The Old Man and the Wasteland

Il romanzo è un omaggio - e lo si vede già dal titolo - al ben più noto romanzo di Hemingway.
Il protagonista, qui senza nome, non intraprende un viaggio nell'oceano ma tra i detriti lasciati dall'ultima guerra.
Per certi versi i temi trattati sono simili a quelli di "The road", anche se il romanzo di McCarthy supera questo nell'incisività della narrazione.
Purtroppo il voler rendere omaggio a romanzi di indubbio spessore è una limitazione; come quelli che ricopiano i quadri famosi: possono essere bravissimi, però l'idea originale era di un altro. ( )

Review:

Have you ever heard the term Slow Burn? If you haven't, basically it means a steadily penetrating show of anger or contempt. This book is a slow burn. I wanted to like it, I did but the more the pages went on the more disgusted I became. Yet, I went against my better judgement and kept reading. On and on the slow and painful build up went. I kept thinking is something significant going to happen now? What about now? Then to my surprise it's like a light went on and all that built up frustration, annoyance, and anger clicked together. My mind wasn't blown but I did see what the writer was trying to achieve even if the execution failed to impress.

If you haven't noticed, The Old Man and the Wasteland is based on The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway. In the book the main character even has a copy that he salvaged on one of his wasteland expeditions. I haven't read The Old Man and the Sea since High School and that was quite a bit ago so needless to say I didn't remember it much. Course if I had, I might of known what type of book I was setting out to read and avoided it in the first place. Anyway that is rather here nor there moving on...

Let's talk about some of the technical points of the story.

The Writing- Even though I don't remember The Old Man and the Sea the writing still felt very Hemmingway. Is that a good thing though? I say no. Listen, Hemmingway was a brilliant writer but I felt that Nick Cole was trying to imitate him a bit to much losing himself in the process. In places I even had to go back and reread whole sections because parts didn't make sense which leads me back to this being a slow burn type of read.

World Building- OK, I will give the Author some credit I actually enjoyed the world building. We get to see some nice glimpses of the before time as well as moments that took place as the disaster was happening. Overall I'd say these scenes were by far my favorite so much that it actually disappoints me that the author chose to write the book he did instead of a unique apocalyptic tale all his own.

Now I know I sound like I downright hated this book and to tell you the truth at times I did but I can see glimpses of greatness in between the lines and that spurred me on. One of my favorite scenes takes place between the old man and a "blind" hotel owner. I won't give it away but the scene is great and had some nice twists that broke up the the monotony of the scenes before it.

Overall, Would I recommend this book? Yes, but I'd really stress borrowing before buying. You might like it, heck you might even love it, I however wouldn't feel right saying to go buy this book knowing how much I struggled with it. In the the end I did like The Old Man and the Wasteland but it felt like it took to long for me to come to that realization. The above mentioned combined with the overall choppiness in parts causing me to go back and reread whole sections leaves me rating The Old Man and the Wasteland by Nick Cole ★★★. It wasn't bad, it wasn't great, it just sort of exists and sometimes that's the worst book of them all.

*Reviewed through Edelweiss. All opinions are my own and I was not compensated in any way for them. ( )

My expectations for dollar kindle books are never very high, but this book was a revelation. Reminiscent of A Canticle for Leibowitz and The Road, the Old Man and the Wasteland pays homage to Hemmingway's The Old Man and the Sea. I was unable to stop reading from the moment I started, and was captivated by the well written and paced story of the old man's journey of survival and redemption. Very well done, and worth very much more than the 99 cents I paid for it. ( )

The book follows an old scavenger who decides to leave his community to try and prove he can still be useful in life. After Nuclear War in the US the world as people know it has ended and know one knows who survived. People love in communities and by scavenging.

As one of the scavengers our main character is seen as unlucky so he leaves to either prove that he can be still useful or die trying. He travels into the East of the land which everybody sees as being dangerous and finds a religous community who attacks him, a crazy man who tries to kill him and also a city where the supplies will help his community survive.

But can he get back to share it, can he get back to show them he is not tainted and what has the journey brought up in the way of memories from his past. ( )

This novella is a quick and relatively easy read, and while some of the Old Man's trials stretch the suspension of disbelief just a little too far, the plot manages to move along at a good clip. Unabashedly setting out to retrace the footsteps of McCarthy and Hemingway is a hell of a task to set yourself, and while the author doesn't match either McCarthy for immersiveness and metaphor or Hemingway for economy, he seems to have managed to find his own, very readable voice.That said, there are moments when both the prose and the plot cry out for a good editor, and there are a few typographical errors that I found a little jarring (though not that many more than the $10 Kindle editions of some bestsellers I've read!) But for an independently published, $1 ebook, I'm pretty impressed. I wish there were half-stars to give, as I'd consider this a solid 3.5. ( )