The Road: Pulitzer Prize Winner (Vintage International)

Great storytelling and prose style. This book reminded me to consciously appreciate: Warmth, sunlight, availability of food especially when it's fresh, safety and a basically ordered society, living rather than just surviving from day to day, home and a stable existence - all so easy to take for granted. The father-son relationship is fundamental to this story of course. Not an easy read but paradoxically beneficial.

Cormac McCarthy’s bleak, heart-breaking post-apocalytic novel of the remaining few survivors, scrabbling towards the final, dying days of a wasted, destroyed planet, some time in the very near future would have been a sombre, regret filled read at any time. But in these days where the Presidential Office is filled by an erratic, self-obsessed and unreflective man, McCarthy’s book seems far less fictional than might be comfortable. Less allegorical and possibly more prophetic. I hope not. The ‘event’ some ten years ago in the past is never spelled out, but, there was a blinding flash, there were sonic reverberations, and people burned, disfigured. Some kind of nuclear winter appears to have occurred. Almost all living things have now ceased to be – vegetation, insects, birds, mammals, most humans. Pockets of survivors, feral, cannibalistic exist in the unnamed place, somewhere in America, where the novel takes place. The central characters are a man, and his child, a boy who is probably now 10 years old. His mother is no longer living, and why, will be revealed. The father looks back to a time before the event, before his son was born, before the world was catapulted into these dark days. His son is his reason for living, he has been charged, he charges himself, to take care of his boy. Some years after the cataclysm, and all the available food sources (whatever there was, canned), in houses, in stores, across the world, have all been looted by whatever survivors there were. Most have long since, horribly, died, but those small bands who remain – are they people of decency and humanity, or are they those who now regard other humans merely as food, offering a few more weeks and months of survival for those who kill them? Bleak days, little hope. And yet, McCarthy offers us a strong love, some relic of who we might have been, when we seemed to ourselves to be evolution’s finest flower. There is the tenderness and dependence of father and son upon each other, as they walk a road ‘South’ in search of warmer weather Practical tasks occupy the pages. Scavenging odd discovered stores of tinned food, clothing, rags to bind round feet, wheeling all these worldly goods in abandoned supermarket trolleys. Balancing the need for fire and warmth with the possibly dangerous signals given out by smoke. The reader knows the father and his son are ailing, infections taking hold, breathing laboured. The outcome is bleak, cannot be good, for either. Nonetheless, there is also something about the child. He has a kind of holy innocence about him. He might be a kind of naïve fool – or the repository of human wisdom, not intellectually, but in goodness, in kindness, in tenderness and that so sullied thing ‘humanity’ Time and time again he rather sets a moral compass for the father to orientate towards There are many, sometimes subliminal nods to religious imagery, and I thought this a kind of journey through an anti-Garden Of Eden, where nothing grows, but the child might be – possibly a new kind of ‘Adam’. “It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond ran along the crest of a ridge where the barren woodland fell away of every side. It’s snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom” McCarthy does the reader the great service of keeping a kind of ambivalence going in the story. We know how the story must end, realistically, without appeal to any kind of magic, corn, or unsatisfying tied up wrap. But, isn’t life itself something evolving? There have been earlier cataclysms which destroyed life as it was known. Didn’t other forms arise? Might a conscious, a self-conscious species, be able, some of them, to choose to be some kind of bearers of light? I found the concepts, the far wider considerations McCarthy was presenting the reader, kept me engaged and absorbed, as did the practical details. Father and son, and particularly, that relationship between them, and the father’s memories of ‘before’ were all extremely powerful. And, often his writing is magnificent, carrying his weighty themes, particularly in his chilling descriptions of the new, harshly wasted world “The land was gullied and eroded and barren. The bones of dead creatures sprawled in the washes. Middens of anonymous trash. Farmhouses in the fields scoured of their paint and the clapboards spooned and sprung from the wallstuds. All of it shadownless and without feature. The road descended through a jungle of dead kudzu. A marsh where the dead reeds lay over the water. Beyond the edge of the fields the sullen haze hung over earth and sky alike” Despite these undoubted strengths I sometimes struggled with McCarthy’s writing. He has a tendency to a kind of portentous elevation, using archaic language – and then over-using it. As example, he carefully seems to want to avoid using the word ‘wash’ replacing it with ‘lave’ Using an unusual or poetic word like that, once or twice, helps the feeling of strangeness. But if every time something – hand, face, hair, knife is not washed, but is laved, it becomes grating and repetitive in a way the reader would not have noticed if the common word had been used over and again, for a common action Still, a very powerful read indeed

Brilliant read , couldn't put it down .Like a contemporary Waiting For Godot ..the sparseness of the setting and the desperate hollow prospects.. wonderfully conjured .

I knew very little about Cormac Mcarthy prior to reading this book. I'm going through a phase of consuming post apocalyptic stories and after much deliberation I thought I'd give it try. I'm so glad I wasn't put off by some of the negative reviews. The Road is beautiful, thought provoking, compelling and life affirming. I hesitate to say it was a pleasure to read given the tone and subject matter but I recommend this book to anyone who is prepared to engage their brain and open their heart. McCarthy's writing emotionally tied me to the characters without the usual writing conventions I'd expect, life doesn't necessarily provide us with nice neat answers or resolutions to things especially in this case where nothing is normal and will never be so again. Why worry about fripperies when all human life has been cleaved down to the barest essentials, the novel's style and prose reflects that in many ways. I was fully immersed in the story from the start, it's not a long book, it was easy to follow the various exchanges and the story flowed beautifully. But be warned it's emotionally draining and very bleak, it hurt my heart to read some of the passages, this truly frightening world McCarthy brought forth will live me for a long time. Forget the whys and wherefores of how the earth reached this hellish state, that's honestly not important. The Road is basically a love story between a man and his son, McCarthy dedicates this book to his own little boy at the start and it's abidingly clear that the primary focus for the reader should be on this relationship and its development, it positively burns through the pages. Man and boy are nameless (as are most of the characters we meet) but it didn't lessen the power of his writing to convey the incredible depth of their love and reliance on each other. What we do learn is that there was an apocalyptic event around the time of the boy's birth, its clear the effects were utterly devastating, life appears to have been extinguished save for a few pitiless souls left to walk the barren ash choked wasteland killing, stealing and scavenging for what's left of any canned/preserved food or worse resorting to cannibalism. They trudge day after day through a world that appears stripped of life, of colour and a future for humankind. The boy knows nothing of the time before the tragedy, living in constant fear, cold and hunger for him is normality for the father it's much worse, a desperate sadness at what has been lost that he is loathe to articulate, he remembers his old life in dreams and brief recollections and it's from these that we get further insights into the past with his wife and family. The man is getting sicker by the day as they travel through the seemingly eternal grey, bleak, inhospitable, cold wasteland along a road. There is no sun, they are fighting constant starvation, the days are growing darker and colder as if heralding a nuclear style winter. They are moving south towards the coast as the father knows they can't survive another winter where they've been living. It's better for the father to have some goal to reach in order to hold on to his sanity and hope for the future and his son's well being so they keep on the move. Hope, humanity, goodness and faith are key here it's about "keeping the fire" as the father calls it, they are "the good guys" and his son demands reassurance of this fact at various stages and this sustains both of them despite the apparent desperateness of their situation. The father is deeply mistrusting of anyone they meet with his fearsome desire to protect his child who he looks up to almost as a vessel of goodness in this hellish world. When certain incidents happen the boy gets very upset and begins to fear they are no longer the good guys, this schism reflects more on the general fear of any parent desperately wanting to equip their child with the tools for survival and independence but fighting the need to control and fiercely protect. To compound the issue, the father realises he's running out of time but equally the son carries the burden of knowing that soon he will be left alone to fend for himself, this forms an unbearable emotional strain between them. The tenderness the father expresses towards his son was deeply moving, despite the sparseness of the dialogue between them, the father is only still alive because of his son who is equally dependent on him. His fear and anguish over the boy at key moments almost had me in tears, the future is left opaque and undecided, it may be hopeless it may not, the reader is left to surmise for themselves many things and that's how it should be. McCarthy's gift in his writing is to keenly show in a very painful and raw way how loving someone can be and that the strength found in that is sometimes enough to carrying on. The rather stark, simple exchanges between father and son I found curiously moving and heartfelt and there are many touching little moments described. Also, the father is constantly tormented wondering if the time comes could he kill his child to spare him almost certain defilement. I can only imagine how much this story would resonate and especially if you're a parent. "You have my whole heart", the father says at one point, such simple honest beauty in that line! The Road shows us the strength of love and how in our darkest moments it can bind and hold people together against extreme circumstances that should crush the human spirit. Yet some if us choose to go on even if in the end the universe makes our existence appear almost meaningless. I can see why this book won acclaim.

If you want to fully dive into a book that catches your full attention and makes you forget about the world, this is it. A real page-turner, beautifully written, amazing story, heartbreaking, insightful, entertaining.

In een vernietigende zwarte kou doolt een vader naar het zuiden met als enige motivatie zijn zoon. We volgen dit tweetal in een post-apocalyptische wereld van as en onmenselijkheid door zo helder beschreven vernietiging dat de adem stokt. Er is geen hoop, maar de lezer denkt het te kunnen vinden.

Brilliant read, loved it. Fast, free delivery from Amazon

Scritto in ma ieri quasi asettica, in alcune parti ripetitivo, quasi a suggerire il nuovo corso delle vicende umane dopo una misteriosa catastrofe che resta percepibile solo attraverso le tracce che lascia. Ci sono due visioni quasi contrastanti. Un padre che lotta per la sopravvivenza e un figlio che prima accetta qualsiasi nefandezza come qualcosa di indiscusso, e poi, crescendo, inizia a sviluppare una sua personale coscienza. E' un grido forte all'umanità, alla riconquista di valori perduti. Storia che lascia tantissime emozioni e che merita di essere letta tutta di un fiato.

Je n'étais pas du tout familière de l'oeuvre de McCarthy et j'ai acheté ce livre car j'en avais entendu beaucoup de bien. Quelle bonne idée j'ai eu! Ce livre est en fait très rapide à résumer car en substance en fait il ne s'y passe pas grand chose: Après une catastrophe qui a réduit à néant la quasi totalité de l'humanité (façon fin des dinosaures) un père et son fils tentent de survivre dans une amérique en cendres. Leurs objectifs? Se nourrir, se réchauffer, ne pas se faire tuer, bref: survivre. Et... et bien c'est tout! Mais réduire The Road à ce résumé simpliste et se dire que le roman est creux serait une grave erreur. The road ne peut se lire qu'avec une certaine distance, distance que le style minimaliste de l'auteur impose dès les premières pages. Et quand je dis minimaliste, c'est tout sauf péjoratif. Le style de McCarthy reflète parfaitement le monde qu'il décrit. La terre est ravagée, l'amérique (je ne dis même pas les Etats Unis puisque ceux-ci n'existent plus) n'est plus qu'un tapis de cendre, tout (et presque tout le monde) est mort. Les mots mêmes de l'auteur nous font ressentir le vide de l'univers de ce roman. Pas de tournures de styles alambiquées, que des phrases courtes et brutes pour décrire un monde sans un souffle de vie, sans un chant d'oiseau, sans lumières. Les villes, les pays, même les gens n'ont plus de nom (on ne saura jamais celui d'aucun personnage d'ailleurs). L'humanité n'existe plus et les quelques survivants en sont réduits à satisfaire des besoins primaires: homme ou animal, survivants ou bêtes traquées, on ne sait plus trop... Chacun trouvera dans ce livre ses propres métaphores. Certaines sont évidentes: ce chemin sur lequel il faut toujours aller de l'avant sans s'arrêter, ce monde dans lequel tout retourne à la cendre..., d'autre plus personnelles. The Road invite aussi à s'interroger sur les notions de bien et de mal dans un univers où plus aucun repère n'existe. Certains commentaires disent que ce livre se lit d'une traite, qu'il est impossible à poser une fois commencer. Pour moi, ce fut le contraire. J'avançais dans l'histoire à petits pas, incapable parfois de continuer tant l'atmosphère est pesante, tant la lecture est parfois aussi déprimante, longue et dure que la vie que se voient contraints de mener les protagonistes. Un livre indispensable, une sacrée expérience littéraire.