The Road

[welsh]

Cormac McCarthy, one of America's best novelists, has written a post-apocalpytic book The Road

Has anyone read it yet?

Dennis Lehane, a mystery novelist writes this-
"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"

So what do you think?

To be honest, I think the Crossing Trilogy (especially the middle book), Outer Dark and Blood Meridian (which Bloom calls one of the best novelist of contemporary literature) were all apocalyptic in tone and theme. It seems McCarthy is being much more explicit in that theme this time around.

 

[SuAside]

i'll add it to my list...

 

[Cimmerian Nights]

I read it a few months ago. It's probably the bleakest, gloomiest book I've ever read. I haven't wanted to open a vein so bad since I read the Gulag Archipeligo.

That being said, the reviewer is spot on ( and much more eloquent than me). As a father, this book tore me up like nothing ever should for any parent. It makes you ask yourself, "what would I do to keep my child alive, regardless of what it makes me become in the process". It's definately more about the battle over light/dark than any kind of PA cliche. He's pretty much stripped the Mad Max/Wild West type romanticism out. In that regard it's nice to see the PA genre explore the human condition in a heavier, more mature vein. It's heavy on the survival aspect of post-apocalypticism though.

I'd highly recommend it. Just don't read after breaking-up with your girl, with Black Sabbath on, whilst drinking whiskey with a loaded weapon or your apt to Cobain yourself.

 

[Wooz]

The title strikes me as a bit of a rip-off to Kerouac's masterpiece.

Also, I've never heard about this guy.

 

[KQX]

Ah, Welsh beat me to it. I did a search a few days ago to see if anyone already mentioned it.

Anyway, last month when I was picking my classes for this quarter I came across an English class called "Narratives of Disaster". The reading list for the class is as follows:

Albert Camus The Plague
Jose Saramago Blindness
John Hersey Hiroshima
Jonathan Safran Foer Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
and finally
Cormac McCarthy The Road

After reading the description for The Road, I knew I had to take the class. So far I've read The Plague and half way through Blindness (very good so far). The Road will have to wait until late May, but I'll definitely be bumping this thread afterwards. Looking forward to it.

Some surprising news from last week. The Road has been selected by Oprah's Book Club... yeah.

 

[alec]

Jonathan Safran Foer Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Awesome book. Very refreshing and unconventional, graphically very interesting, although maybe stylistically a little bit too much in the manner of young master Dave Eggers. Started reading it when my ex advised it to me.

Oh God, my ex...



Might add "The Road" to my reading list after my 52-day self-inflicted torture journey ends.

Here's a hint: "I'm not heeeeeeeeeeeeeeereeee, this isnot haaaaaaaaaaaaaaappeningggggggggggggg.... I'm not heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere..." and so on.



Rosebud.

Drunk. OMG you wouldn't believe it. I'm so friggin' drunk. Drunk. Drunk. Drunk. This might be fun when you're 20-ish, but when you're 30-ish, this means one thing: you're out. You did not follow the rules. You are not one of us. You definitaly got to use spell-check... and so on. Awww, lonesome meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee... (Neil Young)

 

[welsh]

Oprah has been trying to get more respectable with her book club after one national prize winner scorned her club as being too commerical and low brow.

Apparently you're not the only one suprised by this- The Chicaago Tribune wrote about that as well

He's bleak. She's chipper.

He sees dark clouds. For her, it's strictly silver linings.

She says, "Live your best life now!" He says, "Life? Who needs it?"

She's one of the most famous people in the world. He could take the bus seat right next to you and you wouldn't look up from your newspaper.

When novelist Cormac McCarthy joins Oprah Winfrey on a forthcoming installment of her show, they will constitute one of the oddest and most unlikely cultural pairings since Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe.

On Wednesday, Winfrey announced that McCarthy's novel "The Road" (2006) is the latest pick for her book club. McCarthy, 73, who lives in Santa Fe, did not appear on Wednesday's program but said through his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, that he will show up on a future episode for what Winfrey called "his first television interview ever."

That left admirers of the notoriously reclusive author, whose solemn, elegiac prose reads as if chiseled on the side of a sheer rock face, flummoxed and stunned.

"Wait a minute until I can pick my jaw up off the floor," said John Wegner, an English professor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and a former editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal Online

That said, she did a nice write up for McCarthy

The title strikes me as a bit of a rip-off to Kerouac's masterpiece.

Also, I've never heard about this guy.

Silly Wooz. You have to get away from all the paint and horny girls sometimes.

(ok, then just away from the paint).

Form wikipedia-

Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner and sometimes to Herman Melville.

Oprah's Book Club summary-

Compared to authors like William Faulkner and Herman Melville, Cormac McCarthy often sets his stories against the landscapes he knows best—the Appalachians nears Tennessee and the Southwest. His distinct descriptions and deeply disturbed characters—from a father and son trudging through the apocalypse to ranchers struggling on sprawling Southwestern plains—have captivated the imaginations of millions of readers.

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933. He attended the University of Tennessee in the early 1950s, and joined the U.S. Air Force, serving four years, two of them stationed in Alaska. McCarthy then returned to the university, where he published in the student literary magazine and won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. McCarthy next went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper.

The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy’s editor there was Albert Erskine, William Faulkner’s long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of his next novel, Outer Dark.

In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener’s Son, which premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press.

In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985.

After the retirement of Albert Erskine, McCarthy moved from Random House to Alfred A. Knopf. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was publishedby Knopf in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film directed by Billy Bob Thornton and starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon thereafter, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing; the third volume, Cities of the Plain, was published in 1998.

McCarthy’s next novel, No Country for Old Men was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago and published in paperback by Vintage Books. McCarthy’s most recent novel, The Road, was also published by Knopf in 2006.

While I didn't like the film for All the Pretty Horses, the book was pretty great. Blood Meridian is pretty hard to get through.

Blood Meridian- This 1985 novel of historical fiction marked a shift in the setting of his books to the southwest. His works are often divided into the "Appalachian Period" and the "Southwestern Period". This work is polarizing: it is certainly his most violent work, but also work of tremendous depth and precision. It traces the life of a boy named only "the kid", who in 1851 finds himself riding with "The Glanton Gang", a vicious gang of outlaws who are being paid by the Mexican government to bring back Indian scalps. The book unflinchingly depicts horrific acts of violence committed by Americans, Indians and Mexicans alike. Despite the graphic depictions of violence the outlaws commit against nearly anyone they encounter in their journey across a long swath of the West, the novel is written in a language that is not only exact but florid and dense, using a vocabulary heavily borrowed from Spanish and a diction that seems at turns archaic and lyrical. In a 2006 New York Times poll asking many noted writers and critics what they thought were the most important works in American fiction in the last 25 years, Blood Meridian ranked #3 (behind only Toni Morrison's Beloved and Don DeLillo's Underworld).

A good first stab might be Outer Dark-

Outer Dark is U.S. novelist Cormac McCarthy's second novel, published in 1968. The time and setting are nebulous, but can be assumed to be somewhere in the Southern United States, sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. The novel tells of a woman (Rinthy) who bears her brother's baby. The brother, Culla, leaves the nameless infant in the woods to die, but he tells his sister that the newborn died of natural causes and had to be buried. Rinthy discovers this lie, and decides to set out and find the baby for herself.

Meanwhile, the baby has been discovered in the woods and taken by a nameless Tinker.

Culla soon follows Rinthy, intending to return her to their home. Over the remainder of the novel the two characters follow separate paths. Rinthy encounters often generous people who offer their help in different ways. Culla, however, finds difficulty in his attempts to locate his sister and is constantly pursued by three violent and frightening strangers who murder many of the people he comes in contact with.

 

[Yamu]

Read it. Loved it.

I really wish I would've bought the first edition hardcover. Now my work's sold out and every copy I can find has Oprah's name stamped on the cover.

 

[welsh]

yamu- sorry I missed that post. I just read it and am trying to deconstruct 4too's review. Did he like it or didn't like it?

 

[Cimmerian Nights]

Yeah, 4too's posts make more sense after a bong hit or two, I liken him to the FO community's poet-laureate. I can't speak for him, but it would be hard to say it's a book 'I like'. It's powerful, it's moving, and certainly scratches an existential itch. There is this tiny shred of beauty to the enduring love that the father and son have despite the death all around them. It's really the only thing that keeps them going. The book's atmosphere is darker and heavier than any funeral I've ever been to, so it'd be hard to say 'I like it'. Like a funeral, it's not the kind of thing you walk away from feeling to upbeat about.

Reading a book that describes humanity in it's last few spins before it's completely flushed out of the toilet is not very pleasant, but certainly a necessary exploration.

I really wish I would've bought the first edition hardcover. Now my work's sold out and every copy I can find has Oprah's name stamped on the cover.

Cool, maybe I should sell mine on E-bay. You go Oprah!

 

[KQX]

yamu- sorry I missed that post.

Yeah I was wondering how come it didn't come up when I searched for "Cormac and McCarthy". Then I realized that it's because Yamu wrote "Cormac McCarthy's". Damn search.

4too's posts make more sense after a bong hit or two

Hehe, that reminds me:

4too you seriosly need to go out of your house now and than just to see what it sounds like, when actual people talk and stuff.

 

[DirtyDreamDesigner]

Hahaha Haris is so funny. In a haha-laugh-at-the-retard kind of way.

 

[Cimmerian Nights]

I just noticed in today's paper that it's #1 on the bestseller list, no doubt due to Oprah's endorsement.

And I was watching one of the old Japanese Lone Wolf and Cub movies when it hit me - father and son, dead mother, the cart, slowly plodding through a hellish landscape hmmm...

 

[Yamu]

yamu- sorry I missed that post.

No worries. I wasn't trying to sound snotty or anything. I just didn't have the energy to type out my review again, but I'm quite enthusiastic about reccomending the book and I wanted to chime in.

I had missed 4too's response to that post... seems like he approved of it too, but the measure of his enjoyment could've been bolstered at least slightly if we had been given a more explicit accounting of The Boy's age. (Incidentally, I was solidly of the opinion that he was somewhere between 7 and 11.)

I love 4too's posts... they really give some use to that English degree I was studying for before the money ran out.

 

[Pajari]

4too is probably the best poster on any internet forum I've ever read. And since I know that's weak praise, he's also one of the most skilled manipulators of English prose I've read who isn't published.

I mean, come on:

Driving weather looks good for late November, no freezing rain to evoke the Cumberland Blues as I down shift to climb the Gap.

Effortlessly slick.

Also, he mentioned the book Canticle for Leibowicz (or something), which is another worthy read if you've got the time.

 

[DoughboyJones]

I just finished reading it. Definitely not a fun time, but an excellent book in itself. If you have four or five hours to kill, I'd definitely recommend you spent them in this post nuclear nightmare. Unless you're looking for a pick-me-up....

 

[Commander Halligan]

I've just finished reading it too. Definitely one of the bleakest but probably most realistic visions of the apocalypse by nuclear war, its a must read for anyone whose a fan of the genre.

 

[4too]

Who's Yo' Daddy?

Who's Yo' Daddy?



Todd H. has name dropped ""The Road"" as a back round source,
phrase dropped "survival horror" in reference to the post apocalyptic,
possibly his view on the FO's.

Doubt we will be offered caloric count as a stat point.
Doubt any fatigue oriented fuel pyramid will involve that 'Twilight Zone' taste for ''Serving Man''.


The way that Liam Neeson's role was pitched, think this daddy role will shepherd the son, the PC, to a survivor community that don't eat babies?


Note that ''The Road'' had no giant ants nor mutated scorpions.
Impossible, now possible, mutations a staple Sci Fi mechanism in the post apoc'.
No pulp or matinee freaks on ''The Road"".
Only the fall of ash.
Only the fall of civilization.
Only the fall of man.
McCarthy filled his stage with grey ash and his characters endured, bluffed, fled, and fought to live another day.

Cimmerian Nights: The Wild West type romaticism, token appearance ... ""Save the last bullet for yourself.""


Perhaps, less is more.




4too

 

[Cimmerian Nights]

Re: Who's Yo' Daddy?

Cimmerian Nights: The Wild West type romaticism, token appearance ... ""Save the last bullet for yourself.""

Yeah it was very Lonesome Dove, which I might add has just been joined by The Road as a fellow Pulitzer Prize Winner for fiction. Can beat that endorsement.

Now I should really sell my pre-Oprah, pre-Pulitzer 1st edition on E-bay.

 

[Mad Max RW]

The other day I sat down and read the book cover to cover. Very bleak. Cannibalism, everything dying, burnt, and unrelenting. It actually effected my dreams at night.