I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road in 48 hours. Books have been making me cry lately, I'm not sure if it's hormones or what, but I wept like a child when I finished this last night at midnight. I am haunted, again. I've always had a fascination and "a thing" for apocalyptic novels, but I have never read anything as realistic and rational and absolutely sickeningly terrifying as this read. There is no hope and all hope. It is empty, blank, dry, lifeless, dark, and cold. Yet it stands as one of the bravest and most wrenchingly poignant stories of love I have ever experienced. Don't read this book if you like apocalyptic novels to end with the tiny sprout of green poking through the dead earth at the end of the story. McCarthy does not sugarcoat, and he does not soften his blows and risk kitsch endings. However, he gleams more light from dead cold ashes than I thought possible. This book has forced me to realign my priorities, reconsider my loved ones and my life, and spend fifty more bucks on food storage (salt will be the new gold, people!).
Anyway, if you haven't read it, read it. I'm considering teaching it to my high school girls during 4th term but I'm worried it will only increase their suicidal tendencies (I was close to giving up halfway through the novel, it was so bleak and so terribly hopeless). If any of you have thoughts, I'd like to consider them.Oh, and hopefully the movie will be as incredible as No Country For Old Men. As I was reading The Road, I was trying to decide who would make a good actor for the father and I am pleased that Viggo Mortensen has taken the role. The movie comes out in November, an appropriate time to revisit the novel of so many chilled nights and snowy mornings.
10 comments:
I want to live in the same town you do and frequent the same library. Then I would card-catalog-stalk you ... As soon as you would return a book, I would check it out. Then I could be you ... just four days later.
Maybe you should have read that book in a dark canyon with a headlamp and bugs flying all around you...
I'll have to check this out, although I'm pretty bleak on my own. Maybe I"ll wait for a really sunny day by the pool.
Miss Gillz,
I have read The Road recently and I concur with your review. It is a powerhouse of a book. Beautiful in it's minimalism and yet so expansive and so allegorical.
Hopefully, some poor sap will mistake The Road for On the Road some time and think to themselves, "This book doesn't inspire me to make a road trip at all! Those Beat writers were depressed!"
Have you read Blood Meridian by McCarthy? I also recommend that. It explores war and savagery as it's happening and not the aftermath.
Haha, yeah, I've already had some people confuse my latest read with Kerouac and say, "of COURSE you can't read that to at-risk girls...they have basically already lived that life," to which I reply with a questioning/blank stare and cocked head.
I will definitely check out Blood Meridian. I was eye-flirting with a copy of it at the bookstore yesterday.
Just read your review on Good Reads. Have you read "The Book Thief?" I thought that one was sad...Is "The Road" even worse? Thought I might read "Only Strangers Travel"...thanks for the new options!
Memories: I remember you eating Raman with a fork and spoon sitting on the floor in front of the TV. I remember many late nights laughing REALLY HARD. Yes, I remember Titanic (shameful!) I remember your long jeans always wet at the bottom from walking through the snow...
you said it better then I could have, ever. So I will merely add nothing.
Darren, I secretly stalk your GoodReads profile and saw that you gave it 5 stars. This helped convince me to pick it up in the first place.
Gillz, we're starting up our book club again. Interested?
http://buddiesneverdie.blogspot.com/
Em, I too read this book in two days and I wept for another 24 hours. Like a 13 year old little girl, I apply actors to characters in books because my imagination only goes that far. Lame. I was so happy when i discovered that Viggo Mortensen would be the man in the movie because that is exactly who i pictured. Cant wait for it to come out.
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