Every year on Father’s Day I put this book up as a staff recommendation with the blurb “A story of a father and son doing some camping.
Also cannibals.”
Carry the fire.

I enjoy survival in the wild plotlines, so I liked the premise of this post-apocalyptic story about a man and his child travelling through a bleak landscape towards the south, to find the "good guys," and appreciated that, even though it's extremely bleak and depressing, it isn't nihilistic and has a dash of hopefulness all along.

However, like it happens with most dystopias I pick up, this one suffers from an inability to explain why the world is in the state it is. What happened? We're not told, we're just shown that something very horrible happened that ended civilisation. And I suppose it's fine to let it up to the reader to make up their own mind about what caused this catastrophe; and I also do understand that the cause of the catastrophe isn't the point of the book: the effects are. But that doesn't excuse leaving it so completely unaddressed that it's a plothole, and makes the author look sloppy and lazy. You can't just spend your entire time showing the consequences whilst ignoring the cause, at the very least McCarthy could've said in passing if it was a nuclear holocaust, a plague, an asteroid, cataclysmic natural phenomena, whatever. As things stand, he doesn't, and whilst I can imagine what happened, I still fault the author for this plotline failure.

Furthermore, all those critiques I'd been hearing about McCarthy's fixation on gross and over-the-top violence turned out to be true. I'm aware of his fans' arguments in his defence as well, and I don't quite agree. He can be gratuitous, and often ignores the entirety of human nature for the base and the vile, and falls into the traps of titillation. And his prose, although he can certainly have dashes of genius in his conveying of imagery, is pretty basic, overdescriptive and has the quality of a mechanical reading device monotounously talking about the user's manual for your laundry machine.

Not a writer I'm going to give another try with a different book, but I'm glad I read this book for the characters more than anything.

The Road is a moving and terrifying post-apocalyptic novel that deserves its notoriety. The two unnamed characters, a father and a son, set out on a nightmarish, nearly impossible journey. It is hard to stop reading once you start. I felt a bit nauseous at times but as always the spare but beautiful, powerful writing of McCarthy is spellbinding. I definitely understand why this book got a Pulitzer. Now, gotta watch the movie!

Five Stars For Brilliant Story Telling: It really doesn’t get any better than this. The story is a journey, an epic journey, a hero’s journey. The prose is sparse and real in its immediacy. We not only read it but feel it, smell it, taste it. That is a rare treat for any reader.

Five Stars For Best Father and Son Relationship: The father and his son in this book have such a strong bond, it is both heart wrenching and inspiring to share it. On their long journey, they teach each other, mostly by example, how to live in a world that is unlivable. How to survive, how to protect, how to love.

Five Stars For Most Creative Environment: The world of this book is not beautiful. It is filled with ash, the sun is barely visible through the thick pollution of the atmosphere, most trees destroyed or falling down; roads have melted and then cooled again, streams and rivers and even the ocean an off-shade of gray. It is a dead world that has not yet begun to come back to life, and we do not know if it ever will.

Six Stars For Pulling Me Out of my Comfort Zone and Making Me Like It: Post-apocalyptic or dystopian writing is not a genre I feel comfortable with for various reasons. Having said that, this is one of those very rare stories that seems to cut across all genres, grabs hold, and doesn’t let you go – even after the last page.

I loved this book, and recommend it to anyone who might be interested in the above Star points.

This book was interesting. It’s a complete slow burn with quirky writing (not like A Clockwork Orange, thank heaven but interesting quirky).

It is a post-apocalyptic story that follows the day to day of a boy and his father. There are some SERIOUSLY disturbing descriptions in the book adding to the dark and ominous story.

I’d recommend it just for the sake of experiencing a book outside the normal type of writing and reading you’re used to. This story doesn’t really have the typical beginning, middle and end…it just. IS.

Everyone warned me it was depressing, but I read it anyway. I read it anyway because each and every one of those people also said The Road was really great. They were right. With masterstrokes of economic elegance, McCarthy colors his spartan, post-apocalyptic landscape, bringing a barren world to life in all its misery. The characters are developed only as deeply as necessary, showing admirable restraint by the author. Yet even with the barest of bare essentials a character could possess (they don't even have names!), I still found myself pulling for them in a way I seldom do. The Road is a compact, tightly-wound novel that truly deserves the praise it has received.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a hauntingly beautiful novel that explores the unbreakable bond between a father and his son in a desolate, post-apocalyptic world. Written in McCarthy’s signature sparse prose, the story is both bleak and deeply moving, filled with moments of quiet tenderness and unwavering hope. Despite the grim setting, the novel ultimately shines with its portrayal of love, resilience, and the human spirit. A masterpiece of modern literature, The Road is a must-read—profound, unforgettable, and utterly heart-wrenching.

So I generally don't hate books - Recently when joining a face2face club they asked which book I disliked the most - and had no answer. Well I want to thank Cormac McCarthy for giving me something to be able to put there.

Having heard the buzz about this book and having seen the plethora of positive reviews, I felt compelled to write my own if only to be that voice of reason in a wilderness of pretentious insanity.

Cormac’s McCarthy’s The Road, I can honestly say, is the worst book I have ever read. I am stunned to find such a critical following for a novel that is so clearly bad that I have yet to meet a flesh and blood person who does not hate it, or cannot, even after the most mild inquires, explain its appeal beyond the latent thought that they “ought” to like it. To do otherwise would mark them as uncultured and ignorant. Modern art had Duchamp's toilet, and now literature has its own case of the emperor’s new clothes in, The Road.

What sets this novel apart from all others in its genre of ill-conception, is the totality of its failure. There is nothing good that can be said of it. Some virtue can be found in every book, as in the old adage—“…but she has a nice personality.” The Road breaks this rule, and soundly. From the plot and characters to the writing style and even the cover design, the book is abysmally uninspired and a black hole of skill.

Much has been made of the writing quality. Alan Cheuse, of the Chicago Tribune, and book commentator for NPR calls it “…his huge gift for language.” Let’s look at that for a moment. It is universally accepted that the first few sentences of any novel are the most crucial—the words which a writer labors over the most to get them just right. Here are the first two sentences of The Road:

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.”

I once presented these two sentences to an amateur writer’s forum and asked their opinion. Several members politely replied that the sentences were badly in need of work. Not only were they not grammatically correct, but they were awkward, confusing, used several unnecessary words and had all the rhythm and pacing of a dog with four broken legs. Nights dark beyond darkness, has got to rank up there with, it was a dark and stormy night. This is not at all an isolated example. It is merely the beginning—literally. Other laudable narrative sentences include: “The Hour.” “Of a sudden he seemed to wilt even further.” “A lake down there.”

Lest you think I am selectively picking the worst, here is the passage Mr. Cheuse used in his own review as an example of genius: “tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return.” What McCormac is describing here is that it is dark and the man can’t see where he is going. The author is clearly a master of communication.

Let’s also pause to consider his brilliance of dialog, and his mastery of the monosyllable conversation that make the screenplay dialog of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger on par with Shakespeare. Nearly every conversation has the word “Okay,” which appears so often I began to think it was a pun, like a ventriloquist routine. One might conclude McCarthy is attempting to reflect a realistic vernacular into his work, except that the conversations are so stilted and robotic, as to lack even the faintest aroma of realism. There is no slang, no halted speech, no rambling. It is Dragnet.

First dialog in the book:
I ask you something? Yes. Of course. Are we going to die? Sometime. Not now. And we’re still going south. Yes. So we’ll be warm. Yes. Okay. Okay what? Nothing. Just okay. Go to sleep. Okay.

You’ll note that I did not use quotes in the above excerpt. That is because neither does McCarthy. There are no quotes anywhere in the book, nor are there any tags designating the speaker, which manages to successfully make determining who is speaking quite a dilemma at times. Moreover, McCarthy never provides names to his characters this forces him to use the pronoun “he” frequently which very often leaves the reader bewildered as to whether he is referring to the father or the boy.

McCarthy doesn’t stop with quotes. He rarely uses commas or apostrophes. It doesn’t appear as if he is against contractions as he uses the non-word, “dont” quite frequently. Nor is he making the statement that he can write a whole book without punctuation as he does, on rare occasions, use a comma or an apostrophe, (as you can see from the dialog segment I listed above,) as if he is going senile and merely forgot. As the lack of most of the necessary punctuation’s only result is to make it harder to read, I can only conclude that McCarthy, or his editor are the most lazy people I’ve ever heard of—although I am certain no credible editor ever saw this book. If they had I am certain we would have heard about the suicide in the papers.

One might overlook the shortcomings of writing skill if the novel’s foundation was an excellent story. Sadly, this is not the case. Not that it lacks an excellent plot—it lacks a plot. Often times writers anguish over distilling the plot of a novel into a few sentences that might fit on the back of a book cover. It is often impossible to clearly convey all that a book is in such a short span. The Road does not suffer this. Instead I would imagine that if it were possible to put this book in a microwave and evaporate all the extraneous words all you would have left is one sentence: A boy and his father travel south in a post-apocalyptic United States, then the father dies. I wonder if the blurb writer for the, The Road, realized he was also providing a spoiler for the novel so comprehensive, no one need read the book.

What the book lacks in plot it clearly makes up for in even less characterization. The father and the boy—that is about as much characterization as you will get. McCarthy doesn’t even provide names from which readers might glean some associative characteristics. We know the boy is afraid, because he says so approximately every four pages, always with the same robotic level of emotional intensity, backing it up with his many reasons, regrets and concerns as in the passage: I am scared. Likewise, the father is equally a pot bubbling over with emotional angst and frustration so vividly expressed in his response: I know. I’m sorry.

We might as well burn all our copies of Grapes of Wrath now that we have this tour de force.

As amazing as it is, with only an eggshell of plot, McCarthy manages to run afoul of logic. The boy and his father come across shelters packed with food and water, and yet the father insists they move on. Why? Because they must keep moving so as to avoid encountering others. Clearly staying in one place is the best plan to avoid meeting others, hermit do it all the time. Yes, other people might wander into you, but you double that equation if you too are roaming. The only argument for pressing on with the journey is to find others.

I am certain I am being too kind here, but given that this is a Pulitzer Prize winning, Oprah Pick, National Bestseller, I don’t want to ruffle too many feathers. Of course, Duchamp's toilet (Fountain) was once voted "the most influential modern artwork of all time".

Qualche giorno fa, in biblioteca, una signora (sui 70, ex prof.) con cui scambio sempre qualche chiacchiera mi chiede cosa sto leggendo. Glielo dico. Aggiungo solo che è una storia triste e senza via di uscita. E che ha vinto un premio molto importante qualche anno fa.
Lei non ha mai sentito parlare di McCarthy ma non è come me che mi faccio un sacco di problemi a leggere cose di qualcuno che non conosco. Ce n’è un’altra copia e la prende in prestito.
Il giorno dopo torna, lo restituisce e mi dice semplicemente “splendido”.

Due conclusioni:
1. sulle signore un po' agée che non leggono rosa riscuoto sempre un discreto successo.
2. le cose fatte in un certo modo le riconosci subito.

P.S.: spero che la signora a cui è toccato “Underwolrd” non me lo tiri in testa quando verrà. [77/100]

n  Stripped Baren

Something awful has happened to the planet. Everything is burned or burning, and ash is a persistent, suffocating blanket. People are nomads, moving from place to place in terror and in desperation to find food and shelter. Houses and towns and cities are abandoned, mostly looted and picked clean. Think "The Walking Dead" minus the zombies.

This was by far the easiest, quickest read of all dozen or so Pulitzer Prize novels I've read. This is partially due to my emotional investment in the story - I truly cared about "the man" and "the boy" and their survival - but even more so due to the bareness of the writing. It's the opposite of cluttered. Each word lies naked, unadorned, as though with the apocalypse, flowery adjectives and superfluous verbiage were destroyed as part of the mass carnage.

It's true. In this book, there is no room for melodrama. There's no room for purple prose either, though there is definitely poetry hidden in the simple, raw words. There's no room for punctuation: can't or don't inexplicably becomes cant and dont and there are no quotation marks during dialogue. There’s no room for identity, either, as our main characters have no names. No characters have names, actually. And, there's not a great deal of room given to 'plot'. The story is simply a journey that the father and son take along the road, the telling of their mental and physical survival during unbelievable stress and constant danger.

It also documents the survival of their humanity, in times where people cross every line imaginable in the name of self preservation. The boy holds dearly to his innate moral compass - they are the "good guys", which means there are things they absolutely will not do in order to live. This is what separates them from the "bad guys". It is interesting to me that this child, born into a barren, unfriendly world, a child who had never seen a bird or tasted Coke, knows his life, while precious, isn't worth losing his self. The father saves his son time and time again, in the physical sense. But the boy saves his father too, keeping him from shedding the very thing that makes him a good person. And this is both beautiful and painful to see.

However bleak this story is, there is hope. In this decapitated, desecrated world, there is still love. Still love, no matter how dark the road.

"Ten presente que las cosas que te metes en la cabeza están ahí para siempre, dijo. Quizá deberías pensar en eso. Algunas cosas las olvidas, ¿no? Sí. Olvidas lo que quieres recordar y recuerdas lo que quieres olvidar."

Uff... ¡qué panorama presenta este libro desde las primeras lineas! Desesperanza, melancolía, caos, paisajes de ceniza, suelos tapados de cadáveres y dolor. Me noqueó emocionalmente, no lo voy a negar. Está plagado de descripciones sumamente sombrías que hacen que este viaje sea difícil de emprender. A pesar de haber absorbido todo lo triste en este libro, debo decir que me dejó encantada, sólo evitaría volver a recurrir al mismo en épocas de parciales y momentos estresantes. Para los que estén buscando una lectura intensa, cruel y gráfica, recomendadísimo "La carretera".

Pronto hablaré de este libro en mayor detalle en mi canal: https://www.youtube.com/coosburton

I've always been interested in the end-of-the-world genre, though its quality has always existed along a broad spectrum, from the pulpy to the philosophical. After thinking about this for approximately ten seconds, I've decided there are two broad types of doomsday novel. You can deal with people waiting to die, as in Nevil Shute's minor classic On the Beach (it's like Jonestown in Australia!), or you can follow survivors as they try to...well, multiply, such as in William Brinkley's entertaining, if overwritten, The Last Ship (featuring some of the best/worst sex writing ever!).

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is somewhere in between. The protagonists are not waiting to die, nor are they planning to repopulate the earth. Instead, they're on a journey, a road trip if you will, but not the fun kind of road trip where you drink Red Bulls and eat gas station hot dogs and stay in Super 8s.

Something horrible has happened to the world as we know it. It's not really clear what. A war? Some kind of environmental disaster? An asteroid? A comet? An asteroid and a comet that have fused together and then slammed into earth? The repeated references to ashes make me think nuclear war, but nuclear winter would've ended this story a lot quicker (think of poor Steve Guttenberg's hair falling out in The Day After; or better yet, don't think about that).

The references to the tragedy that befell this earth are oblique:

The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer.

If you're looking for details as to what happened, you can look for them in the same place that McCarthy put all his apostrophes. Aside from this description and a few dreams and flashbacks, we are placed in a hauntingly burnt-out place that is both similar and horribly strange. (You can't tell what year this is supposed to take place in. Moreover, you aren't even sure this is America. If you search the internet, you will find people have actually expended time theorizing about these questions).

The story is as simple as you can get. Almost a parable. There are two main characters: the man and the boy (McCarthy thinks capitalizing proper nouns is gauche). The man is the boy's father. The world has been destroyed. They head towards the mythical south where they hope they might find other "good guys" like them.

Page after blunt, grim, nightmarish page chronicles their arduous trek, as they search for food and water and attempt to evade the masked gangs of cannibals that roam the scorched landscape.

They passed through the city at noon of the day following. He kept the pistol to hand on the folded tarp on top of the cart. He kept the boy close to his side. The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather.

The writing is taut and constrained (though McCarthy has an annoying habit of throwing a $100 word into a $5 sentence, so that I have to slink with shame to a dictionary). Though simple, there is a certain lyricism to the descriptions, and the imagery is quite vivid. It even gave me a nightmare, though I have an overactive imagination and a Nyquill addiction, so I don't know if the book caused it. (I have a friend who is a doctor, and he says it's probably the Nyquill).

On the way south, the man and boy see some awful things:

They walked into the little clearing, the boy clutching his hand...He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him...He turned and looked...What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit.

The man tells the boy:

You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?

The world that McCarthy has created is unrelentingly bleak. There is no law, no humanity. The air is shot-through with evil. You can't trust anyone. Everyone is out to get you: to steal from you; to murder you; to chain you up in a basement and eat you from the feet up.

Odd, then, that McCarthy chooses to leaven this dark atmosphere with some utter corniness, as embodied by the angelic boy. The dark scenes in this book are hard-hitting and do not pull back; the soft scenes in this book seemed culled from Hallmark cards, Tuesdays With Morrie, and blog posts by Paulo Coehlo.

Without doing anything to spoil the ending, I will say I was disappointed. Throughout the story, there are several deux ex machina moments, where the man and boy manage to stumble into some food trove that allows them to survive. I felt the novel ended in a similar vein, coming as it did from nowhere.

However, at least I understood it, which is saying something with McCarthy. After the danse macabre that concluded Blood Meridian, and Sheriff Bell's opaque dream to finish No Country For Old Men, I appreciated being able to figure out what was going on without taking a masters-level English class devoted to parsing the last few paragraphs.

The Road seems to be a continuation of the "widely accessible" phase of Cormac McCarthy's career, which I have enjoyed of late. I'll even forgive him his cooler-than-thou, punctuation-be-damned style.