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The Road

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Author - Cormac Mccarthy ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Kindle Edition eBooks item from Knopf was reviewed on 27-Oct-2008.

The Road Reference eBooks. Classifications : Subjects Arts & Photography Biographies & Memoirs Business & Investing Children's Books Comics & Graphic Novels Computers & Internet Cooking, Food & Wine Entertainment Gay & Lesbian Health, Mind & Bod . Click the following link to view the cover of The Road.

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1) Kindle Edition eBooks The Road by Knopf. An unnamed man and his son travel south in a desolate charred landscape, the aftermath of some unnamed apocalyptic disaster, hoping to find some escape from the horrors that have become their daily struggle for survival. We know nothing about them other than what little we learn as they travel; we deduce for example that the boy must be very young; we come to realise that they consider themselves the "good guys", and that out there somewhere there are also the "bad guys".

It is a harrowing tale, and while not a vast novel it does seem after a while that there is going to be little relief from their constant search for food and the struggle against starvation. Yet one is compelled to stick with them as they cling to some distant hope. For despite all the apparent despair the boy (for that is what he is called), shines as a model of morality and compassion; while his father tries hard to live up to his son´s expectations of him.

It is a story told with great economy, matched by the succinctness of the dialogue between father and son. But what makes the story so compelling is that we are quickly drawn to man and boy, the obvious love and trust the two share, that we have to keep with them ever sharing their forlorn hope.
¤

2) Kindle Edition eBooks The Road by Knopf. A man and a boy are traveling in a bleak and desolate world. Ashes decorate the scarred and burnt landscape. The man and the boy struggle to survive in an almost empty land while avoiding the straggling groups of marauding invaders bent on evil. The man and the boy travel down THE ROAD in a powerful and unforgettable tale.

Atmosphere is absolutely critical to the success of THE ROAD. Cormac McCarthy envisions a post-apocalyptic world that is both harsh and believable. One can easily visualize the remnants of our current civilization as described in THE ROAD. Everyday items we take for granted become prizes worth killing for while the items we currently consider luxuries are ignored as they are useless when survival is all that matters. The joy over a can of peaches is beautiful and poignant in the hands of this storyteller.

The sometimes terse and simplistic prose only serves to heighten the horror of the world in which the man and the boy travel. Even the lack of names for all the characters, except for one, adds a starkness to this powerful and often depressing tale. However, all is not lost as there is a kernel of hope buried within the tale, the hope of the power of love that knows no boundaries or limits.

On audio, THE ROAD is a frightening and eerie story. Tom Stechschulte´s narration is absolutely superb. He provides just the right pleading, sometimes whiny tone for the boy to contrast with the gruff voice of the man.

THE ROAD is not an easy tale to listen to or read. Cormac McCarthy doesn´t pull any punches with this one as he demonstrates just what lengths man will go to when survival and love are all that matter. Not everyone will enjoy this tale, but it is destined to be a classic for the strong emotions it evokes.

COURTESY OF CK2S KWIPS AND KRITIQUES¤

3) Kindle Edition eBooks The Road by Knopf. I´ve read post-apocalyptic tales before. I´ve read tales of fathers and sons.

There are key elements missing in this story. Specifically: plot line. Man and boy walk down the road, while wonderful descriptions of a bleak landscape are recited. But other than that, almost nothing happens. Oh, there are a couple of encounters, but none fleshed out to the point where there is a significant action sequence or tension, beyond the steady grinding of death by starvation.

This is nothing that hasn´t been done better by any number of authors. Perhaps the rabid fans of this novel have not read any of these types of stories before, but there´s nothing that makes this better, or even as good, as many of the others out there.¤

4) Kindle Edition eBooks The Road by Knopf. ...or does McCarthy totally overuse the word "okay" in almost every exchange of dialog between the man and the boy? It actually gets annoying after a while. Nobody says okay that much!!! Aside from that, it is a very good and disturbing novel that portrays exactly the world that humanity will deserve after a nuclear war.¤

5) Kindle Edition eBooks The Road by Knopf. I´m not really big on reading novels. Outside Hemingway, Vonnegut, and a handful of others, I find most of today´s fiction full of clever prose, but ultimately spoon-feeding and ponderous. However, I found this book not ponderous, but ponderable. And the pondering comes from me. With every page I found myself filling in the all the blanks. Agonizing over what would I do at this point? What if my child saw that? Would I be that courageous? Or would I cave? This story puts you front and center into a meditation of hopelessness. Unenviable, but cathartic. The Man in the story is the ideal of the best we could ever hope to be. That we would be strong enough to save that which we love so much. Messianic in the most human sense. Trudging imperfectly into a full on hell, armed with nothing but a single bullet and his hope against hope for nothing else but the sake of his child. I know some didn´t think much of this story, and I respect their opinion. I only hope the upcoming film does the story justice, so maybe those who couldn´t take something true from the pages will find what´s meaningful to them in a more visceral environment. I actually had to stop about six pages from the end to gather myself, which I have never done. I was caught completely off guard, that a book could ever bring me to such a place. But when all you have done for nearly 300 pages is carry your own child through the nightmare of nightmares, then getting to that place comes pretty easy.¤

6) Kindle Edition eBooks The Road by Knopf. A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

From the Hardcover edition.¤

7) Kindle Edition eBooks The Road by Knopf. Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we´ve read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham

Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play).

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

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 24-Nov-2008, , YWB-AKB-1QB-MGB-WQB-6MB-K0B-OAB-MYB-8

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