The Road is a painful, beautiful, horrifying, heartfelt, and compelling novel about a father and his son that astounded me from its opening pages through to its conclusion.

I’ve made known my disparagement for post-apocalyptic stories, which all seem to eventually fall into the same tropes ad museum. You’ve read or watched the stories where one band of survivors tries to survive only to run into another band of survivors who, despite initial appearances, have devolved from society into little more than beasts. The Road is patently not that story.

Where much of post-apocalyptic literature sets itself apart by small increments, The Road moves as far away from the mores of the genre as possible. McCarthy’s novel focuses on an unnamed father and son who trudge through what is possibly the bleakest future I have ever read. The world is covered in ash, the sun blotted out, food is so scarce that cannibalism is the norm, and as winter approaches our two leads are placed in immense jeopardy. With this grey, black, and white palate, McCarthy paints a relationship in vivid colour.

For this novel is truly a novel of fatherhood, unyielding love, and the lengths we go to for the ones we love. A recurring conversation between the boy and his father is their status as carriers of the fire. While at first it seems like a cheap contrivance, by the novel’s end I was dazed by how they truly do illuminate the novel. The moments shared between father and son demonstrate love overtly and subtly. In the man’s struggle to keep the darker parts of the world from his son despite their ubiquity, the reader comes to know the character of the man. The moments are so many and too well written to be sullied by my meager paraphrasing. Suffice to say that these moments are delivered without artifice, pretense, or falseness.

The novel is raw, and it comes through not only from the world or emotion, but also from the writing. My only previous encounter with McCarthy was a good four to five years ago when I attempted to make my way through Blood Meridian. Though it has been a long time between my abandonment of that novel and my reading of The Road, I have to wonder if I was too harsh on the former. McCarthy ignores a great deal of grammar, preferring to eschew commas, quotation marks, and apostrophes for the bare minimum required to convey his idea. Though I normally wouldn’t appreciate this, it was impossible for me not to be drawn in by the poetry in this language which, much like its setting, is stripped of pretense.

The Road is a harrowing read, there’s no doubt about it. Though for all its horrors and inhumanity, I came to the novel’s end thinking it to be an ultimately hope-filled novel. What's more, it is a compelling adventure in that it is a story about the struggle to survive. What this novel has is what other post-apocalyptic fiction lacks: heart. Against a tide of incessant desolation stand a man and his son, and their love holds aloft the fire of humanity, the essence upon which our societies are built. I cannot recommend this novel enough, and it will definitely not be my last from McCarthy.

The Road is a dismal and poignant novel. A man and his son are trying to survive on a devastated (possibly post-nuclear) land, covered by ashes. They trudge through on a deserted road that doesn't seem to lead anywhere. They are starving. Occasionally, they either find some food or come up with a group of man-eating panhandlers.

Not much of a plot to speak of in this book, and everything sounds like a pointless and painful attempt at surviving in a world that is already charred and dead — in a way, it reminded me of some of Samuel Beckett's plays. There is at all times an undercurrent of danger and threat. Most descriptions are about landscapes or minute details: the man exploring abandoned houses or cobbling rusted things together. Most of the dialogues between the two main characters are about making sure the other one is okay. Cormac McCarthy's narration is extraordinarily subtle and pared-down.

In the end, this might sound quite dull and gloomy indeed, but through it all, and mainly through the relationship between the father and his son, I was startled by the genuinely stirring sense of humanity, of compassion, of love, of hope that arises from this story.

Edit: Watched the movie starring Viggo Mortensen. Apart from a few flashbacks with the wife (Charlize Theron), it is respectfully adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel. It’s a colourless, dreadful, profoundly wrenching film, in the best tradition of father & son movies such as Chaplin’s The Kid. Mortensen, Robert Duvall and the boy Kodi Smit-McPhee are outstanding.

Put aside all the zombie stuff...this book is terrifying because of the Pogo maxim: "We have met the enemy and he is us." What if the boys in Lord of the Flies ruled the world after the next nuclear war laid waste to civilization? I have had a nightmare about the 'mobile slaughter wagon' and I did not like it...a very powerful book.

Por fin le hago hueco a esta obra maestra de la literatura norteamericana contemporánea.

No sabremos qué ha pasado exactamente pero un cataclismo de origen desconocido ha acabado con la práctica totalidad de la vida en la tierra, los pocos humanos que quedan intentan sobrevivir como buenamente pueden.
Se respira ceniza, oscuridad, el aire es denso y pesado.
Durante sus poco más de doscientas páginas acompañaremos a un padre y su hijo, a los cuales nunca se refiere el autor por sus nombres, solo son padre e hijo, por esas carreteras interminables.
Recorrerán largas distancias en busca de un clima más templado, algo de comida para su hijo cada vez más famélico, un refugio seguro.
Deberán esconderse bien, nunca se sabe quien puede estar acechando para robarles lo poco que les queda.

Al principio cuesta hacerse con la narrativa fragmentada, un poco caótica.
La ausencia de guiones que diferencien los diálogos. Unos diálogos entre ambos también muy extraños, tan fríos como el clima que los envuelve. Algo normal en vista de las circunstancias.
Es una lectura densa, con momentos que se me ha hecho tan difícil avanzar como al padre arrastrar el carro con tanto obstáculo y basura en mitad de la carretera, muy monótona y tremendamente descriptiva; siempre vagando ese padre y su hijo buscando provisiones, detallando a la perfección cada objeto que se encontraban en sus incursiones en las casas medio derruidas y ennegrecidas por la ceniza que se encontraban, por eso no es un libro que pueda recomendar a cualquiera.
Es exasperante tanto por lo que cuenta como por cómo lo cuenta.
Esa desesperación del padre, el no rendirse nunca, no desistir en la búsqueda a pesar de que las fuerzas no les acompañen, por no saber que hay más allá. Es capaz de traspasar el papel.

Hasta el último momento he dudado de mi valoración final por lo que he comentado anteriormente, pero me he decantado por las 4⭐ porque ha conseguido emocionarme, tiene esa capacidad de deprimirte tanto como a los propios protagonistas.
Es un libro para tomárselo con calma y en el momento adecuado, destila tanta tristeza y pesadumbre que acabas hecho trizas tras cerrar la última página con un suspiro.

Y qué decir de la película homónima protagonizada por Viggo Mortensen, una muy buena adaptación que sabe transmitir a la perfección la atmósfera lóbrega creada por McCarthy.

Lo dicho, muy recomendable, pero no para todo el mundo ni para cualquier momento.

4/5 Estrellas.

Poco que añadir sobre esta obra maestra. Los protagonistas, el hombre y el niño, no tienen nombre, eso hace que desde la primera palabra nos veamos sumergidos casi en primera persona en ese mundo postapocalíptico, no sabemos que ha pasado, pero rápidamente empezamos a sentir el frío y la lluvia, el hambre nos atenaza, el miedo y la angustia hacia lo que nos espera más adelante en esa maldita carretera, a no tener nada para comer, a nuestros semejantes, a que no haya quedado nada del mundo que conocíamos, a que no exista un futuro.....pero aún así seguimos adelante, no sabemos porqué, pero seguimos, quizá quede algo o alguien, no sabemos y seguimos....un paso más, hasta el último aliento. Esa es la condición humana, para bien o para mal.

Gran libro. Por momentos no es fácil de seguir, el formato de la escritura tampoco ayuda, de ahí las 4 estrellas.

No he podido quitarme de la cabeza la imagen de Viggo Mortensen haciendo del "hombre", gran peli también.

Ladies and gentlemen of Goodreads, I present to you my first five star review of 2018- The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

And, ladies and gentlemen of Goodreads, here is the crazy thing. This is my THIRD time reading the book! My THIRD time! And y’all wanna know how many stars I rated this book last time? TWO! TWO WHOLE STARS! I didn’t even write a review. I just gave it two stars and moved on with my life. And now here I am with a five star review, and, folks, I can’t even explain what’s happened to me. I don’t know why I’ve had this change of heart. I don’t know why all of a sudden this book grabbed me and held me in its arms like a little baby and crushed me in the end.

I have one theory though. I LISTENED to the book this time around. I’m sorry for capitalizing so many words. It just feels right for some reason. It feels RIGHT. Listening to the book forced me to slow down a little bit and take in the writing in a much different way. It allowed me to really savor the book and chew on the words a little bit before swallowing them. The book is beautiful, man, and I think it’s beauty flew right past me the first two times. Not this time though.

I love apocalyptic books anyway. I loved Station Eleven. The Stand is alright. I Am Legend was awesome. But, man, McCarthy comes in with The Road and you can literally feel the bleakness and the emptiness and the desperation in his writing. You can see and smell the blackness and the ash and the cold. It’s hard to read (or listen to) sometimes because it’s just so hopeless, and you know nothing good is coming. You know there can’t be some happy ending waiting for you. There’s no way. Not in the world he’s created.

But for a book so cold and dark, it’s also poetic and beautiful. McCarthy’s short sentences and minimal words in his dialogues work great in this world, and it all adds to the overall tone of the story. Boy howdy, I’ve had an awesome JanuMcCarthyary so far.

On to Blood Meridian!!!!! Can’t wait!!!! Yeaaahhh!!!!

Gorgeously written. Evocative and powerful. The atmosphere is bleak and depressing but so immersive. I definitely teared up a bit at the end.

A good friend gave this to me to read. I told him I already had an audiobook working and he said, "you'll want to read this one".

I could barely put it down.

Mesmerizing.

McCarthy's prose is simple, fable like, yet also lyrical, like a minamalistic poet. The portrait he has painted is dark and foreboding, difficult and painful, yet he carries "the fire" throughout, a spark of hope and love that must be his central message to the reader.

Having read the book, not sure if I want to see the film, it may spoil my vision of McCarthy's art. **March 2017 and I still have not seen the film and still don't think I will.

This review can now be seen at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud.

McCarthyites strongly cautioned.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

(A-) 84% | Very Good
Notes: Dreamlike and deeply moving, it's thin on plot, with dialogue that's often genius, but also inauthentic and repetitive.

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”



To say this is a grim read is an understatement. Cormac McCarthy's The Road stands out for its stark sense of desolation and desperation. This bleakness is oppressive even for the reader who feels pinned down on the road, hope suffocating with every page turned. In the story, winter pushes a man and his young son to take to the road where they must fend off starvation and roving militia bands. Undoubtedly, McCarthy's spare language--it is always the man and the boy, for instance--contributes to this feeling of hopelessness. While this bare-bones approach gives the novel a certain power, in my opinion it takes something away too. Is this a novel I can recommend? Absolutely. However, while the atmosphere produced is unequal, I prefer dystopian novels that give me more to think about.