Friday, April 23, 2010

Who Told Me To Read This Book???

****UPDATE - We have a tentative confession "I may have told you since Cormac McCarthy is one of my most favorite writers". Really? Well, it's been nice knowing you ADMIN!

I will keeeel you!

I can't remember if it was in comments of one of the blogs I frequent or in one of my email groups. But someone recommended "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy and so I got it.

I read the first 60 pages while I ate breakfast yesterday morning. It really drew me in, but the subject matter is brutal.


An Amazon review by Dennis Lehane, a favorite author -
Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane

I went home after going to the movies last night and only meant to read a little more....two hours and I was finished.

Wow! A very heavy book.

1 comment:

  1. I just borrowed this from a friend at work to read. He said much the same thing, very dense reading, but he thought worth it. I'll let you know what I think.

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