First off, sorry, haven't did much posting. Hopefully I'll get back at it. Now, I just got the book "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy for Christmas. It isn't a terribly long book and has sizable print so I flew through it. It only took me two days to go cover to cover and part of me wishes I would have taken it slower. It was an exceptional story and is well deserving of the Pulitzer Prize it won.
The book is set in not so distant future, but to say it is futuristic would be wrong. It isn't science fiction, instead, it is a look at what could happen to America (or the world for that matter) if we were set upon by an apocalypse. The story is dark and lacks any sense of hope, even though at the back of your mind you're hoping that some sort of utopia exists for the two protagonists.
The world is a mess. Everything has been burned and looted. An apocalypse happened some ten years earlier and survivors are few and far between. A man and his boy (they have no names in the book) walk the road trying to survive. They push a grocery cart, mile after mile with all their worldly possessions hoping to find someplace where they can live, where they can survive. They search through abandon houses to find food and sleep in hiding, hoping their small camp fire isn't seen by others who would set upon to take their things or worse yet, their lives.
It is a sad story, yet it is beautiful in the bond shared between father and son. They are what keep the other alive and it is quite evident throughout the entire story.
The writing is fairly complex. The author has an incredible vocabulary and the first page of the book is almost too complex for me to read. It is a good thing I pushed through deeper into the book, because after the first page you failed to notice the complexity of the writing and really began to understand the story. McCarthy is the kind of writer I wish I could be.
The other thing about the book that you should receive warning is that like the raw, desolate setting of the story, so is the punctuation and grammar of the story. He uses no real punctuation, other than periods. There are few commas and he never uses a quotation mark to determine who or when someone is talking. This however works very well and as I mentioned previously, seemingly adds to the story itself.
The book is incredible. I will warn you that there are moments where you lose all hope in humanity, that you feel horrible for what the people are doing and wonder if had been better if all of humanity had been completely wiped out. Yeah, it is that bad.
Anyway, you deserve to pick up this book and read it. It is wonderful and beautiful and depressing and enlightening all at the same time. When I finished the first thing I did was turned to the first page and started reading it again. Yeah, that good.
2 comments:
I read it after looking at your review. Sounded like the kind of book I enjoy.
I wasn't as impressed as you were. The story line was good, and the descriptive writing was some of the best I've ever seen. The author did an awesome job of presenting the mood of the setting...all dismal and hopeless.
The writing style itself I didn't care for a bit. In my opinion, the book would have been a better read if it was written more conventionally....with clear sentence structure and dialogue between the characters. Several times I had to read back through a conversation to figure out who was saying what, especially when one character repeated the same words that the other had just said.
I would also have liked to hear more about the history. The relationship between the wife and the main character could have been expounded upon a bit more, so you could actually figure out what all happened between them, without having to guess. Same thing with this apocalypse...what caused it? You can only deduce from the setting in the book what the source of all the destruction was.
The ending was sort of brief, like the writer one day said..."oops, I think I'm done writing this." Even a prologue would have helped.
I'm sure the writer considered all of these things, and left them out intentionally to keep you wondering. Problem is, I don't want to be left wondering at the end of the book. I want to know how the story ends.
Overall, it was a good book. I'm glad to have read it, but I don't think I'll read it again.
I decided to pick this book up the other day. Read it all that night. I really liked it. Didn't have too much trouble with the writing style after I got used to it but it took a while for it to stop being annoying.
I kind of liked the fact that it hardly ever focused on past events. It conveyed the fact that nothing mattered beyond simple survival anymore. Although I would like to know more about where the boy ended up.
All in all I really enjoyed the book.
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