A Road To TreasureNovember 18, 2008 2 out of 3 found this review helpful
You know who they are. Those people that get upset when stories are told that aren't a sugar coated version of the world, stories that seem like they were written by authors who truly believe that ignoring cold, hard reality is the best medicine.
Cormac McCarthy is not one of those authors. At the very, very least not with this book he is. And this is not a book for those who can't face what true horror can be. By true horror, I don't mean the boogie man in your closet or having to work for some really nasty boss with a penchant for administering torture in the form of some really nasty humiliation tactics. This is a story about facing absolute oblivion in its truest form and continuing to move forward under its weighted stare.
McCarthy's writing is poetry. The book is written in some of the most sparse prose I've ever seen read with my own eyes. You can finish this one in about a day, its such a quick read. Yet somehow the book manages to paint a detailed landscape for this poor father and son to trek across in fewer words than I'd have thought possible. They make their way across a bleak and horrific world wiped out after a nuclear holocaust, a blasted world where people do anything they can to survive, even if it means consuming one another. I can't explain how this book grabs you almost immediately and how soon you begin to empathize with these two unnamed characters as they encounter horrors that would probably break most people had they been placed in this same situation.
The two make their way towards the shore miles away, simply on the faith that its the right decision. And you'll be right there along with them for every treacherous step of the way. McCarthy creates a world that really is not too far out of reach, the apocalyptic world that we've heard about and been warned of for some time now but have managed to avoid, at least for the time being. The relationship between the father and son is a thing of beauty. In this world where men feed on each other and life as we know it has come to a sad death, it seems to be the only thing in existence that has any value to hold on to. I mentioned before that this book was a quick read. I purposely read it only a little at a time, just so I could hold on to these characters a little longer.
This book managed to move me as few other books have. The book isn't an action packed bonanza but really a meditation on survival and perseverance in all forms. It does have some really tense moments and moments where just when its gotten as horrifying as it can be, the rug is pulled out from under you and something even more horrible is there for you to stumble across. I will say that any book that makes me tear up when someone finds a packet of grape flavored drink mix gets my vote.
