The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
A father and son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ask on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The 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.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It 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. Awesome in the totality of its vision, The Road 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.
This is not a book that ever particularly interested me, until I saw the trailers for the movie. When just the trailers can make you a little tense, the movie's probably worth seeing. And if the movie's worth seeing, I figured the book it's based on should be worth reading. So I did.
Not my thing, which is not terribly surprising. It's very dark, bleak, depressing. There's no explanation for why the world is in this state (although it's also not inconceivable. I'm sure we'll lay it to similar waste eventually.), and no foreseeable improvement. There is a certain degree of "happy ending," but it's really just going to be more of the same. More of the same inexplicable drive to survive despite being basically miserable. I guess maybe that's why I can't quite get on board with this book the way most seem to. Yes, it's something of a testament to man's ability to survive in the face of overwhelmingly horrifying circumstances, but I just don't see why you'd want to. There's nothing in this book to make me believe that everything they went through was worth it. Maybe I'm weak, or a quitter, or something, but I just don't see the point of survival for survival's sake. I really don't. And that makes it kind of hard to really appreciate a story like this, and to really see the beauty in it.
Frankly, it was also kind of dull. 287 pages of walking and slowly starving to death. Moments of suspense when they encountered other people, and I suppose it's exciting when they find a new stash that is somehow still intact, but really, for me, it was mostly just incredibly monotonous.
His writing style is interesting. Don had told me that he finds McCarthy's writing to be the sort that leaves you feeling unsettled without knowing why, but I kind of disagree. Unsettling, yes. Inexplicably so, no. For one thing, there's the subject matter. It's unsettling. I don't know if all his books have that, but it's certainly a big part of it. The characters have no names. That always leave you feeling a bit at sea. (Also it can be little confusing when pretty much all the characters are male. "He" is really not that specific when there are three "he"s in a scene.) He writes in very short sentences, frequently in fact, just fragments. That leaves you feeling off as well, since the sentences aren't complete, or "properly" balanced and what not. And then there's his use of various punctuation. He doesn't use quotation marks, for one thing. At least he generally formats dialogue in the standard way aside from that, though. which makes it considerably easier to follow than Saramago's way of doing it. But it's his use of apostrophes that, weird as this may sound, I think causes the most inexplicable (to most) uneasiness about his writing. I may be ruining it by pointing this out, but he uses apostrophes entirely normally, except in words where they're shortening "not." So he writes "didnt," "cant," "shouldnt," etc. It's instantly noticeable to me, but, especially in this day and age when no one seems to really understand the apostrophe, fairly subtle for most people. But I think it contributes to the unsettlingness of it because even if you don't notice this, there is some part of your brain that expects those apostrophes, and because they're not there, it gets a little uncomfortable. But doesn't necessarily know why. I find things like that a little gimmicky, and am not especially fond of them, but I also find them interesting. I'd be curious to know if that was specifically his intent, and if he came up with the idea himself, or if there are some kind of studies out there about how punctuation makes people feel, subconsciously. Boring stuff, probably, to most people. But I find it fascinating.
Anyway, so that was that. I don't expect to feel compelled to read any more of his books, but I do still want to see this movie, so there it is.
Next up: The Bullet Trick, by Louise Welsh
A father and son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ask on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The 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.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It 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. Awesome in the totality of its vision, The Road 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.
This is not a book that ever particularly interested me, until I saw the trailers for the movie. When just the trailers can make you a little tense, the movie's probably worth seeing. And if the movie's worth seeing, I figured the book it's based on should be worth reading. So I did.
Not my thing, which is not terribly surprising. It's very dark, bleak, depressing. There's no explanation for why the world is in this state (although it's also not inconceivable. I'm sure we'll lay it to similar waste eventually.), and no foreseeable improvement. There is a certain degree of "happy ending," but it's really just going to be more of the same. More of the same inexplicable drive to survive despite being basically miserable. I guess maybe that's why I can't quite get on board with this book the way most seem to. Yes, it's something of a testament to man's ability to survive in the face of overwhelmingly horrifying circumstances, but I just don't see why you'd want to. There's nothing in this book to make me believe that everything they went through was worth it. Maybe I'm weak, or a quitter, or something, but I just don't see the point of survival for survival's sake. I really don't. And that makes it kind of hard to really appreciate a story like this, and to really see the beauty in it.
Frankly, it was also kind of dull. 287 pages of walking and slowly starving to death. Moments of suspense when they encountered other people, and I suppose it's exciting when they find a new stash that is somehow still intact, but really, for me, it was mostly just incredibly monotonous.
His writing style is interesting. Don had told me that he finds McCarthy's writing to be the sort that leaves you feeling unsettled without knowing why, but I kind of disagree. Unsettling, yes. Inexplicably so, no. For one thing, there's the subject matter. It's unsettling. I don't know if all his books have that, but it's certainly a big part of it. The characters have no names. That always leave you feeling a bit at sea. (Also it can be little confusing when pretty much all the characters are male. "He" is really not that specific when there are three "he"s in a scene.) He writes in very short sentences, frequently in fact, just fragments. That leaves you feeling off as well, since the sentences aren't complete, or "properly" balanced and what not. And then there's his use of various punctuation. He doesn't use quotation marks, for one thing. At least he generally formats dialogue in the standard way aside from that, though. which makes it considerably easier to follow than Saramago's way of doing it. But it's his use of apostrophes that, weird as this may sound, I think causes the most inexplicable (to most) uneasiness about his writing. I may be ruining it by pointing this out, but he uses apostrophes entirely normally, except in words where they're shortening "not." So he writes "didnt," "cant," "shouldnt," etc. It's instantly noticeable to me, but, especially in this day and age when no one seems to really understand the apostrophe, fairly subtle for most people. But I think it contributes to the unsettlingness of it because even if you don't notice this, there is some part of your brain that expects those apostrophes, and because they're not there, it gets a little uncomfortable. But doesn't necessarily know why. I find things like that a little gimmicky, and am not especially fond of them, but I also find them interesting. I'd be curious to know if that was specifically his intent, and if he came up with the idea himself, or if there are some kind of studies out there about how punctuation makes people feel, subconsciously. Boring stuff, probably, to most people. But I find it fascinating.
Anyway, so that was that. I don't expect to feel compelled to read any more of his books, but I do still want to see this movie, so there it is.
Next up: The Bullet Trick, by Louise Welsh