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Loading... The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition) (original 2006; edition 2008)by Cormac McCarthy
Work InformationThe Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
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Well-crafted and mercifully short because the trauma was unrelenting and there was no relief. Ending was abrupt, awkward and didn’t fit, almost as if he couldn’t think how to wrap it up. Book club read but I wouldn’t rush to recommend. ( ) I resisted reading this novel as my impression was that its worldview would prove to be entirely too bleak and dismal. Not just the description of the novel but McCarthy's overall reputation preceded it. And now I find it's a story of naive Christianity, of living with love for one's fellow man even in the worst imaginable circumstances, how hope and goodness are the true core of the universe. Well then! McCarthy takes his time to disabuse me of my preconception. Roving bands of horrific cannibal gangs. All is now gray ash, no living plant or non-human animal life remaining. The boy's mother sounds right when she says in a flashback scene, announcing her suicide to her husband, "We're not survivors. We're the walking dead in a horror film... I'd take him with me if it weren't for you. You know I would. It's the right thing to do." I'm nodding, thinking yeah, I'd do it too. McCarthy's prose runs existentially bleak: Everything damp. Rotting. In a drawer he found a candle. No way to light it. He put it in his pocket. He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. It's a reverse mystical experience. Instead of a flash of insight into the oneness and goodness of creation, it's a flash of its absolute negation. It's bleak and depressing but it's riveting writing, I really want to keep reading and following this journey from blackest hell (or nothingness, rather). I race through it and lo, the novel's penultimate paragraph: The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all time. And the novel's final sentence: In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. This is not the bleak prophet of despair I'd come to expect. Rather far from it. Then I thought back to how the boy, though always terrified and in fear, is also always begging his father not to hurt or kill anyone, even when attacked and their survival threatened. They come across an old man on the road, and he begs his father to give the man food from their almost exhausted store. A solitary outcast steals all their supplies without which they'd quickly die and they catch him, and the boy implores his father not to do anything to harm the man. He longs to care for others. In this most dire of possibly imaginable environments, he's the ultimate bleeding heart, acting out Christ, in all its seeming practical ridiculousness, despite his fear. I've read that McCarthy wrote this novel inspired by his love for his own son. It does focus on that love front and center, the terrible choices that love can face, the fierce devotion of a parent to their child. But there's an even bigger love here. Is contained inHas the adaptationHas as a studyHas as a student's study guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
In this postapocalyptic novel, 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. They 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. This book 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. 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.--From publisher description. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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