I've been wanting to read The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, for some time- a couple of my brothers recommended it and said they thought I would like it. It's been on my TBR stack for a couple of months and the snow day this week gave me the perfect opportunity to curl up with it (and the prerequisite mug of hot chocolate, of course!) I read it in one morning, and couldn't put it down. As I've read some reviews on Amazon about the book, I noticed that people either love it or hate it. I am definitely in the former category, and I'm thinking that my brothers have my book tastes pegged.
The Road takes place in post apocolyptic America. You never know for certain exactly what happened, but mass destruction is the result. The story is the journey of a man and his son through the countryside, trying to reach the coast. During the trip they travel through abandoned cities, forage for any food they can find, and desperately try to avoid "bad guys" who have taken to cannabalism for survival. The father and son are unnamed through the book, and at first that really bothered me, but I realized that in doing so, McCarthy makes it easier for the readers to immerse themselves in the story and imagine themselves as the characters. There also is a decided lack of punctuation- no quotation marks and scarce apostrophes- that took a while to get used to, but I found that it made me follow the conversations much more carefully than I usually do, and if our whole society was destroyed, who would care about punctuation anyway?
The tenderness between the father and son is very real, and I enjoyed seeing the dynamics of their relationship, especially when it became apparent that they were utterly dependant upon one another. As I've looked at the reviews, it seems like the ending is one of the most controversial parts of the book. Let me just say that I loved it. I wept through the last 8 pages- I probably used up an entire box of Kleenex and had to go back and read it four or five times in a row.
Throughout the book, I kept asking myself, "Could I do this? Would I be strong enough to want to live through a situation like this?" I've thought of that often over the last couple of days, and I still don't know the answer. But if I did survive, I hope that I would be a "good guy" and one of the ones who "carry the fire".
The Road takes place in post apocolyptic America. You never know for certain exactly what happened, but mass destruction is the result. The story is the journey of a man and his son through the countryside, trying to reach the coast. During the trip they travel through abandoned cities, forage for any food they can find, and desperately try to avoid "bad guys" who have taken to cannabalism for survival. The father and son are unnamed through the book, and at first that really bothered me, but I realized that in doing so, McCarthy makes it easier for the readers to immerse themselves in the story and imagine themselves as the characters. There also is a decided lack of punctuation- no quotation marks and scarce apostrophes- that took a while to get used to, but I found that it made me follow the conversations much more carefully than I usually do, and if our whole society was destroyed, who would care about punctuation anyway?
The tenderness between the father and son is very real, and I enjoyed seeing the dynamics of their relationship, especially when it became apparent that they were utterly dependant upon one another. As I've looked at the reviews, it seems like the ending is one of the most controversial parts of the book. Let me just say that I loved it. I wept through the last 8 pages- I probably used up an entire box of Kleenex and had to go back and read it four or five times in a row.
Throughout the book, I kept asking myself, "Could I do this? Would I be strong enough to want to live through a situation like this?" I've thought of that often over the last couple of days, and I still don't know the answer. But if I did survive, I hope that I would be a "good guy" and one of the ones who "carry the fire".
1 comment:
well you definitely wouldn't have been one of the bad guys.
Glad you enjoyed it.
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