What I Am Reading - The Road

The Road

Cormac McCarthy

Softcover 287pgs.

While I generally try and write a little bit about the author before each book review, I feel Cormac doesn’t really need the same level of introduction.  The man himself has written enough stuff that I feel you are familiar with his work or you are not.  The likes of which include: “No Country for Old Men”, “All The Pretty Horses”, “Blood Meridian”, and of course “The Road”.  Three of which were made into major motion pictures of great notoriety.  Cormac McCarthy is 78 years ancient, and lives in New Mexico.  Apparently Cormac feels authors should only undertake matters of life and death, which explains why death is so heavy an element in his stories.  If you are uncomfortable with such I suggest you look elsewhere.  Cormac has been married a few times, has two kids from different mothers and is now happily married to one of them.  Cormac also despises the use of exaggerated punctuation, and told Oprah as much during his first televised interview; that there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks".  This explains a lot of the lacking indicators present in his books.  Dialog exists as flat sentences with little to know sign of who says what throughout the course of a long dialog.  Makes for some interesting reading.

I have to say that I thought the book was alright.  With that said though, I saw the movie first so I knew most of the "tilters" before I read them which dramatically changed the story for me because I knew what was coming.  I was surprised though, after reading it, just how well the movie did at capturing the feel of the book.  In most instances I felt the movie actually did a better job.  The book didn’t really clarify a lot of points of the movie that I was hoping it would but “C’est La Vie” I suppose.

The book itself covers the journey of a man and his son, both unnamed in the story, who are traveling South East to find the coast.  They have no names and the environment they are traveling is a famine disaster full of hidden traps, roaming cannibals, thieves, and a severe lack of shelter.  From the description you summarize that the story takes place somewhere in the United States in an undisclosed time frame in which the world has undergone some sort of world disaster.  The story does not cover the disaster, its first impacts barely mentioned, or what the disaster was.  The story is bleak, it’s violent, and it’s sad. 

A friend suggested that I read it while the weather was nice, and I would give that suggestion to anyone wishing to read it.  I live in Seattle and it rains for months straight, I would hate to try to digest this book during the course of endless rain as the story is bleak enough.

Excited to read “Blood Meridian” shortly.