THE ROAD - CORMAC McCARTHY
I am not going to write a review about “The Road” as I’m sure that there must be hundreds of reviews floating around about this bleak and forbidding novel. This is the second book of Cormac McCarthy I’ve read and, man oh man, he is not the cheeriest of novelist around. I also have “The Border Trilogy” on Mt TBR but I’m hesitant to read it in the foreseeable future as I might just slit my wrist with a rubber knife if it’s in the same vein (pun intended) as the other two of his books I’ve read.
The closing paragraph of the novel seems not to fit in with the plot line or maybe I don’t understand the ending:
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. The smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their back were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing that could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery,”
I’ll have to think this through.
Water has been used as a symbol of the passing of time and memory by numerous authors in a number of books I’ve read. Excellent examples are the beautiful closing paragraph in one of my all time favourite novellas; Norman MacLean’s “A River Runs Through It”. Also Louis Maistros’s excellent novel about New Orleans, “The Sound of Building Coffins” that, to date, has not become the bestseller I thought it would.
A movie based on “The Road” is out on circuit at the moment but I wonder if it’ll do justice to the book.
The closing paragraph of the novel seems not to fit in with the plot line or maybe I don’t understand the ending:
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. The smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their back were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing that could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery,”
I’ll have to think this through.
Water has been used as a symbol of the passing of time and memory by numerous authors in a number of books I’ve read. Excellent examples are the beautiful closing paragraph in one of my all time favourite novellas; Norman MacLean’s “A River Runs Through It”. Also Louis Maistros’s excellent novel about New Orleans, “The Sound of Building Coffins” that, to date, has not become the bestseller I thought it would.
A movie based on “The Road” is out on circuit at the moment but I wonder if it’ll do justice to the book.