Cormac McCarthy- The Road

Can’t answer yr question as I’m not familiar enough with Roth, but I LOVE me some Cormac; hopefully he’s got at least a couple more novels left in him.

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Of course, Roth's stuck us with things like The Breast and the Plot Against America--minor or middling works throughout--but from Letting Go at the beginning to The Counterlife later on to recent things like Sabbath's Theater and The Human Stain. Hate to say it, but none of McCarthy's books are up to that standard.

Curious about The Road though. I expect it to be more entertaining than "great."

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it sort of reminded me of the "sangre de christo! mountains of blood! does christ never get tired of bleeding?" riff i read in ... was it burroughs "place of dead roads"?

now that i'm older and wiser a lot of it seems pretty silly but a lot of it has stuck with me, too.

as far as literary westerns go i sort of prefer the "billy the kid" book by michael ondaatje and i'm really enjoying also this recent NYRB reissue i picked up of something called "warlock" by oakley hall (pynchon wrote for the blurb on the back) and the older alvaro mutis reissues (ok that's sort of a mix of pirate stuff and western stuff and general men's adventure stuff mixed in)

all that said i want to hear more opinions on "the road" ... i can't really afford the 24 bucks and all 36 copies in the local library system are checked out or on hold but i'm dying to read it (no spoilers please)

yow! that's bad. =(

He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down around a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

http://www.newmillenniumwritings.com/Issue14/CormacMcCarthy.html

also in general i have no problem w/ an author pushing further and further into their own millieu, except i hope that they would do something interesting, and in my own experience i have found that a lot of feted authors don't. i generally prefer when authors who pick this route actually pull back from your expectations and explore their own sources (like pynchon w/ "mason + dixon" going back to stuff like "tristam shandy" and "legend of sleepy hollow" or burroughs w/ "the place of dead roads" acknowledging his debt to "gangs of new york"), otherwise you just get the author taking a high road deep into his own sensibility and you end up with something as ridiculous, sterile and overbearing as an ayn rand novel.

for -- SPOILERS SUBSEQUENT -- those who've finished the book, can I ask how you interpret the ending? are the swimming fish hearkened to in the final stanza (clearly re. the duo's visit to man's childhood home) supposed to be symbolic of a weird generational consonance? mystical connection? some echo of circularity, of the man in the boy? i don't think i exactly get the significance of the allusion... which is to say: i 'get' what the allusion is to but not the direction in which to interpret it. it's, hah, something of a metaphor shorn of referent, isn't it?

can someone explain just what mccarthy is trying to achieve with his inconsistent punctuation? this is the first novel of his i've read and at first i thought the missing apostrophes in - say - "dont" and "cant" were a way of signifying the child's speech and defining his dialogue.

but that doesn't seem to be the case - the same thing happens with the father's dialogue, and with the narratorial voice. the more i read, the less of a pattern to it i can determine, and it's actually starting to grate.

i understand that this is something he's done in other books ... what's the deal? because, 36 short pages in, it's starting to become a real problem for me.

okay, if you don't like that sort of fiction, why read it in the first place?

A fair question, but then imagine asking, on ILM, "if you don't like that genre of music, why listen to it in the first place?" When you extrapolate like that, you can recognise the impulse (on Vahid's part?) to discern in the genre something he's previously missed? Of course, we can now say he's still missing it and he would say that's because it's not there!

Possible SPOILERS ahead.

Another thought on this novel: the critique or concept is so overused that I'm already wincing that I'm about to use it, but I was truly haunted by this book, and at regular intervals, too -- the nights where they couldn't even light a fire due to the lay of the terrain and the wind, the grey snowflakes, the one barking dog, a weird realisation that cows are probably extinct, the yellow toy truck, the distant percussive "event", the eventual heartbreaking coldness (in every sense) of the sea. And on many other occasions. Some of the detailed imagery is hard to shake. I think I might be obsessed, and not even in a good way.

Also, and this is horrible: love is more painful than death.

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It certainly confirmed my sometime-suspicion that giving people such capacity to hope is one of the nastiest tricks evolution has played on us. The SPOILERS SPOILERS behaviour of the wife is much more reasonable than that of the husband; it's hope that leads him on and on. The same sort of hope that leads to genocide victims digging their own graves before they get shot in the back of the head--hope that something, somehow, impossibly, will turn up and save them before it's all too late.

yeah

but -

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

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someone, somehow, did turn up! pretty CONVENIENT!!

I must admit I'm not usually averse to a bleak hopeless ending, but I actually liked the way The Road ends, pretty much due to my own imagination surrounding the little boy being left alone becoming pretty much unbearable. Perhaps I'm getting softer hearted as I get older. I wonder if those who were okay with this ending (a tiny glimmer of hope in the darkness, really, nothing more) are the same ones who were alright with the ending of Children Of Men (the movie, I haven't read the novel)? Both worked for me, but I can understand somebody not buying it too.

A fair question, but then imagine asking, on ILM, "if you don't like that genre of music, why listen to it in the first place?"

I started The Pesthouse last night. Maybe I should just read post-apocalyptic fiction for the rest of the summer.

Yeah, that's a better question, and fair enough.

Also, have you (has anyone) read Eastward, Ho! by Jim Crace? Yet another post-apocalyptic novel.

Do you mean The Pesthouse?

'The Pesthouse' is a disappointment, I feel, both in comparison to 'The Road', and as a Crace book. An interesting failure, but still disappointing. The world in which it was set never really seemed to come alive, despite some good ideas.

Do you mean The Pesthouse?

Oh yeah, that's what I meant.

this is my very favourite genre of art; i'm going to look to find a copy of this around for cheap.

Do you mean good post-apocalypse stuff? If so, let me know: if got a reading list that'll have you slitting your wrists and/or dreaming of the bomb every night.

Bum. I've got a reading list, I meant to say.

ooooh, post it, please.

Here we go. This is from a scan of the books not packed away in boxes, so apologies if some obvious ones are missing. Everything here has at least some pretensions to literary quality, so there's nothing of the ilk of 'The Horseclans' or other foolish swords-and-sandals-after-the-bomb series.

The really good ones are marked with an *, the really depressing with an #

*#Ian Macpherson: Wild Harbour – a married couple try to stay alive and unnoticed in Highland Scotland as the world falls to pieces through war

*Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker – life in post-holocaust UK, wonderfully written in its own invented pidgin English

*#John Christopher: Death of Grass / No Blade of Grass – global crop failure, society collapses

John Christopher: The World in Winter – sudden new ice age, society collapses

*John Christopher: A Wrinkle in the Skin – sudden global tectonic disaster, society annihilated overnight

Jack London: The Scarlet Plague – travels of a boy and his grandfather in plague-obliterated America

*Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Liebowitz – post-nuclear-war Catholic Church tries to save civilisation, among their holy relics a shopping list belonging to one St Liebowitz

#Neville Shute: On the Beach – military and civilian survivors of nuclear war wait in Australia for the inevitable deadly fallout that will kill everyone else

*Graham Greene: ‘A Discovery in the Woods’ (short story in ‘A Sense of Reality’) – explorations of a group of children born several generations after nuclear war

*John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids – sudden global blindness plus genetically engineered killer plants, society collapses

*John Wyndham: The Chrysalids – post-nuclear-war puritan village society in Canada, kids with special telepathic powers living in hiding

*George R Stewart: Earth Abides – life of a survivor of plague which kills almost everyone else

Mary Shelley: The Last Man – also the life of a survivor of plague which kills almost everyone else (see also the excellent poem of the same name by Thomas Hood at http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/mws/lastman/hood.htm)

*#William Golding: Lord of the Flies – isolated society of children goes berserk after crashing on isolated island fleeing nuclear war

Jean Hegland: Into the Forest – non-specific societal collapse, two sisters living alone in a house in the forest try to survive

#Aldous Huxley: Ape and Essence – New Zealand documentary crew investigates the nuclear war that ended most of civilisation

*#Cormac McCarthy: The Road – father and son try to survive in aftermath of total nuclear war

*#Wilson Tucker: The Long, Loud Silence – a man living in biowarfare-ruined America tries to get to the “normal”, uncontaminated part of the country

*#Robert O’Brien: Z for Zachariah – excellent YA novel about young girl living alone in isolated valley after a nuclear war, until a stranger arrives…

*#Robert Swindells: Brother in the Land – another fine YA novel, this one from the point of view of a boy who survives the war and tries to survive the aftermath
HRF Keating: A Long Walk to Wimbledon – a man travels through ruined London to find his ex-wife

Richard Jefferies: After London – pastoral-ish novel of life in post-collapse UK (available at www.gutenberg.org/etext/13944)

Luke Rhinehart: Long Voyage Back – people who survived a nuclear war by being in an offshore boat desperately search for safe place to land

*JG Ballard: The Drowned World – early disastrous global warming novel – a few survivors surrender to their reptile brains in tropical, submerged London

JG Ballard: The Drought – massive fresh water shortage, society collapses

Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor – general societal collapse, annoyingly pretentious

#Mordecai Roshwald: Level 7 – increasingly insane existence of the only survivors of a nuclear war, the people living in bunkers in charge of the remaining weapons

*Nadine Gordimer: July’s People – (written pre the collapse of Apartheid) general collapse of South African “society”, white family sheltered by their ex-housekeeper’s black family in the bush

*Stephen Vincent Benet: ‘By the Waters of Babylon’ (short story) – the son of a priest explores the Great Dead Place (ie New York)

Pat Frank: Alas, Babylon – Floridians try to survive nuclear war, story undermined by not taking the effects of fallout, etc, seriously enough

*#Maggie Gee: The Burning Book – seemingly “normal” literary novel interrupted partway through by nuclear war

RC Sherriff: The Hopkins Manuscript – a man’s life story before, during and after the total collapse of society because of the Moon dropping out of orbit (good, but scientifically daft)

Carolyn See: Golden Days – seeming satire of Californian New Age/inspiration industry types interrupted partway through by nuclear war

Dick Morland : Albion! Albion! – so-so adventure story set in post-collapse London, by a pseudonym of Reginald Hill (Dalziel & Pascoe)

Jim Crace: The Pesthouse – disappointing story of two people living in post-collapse America

Not yet read…
Tatyana Tolstaya: Life in post-holocaust Russia, a new translation from NYRB Classics

Oh, and the Mary Shelley's downloadable from http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18247
and there's also a good Victorian-era short story by Grant Allen about London being wiped out by volcanoes (The Thames Valley Catastrophe) at http://www.heliograph.com/ff/library/thames/thames.htm

What about something like Robert Merle's Malevil? I read it a long time back but i seem to remember that it was a good read.

Yes, I've heard of Malevil, and it sounds like my cup of grim tea, but I've never been able to get my hands on an English-language copy.

I should also add...

Harold Rein: 'Few Were Left' - 1950s novel about a man about to commit suicide by throwing himself on the NY subway tracks when nuclear war starts, destroying the city and trapping him undereground as defacto leader of a group of similar survivors.

I kind of breezed through the last 25-30 pages of The Pesthouse. My god was that unconvincing and uninteresting.

because "the road" is supposedly a MAJOR CULTURAL EVENT, not a country song.

music, comic books, video games, hollywood films, etc - i can pick any of these things up and go "enh, it was good for what it was". this paris hilton album, it's a shallow and one-sided view of life without much in the way of nuance. it's good-timeyness, the relentless empowered girl on the prowl vibe, yeah, it's a little oppressive, but maybe i'll just only put it on when the sun is out and the top on my car is down, or maybe just when i'm getting dressed up to go out on friday night. it's good - for what it is.

but you know, i just can't do that with books! books are capital-i IMPORTANT in my world, maybe because i worked in a bookstores + libraries for eight years straight and now i work in education, i just can't, won't look at literature that way. i want ... three dimensions or something in stuff i read. "70% gray" is a pretty good way of describing this novel (the other 30% is what, pitch black??) and i just feel like that's too flat for me, it just bounces off of me.

i like dystopian science fiction a lot! "super flat times" is probably my favorite book of the last 10 years, and i surprised myself by actually liking and getting into "rant" (i HATE HATE HATE palahniuk, or so i thought), because they bring the funny and the eerie and the sexy and the mundane at the same time they bring the soul-crushing horror of it all ...

but this one, i dunno, it's like a MAJOR CULTURAL EVENT / SERIOUS NOVEL just because he takes mad max and lays cartoonishly thick manly-men-only existentialism/nihilism over the top? no thanks.

^^ btw i realize this is probably extremely old-fashioned / naive of me anyway.

i mean, why NOT think of books on the same level as country CDs or TV shows? it's not like being made of paper gives it some special sort of power ...

i actually came here to start a thread maybe about "rant" but now i am regretting that i admitted to liking a palahniuk novel ...

i sorta think video games and movies and CDs are presented by their various manufacturers and distributors as EVENTS far more than most books ever are, any more!

that's absolutely true, but i live in an intellectual ghetto

IOW "major event" in my world = NYT and new yorker say so

also i guess we can add ILX to that list!

I never viewed it as a major cultural event, IMPORTANT novel, etc., but I rarely view anything like that. I don't see where there's anything to be gained in responding to hype that a) may not be a legit gripe and b) isn't a function of the work anyway (unless the novel sets out to be important, and nothing about The Road tells me that it was).

Besides, it's an OPRAH selection. That is not exactly the mark of intellectual/artistic snobbery,

waht

well then off the top of my head i can name about twenty better postapocalyptic genre pieces

Define "better".

I mean, that's a really arrogant statement, and even after you've named these twenty superior pieces, any one of us might disagree.

arrogant? you said it was "the most perfect fable of the 20th century". any one of us might disagree.

OK, i "might" be able to name 20 postapocalyptic novels which "might" be better.

Then name them. Wtf have you been waiting for, an advocate? It might even be interesting. (As long as you define "better", obv.)

Back on track, McCarthy was a lot more cheery/positive on Oprah than I ever thought/imagined he'd be.

Then name them. Wtf have you been waiting for, an advocate? It might even be interesting. (As long as you define "better", obv.)

Not that Moonship should expect any kind of response, if the reaction to my own list is any indication. Ah well.

i really appreciate your list, james. thanks! i was just going over it yesterday. this definitely sounds like something i would love:

"#Ian Macpherson: Wild Harbour – a married couple try to stay alive and unnoticed in Highland Scotland as the world falls to pieces through war"

It's a good one - Canongate (the Scottish publisher) have it in print, if that helps track it down.

i thought this was breathtaking. could hardly finish the last few pages through tears.

i bought this. because the bookshops are all attempting to flog it at half price.

i also got three jim thompsons for a fiver and 'maximum city' for half price. and bob dylan's autobio and what happened to the purchases thread anyway

cute: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0730,idea,77350,9.html

i finally read the road, while on vacation. a cheery little beach read. i liked it, despite or because of the relentless repetitiveness of it (find food, travel, almost starve, get in some kind of confrontation, repeat), which includes the language (i'd like to see a word count on use of "gray," "ash", "black" and "cold"). i liked how he stripped down his verbiage but still managed to work in his wacky vocabulary ("crozzled"!).

but so basically, it's just a story about a parent coming to terms with the fear/knowledge that he will die and leave his child behind. alice munro could tell that story in 25 pages and it would probably be better even though it would all take place in the backyard or on a trip to the grocery store or whatever. this being cormac, though, it has to be freighted with the doom of the world. but he has a lot of fun with the landscapes, and the father-son dialogue is pretty good. sweet, even. it's easily the sweetest mccarthy book i've read, which would have been betrayed if the ending had been more bleak.

i loved this book and i think the stripped down,minimalistic story-telling fable is the best form for mccarthy to write in.
compared to "blindness" by saramago (which is kinda overrated, imo), it is much better.BUT, mccarthy,as always, is better in moving the plot forward,making a great,page turning adventure story (david lynch should direct the movie adaptation in "the straight story" style!), and far less good in digging deep into the depths of the characters,and the moral questions the novel arises.
one can say it fits mccarthy's style and perspective, and it might be true, at least in this form of writing, like "the old man and the sea" did for hemmingway.
but i think, in the "going forward" vs. "digging deep" fight, the first one wins,and when that happens in a book,the same happens with the reader: you go forward with it,but it doesnt reach deep into your soul and mind,like the best books in the world do.

still,i enjoyed it very much.it's a sort of a bible style tale,only with a modern american approach.and much more accesible because of that.

you can say the boy and the child can be read as one character:
in every person theres a struggle between hope,wheich is less realistic, but keeps us alive (the boy) and the realism, which leads to despair sometimes (the fatehr)
SPOILER:
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when the father dies, cause he realise they are at the end of the road, and the hope for a better future is more than questionable, the boy takes his place, and,yeah, like in hollywood, hope wins after all.
but the boy,of course, learned a lot from his father, and now he is a "complete man": he has hope, but he also holds the gun,and he is much less affraid.so the combination between hope and realism is now perfect.

(and as mccarthy said to oprah,love is important)

if the boy or the father would travell alone in the road on their own,cause hope cannt exist alone,nor pure realism,so they feed one another with their believs.

an irish guy came up to me and told me i should read this the other day.

'it's so dark.' he said. 'you can feel the cold.'

i read it in one sitting - absorbing doesnt really do it justice.

I came to the conclusion that the catastrophe was most likely natural, probably a supervolcano. I don't see much evidence that it was nuclear. There's no radiation sickness, little suggestion that there was ever any form of government (just the road itself really) let alone one that brought on this calamity, and the damage isn't localised. There's also just too much ash and darkness. The screaming corpses in the tarmac are harrowing, but made me think more of Pompei than Hiroshima.

I've seen it described (in the UK) as the first great climate change novel. I'm sure it's not about that.

the question is: is it importand?

Not to the characters - it could've been Godzilla for all they can do about it. I think it does matter a bit. The human-human struggles are at such an puny, intimate level that it would be odd if the overlying cataclysm was also a result of human agency. Better to leave it to god or fate or whatever. Certainly I don't like the idea that it's a warning of what might happen if we keep nuclear weapons/don't recycle/insert cause of choice.

I was watching ER last week, and one dude's son comes home from college and gives him a copy of The Road for his birthday. He's all, "No, dad, it's not just good, it's a whole new way of thinking." lolz

yeah, the book is at least a little overrated

It's quite clear from the text that it's the result of a massive nuclear war. As for there being no radiation sickness, it very much seems to me as though there is. Nuclear winter is climate change, I guess, but that's not what it's about. And if you want the "first great climate change novel", look to Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Forty Signs of Rain', etc.

Just finished it. Despite its relative shortness, I found it pretty tedious. Only the second McCarthy I've read, and for whatever reason, I just can't get into him - maybe here it was mostly the sort of overuse of dictionary at hand language that kind of bugs me. And the humorlessness?

By the way, I can't recall a single line from the text that specifies what caused the "disaster," or at least none that specify a nuclear war. I kept thinking of it as the result of a comet crashing into the earth - probably because I'd just read Lucifer's Hammer - which this book is sort of the arty version of, at least in my mind. That the only living things left on earth seems to be humans makes it read more dreamlike than a description of some kind of post-apocylptic situation though. I'd expect more hunting and bug eating in the non-dream version

It doesn't specify that it's a nuclear war by using those words, no, but there were a series of massive explosions, followed by firestorms, followed by toxic ash/fallout, an induced "nuclear" winter, and pretty much every living thing dying off. That's what would happen after a nuclear war.

The father sees multiple flashes of light in the distance when the end happens, which also fits multiple nuclear explosions, rather than a big impact event.

My favorite McCarthy novel, though that isn't saying much. Liked it quite a bit, and have thought about it often since, which seems as good a measure of a book's value as any.

Both The Road and No Country for Old Men create worlds in which moral decision-making has no apparent value, and they follow characters who place a great deal of stock in moral-decision making. Reading them together in quick succession, I saw them as an argument that works like this:

1) Coherent social morality is impossible in the absence of a shared belief in God.
2) God has vanished (or is vanishing) from our world, and may not even exist.
3) Coherent social morality is more valuable than any argument you might make about God or anything else.

Thoughts?

First part of that argument is unproved. It is somewhat plausible because pluralistic societies are rare in history, making it difficult to find examples to disprove the contention. Also, I would like to point out that few societies anywhere have actually achived a social morality that is coherent under any detailed examination. The apparent coherence is provided simply by the faithful observance of incoherent traditions.

Thanks, but I was primarly interested in whether people think the argument/theme I'm describing is present in Cormac McCarthy's recent novels.

Otherwise, sure, I more-or-less agree with you, with the caveat that the coherence I'm talking about is better defined as "sticking together" than "making sense".

read this in pretty much one stretch last night, broken up by thai food (felt awesome to be eating actual food) and the tina fey movie "baby mama."

i liked it a lot. definitely a book about the agony of fatherhood maybe more than anything else.

not really sure what some people are getting at with the "macho" thing? the narrator is a desperate scared man who (while he does kill one dude in self-defense) mostly just... scrounges around and wants to die, and not in a particularly heroic way.

the description of a world completely SCRAPED of anything except the most meager scraps, where nothing new can grow or be produced is pretty amazing. i liked details like how he can't tell if the light is fading--the thing about wanting to use a light meter to test it but there's no batteries.

the idea that you wouldn't have the luxury to care if you were being poisoned by radiation every time you ate something off the ground or walked through a burnt-up highway. "if they got wet they'd probably die."

fun stuff!

I started reading this at midnight last night and didn't stop reading until 2:45am. I think this book would actually make a great video game.

-- Tracer Hand, Wednesday, May 9, 2007 9:25 AM (11 months ago) Bookmark Link

this is true actually! you start with 20% health and get 2 bullets and a tarp. there's like 3 healths in the whole game.

uh, how was baby mama?

bleak and unrelenting.

i heard viggo mortensen plays the fetus?

this is true actually! you start with 20% health and get 2 bullets and a tarp. there's like 3 healths in the whole game.

There was actually an early PSX game called Kileak where you were some sort of robotman going through a labryinth, and your energy was constantly depleting. The lower it got, the slower you could move, turn etc. The whole game was trying to desperately delay your inevitable transformation into slow motion and then death as several enemies ran circles around you while you couldn't even more the aiming reticle fast enough to keep up with one of them.

As a game it was awful, but as a simulation of the descent into being useless and pathetic it was useful.

one thing i really liked about this book was WHEN it was set: not immediately after the apocalypse where it's all chaos and ppl are trying to figuring out what to do, nor like 50-100 years after when ppl have begun to rebuild or at least get used to it. it's like the worst of all possible post-apocalyptic worlds. still alive but there's nothing nothing nothing there. nothing has regrown but everything useful's been scraped away.

it's a bummer!

The Road: It's a Bummer

one thing i really liked about this book was WHEN it was set: not immediately after the apocalypse where it's all chaos and ppl are trying to figuring out what to do, nor like 50-100 years after when ppl have begun to rebuild or at least get used to it. it's like the worst of all possible post-apocalyptic worlds. still alive but there's nothing nothing nothing there. nothing has regrown but everything useful's been scraped away.

That's spot-on!

Sorry, hereabouts I ought to say "s1ocki OTM".

it's like the book version of the video game from dreams of sex and stage diving, right?

is there a thread for the movie yet? I can't find it to post this there: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/movies/27road.html

"The sky was blue, the sun so bright that crew members were smearing on sunscreen. A breeze was carrying away the fog pumping feebly from a smoke machine. Even worse, green grass was sprouting everywhere, and there were buds on the trees. Some of the crew had hand-stripped a little sapling of greenery, but the rest of the job would have to be done electronically by Mr. Forker, who was also in charge of sky replacement."

this = hilarious

Generally speaking, that article makes me feel a little better about a film I thought might be a very very bad idea.

Just finished this; loved it, for many reasons. Must write something cogent at some point.

read it in one sitting, and i can definitely see the attraction, but that ending....?

I also read it in one sitting and enjoyed it. Someone told me Viggo was going to play the father in the film so I had him in my mind mind. I could have done with a more entirely miserable ending.

mind mind?

These days I've got into reading 1-star Amazon user reviews of things, because I figure if the criticisms of something in a 1-star review are salient then they might be more trustworthy than the 5-star ravings of most semi-literate idiots. So I read the seven 1-star reviews of this on Amazon, and all of them either criticised The Road for being dull / depressing, or else Cormac's English for being badly punctuated and with poor / incomplete sentences.

Both of these criticisms seem to miss the point of the book; while the setting and events portrayed are miserable beyond belief (so much so that I sat and cried for a few minutes upon finished the book [which I read in about four brief sittings over three days]), I actually found much of the book, largely the interactions and dialogue between father and son, to be incredibly warm and touching. heartening, even. Yes, barbecued babies are horrific, yes the tone and scene was relentlessly grey and ashen and dark, but I think the humanity of their relationship redeemed it.

I liked the way the lack of quotation marks merged their voices and characters to an extent. It was about them learning off each other. I think the use of punctuation and quotations (or lack of) added massively to the overall feel of the book by adding to the sense of the world they were living in, too; dull, monotonous, yet confusing at times.

I don't think the 'event' that lead to the world being in that state is important; Cormac has apparently said that he wrote the book for his young son, and the book does seem to me to be about a father's relationship with his son rather than about some kind of environmental disaster or nuclear fallout survival.

I don't know how I feel about the ending. I might read it again.

Is the inference of the barbecued baby that that band of survivors were deliberately getting their woman pregnant as a source of food? That's an awful, awful, frightening though, possibly the darkest thing I've ever read.

also not very efficient

think about it, that's liek 9 months for one meal.

I'm not gonna read any of this thread because it seemed to get all spoiler-ey from the get go, but my question is should I read this? I'm a-hungry for book right now I am.

how much meat on a newborn babby too? not worth it; you'd be better off eating the woman.

?

agreed, maybe she could produce another sprog -- but that's *another* nine months, and for a small yield. who has nine months?

I assumed it was someone else's baby, kidnapped to be et.

i read it as bred-specifically-for-eating, and had the same wonders about efficiency. also, i was worried at there being no mention of whether or not it was free range/organic.

^ above few posts pretty much explain problem with "barbecuing babies = horrific"

You wouldn't rely on bred-for-barbecue-baby as your sole source of food, but you would at least know that you had a guaranteed source of food every 7-9 months (I'm not imagining many would go full-term), while you scavenge what's available inbetween.

Fucking hell, how gruesome has this concept made me?

yeah but seriously, you'd have to feed the woman *and* the baby while she was pregnant -- it just doesn't add up.

yeah- eating the woman herself would probably be a much more efficient way of going about it

reading this now finally after letting it sit on my shelf for two years. it is a joy. reading this after having a child is a perfect mindfuck. oddly enough there were times over the past two years when I had to carry my son and he was way too heavy or fussy, or I've had to deal with him on very little sleep, etc, and to get myself through it I've imagined that we were in a post-apocalyptic world and that I would have to persevere despite his complaints or we would die, and it's made it bearable. also, having been a child of the 70's/early 80's, I often had nightmares of nuclear holocaust; my earliest, non-werewolf related nightmare had to do with some massive nuclear explosion.

"The Road" kind of makes me want to become a crazy ass survivalist and build a bomb shelter.

read it in one sitting, and i can definitely see the attraction, but that ending....?

-- darraghmac,

was it too happy for you?

yeah- i guess that it just seemed so unlikely, given the total breakdown in society we've been led through up til that point. i was waiting for someone to kill & eat the kid up until the final paragraph, if i'm honest.

i was waiting for someone to kill & eat the kid up until the final paragraph, if i'm honest.

(I said this upthread and it didn't go anywhere, but I've never been averse to redundancy.)

i dunno about this new cover, it's kinda lame

http://www.bookninja.com/wp-content/themes/bookninja/images/road.jpg

ergh. david cameron lookalike.

jesus that's just inappropriate.

loooool it reminds me of that mcsweeneys thing where they talked abt the movie version - 'in book, wife is dead. Rewrite this. Have her be alive and like blowjobs.'

Maybe wife doesn't like blowjobs—wife really likes blowjobs.

surely that cover is a wind-up?

lol trolled

x-post
uh yeah. do you really think today's parent is going to call the road 'heartwarming'/??

there is a baby on a spit in this book come on

http://www.bookninja.com/?p=4641

trailer - http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810037227/video/13468775/

Wow, that looks pretty bad. Like Red Dawn or something.

Er... I'm liked it! The director usually knows what he's doing. But then I'm a sucker for end-of-the-world movies and books. (But, to attempt to justify myself, I can at least recognise that 'Red Dawn' was balls.)

I liked it. Can't even type.

Looks like they're trying to sell it as more of a post-apocalyptic action flick, which makes sense from a marketing perspective

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2009/05/esquire-wasnt-kidding-trailer-for-road.html

So it was climate change all along? I'm sceptical. The contextless bleakness of the book means that the little slivers of the unknown good times (finding the coca cola) seem almost miraculous - they're hardly going to have the same impact if framed by 24-hour rolling news footage.

They mention in the Esquire article that the news reports were just inserted in the trailer and won't actually be in the movie i think?

Ugh. I hope that this is just a horribly misleading trailer.

how else are they going to sell a completely depressing + nihilistic film to the movie-going public?

I really liked the proposition, so I've got high hopes for this one

it's gotta be better than the mist, right?

I think you can sell the material as dramatic and intense without going all WHAM-BANG-XPLOSION!!! That thing is just a cliche-ridden mess. I hold out hope for the film being good, but damn. I don't think the Weinsteins know what to do with this movie.

if this movie has to be anything, it has to be very, very quiet.

This looks depressing.

That sounds trite, and I didn't mean intend it that way. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I have an 8-year old daughter, so movies about kids in peril, or in circumstances with a certain kind of suffocating sadness, are hard for me to bear. Not begrudging others enjoying the book/movie, obv.

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117940928.html?categoryid=3212&cs=1

Oh dear.

on the other hand, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/sep/03/the-road-adaptation-cormac-mccarthy

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth

Anyone see this yet? I was hesitant after watching the crappy trailer, but turns out that most of the footage wasn't in the actual movie. All in all, I loved the film. I probably would recommend reading the book first if you haven't already done so.

Lacked any of the drive the book had and was fairly unsuccessful at translating the love for the boy that drove the father and made the entire narrative swallowable.

Not out in Aus for months :(

The trailer was changed a lot for the UK, but it still looks awful : (

I've seen the trailer, but I still can't imagine it as a movie unless it was filmed inside a wardrobe or something like that Cure video

Vigo absolutely killed it in this, and the kid wasn't bad either. A decent job all round.

Is there another thread for the movie? Hard to search for.

Oh, this is I Love Books.

vahid never did post his list

You wouldn't rely on bred-for-barbecue-baby as your sole source of food, but you would at least know that you had a guaranteed source of food every 7-9 months (I'm not imagining many would go full-term), while you scavenge what's available inbetween.

Fucking hell, how gruesome has this concept made me?

― Scik Mouthy, Tuesday, July 1, 2008 6:48 AM (2 years ago)

ok lol

Just finished it. Despite its relative shortness, I found it pretty tedious. Only the second McCarthy I've read, and for whatever reason, I just can't get into him - maybe here it was mostly the sort of overuse of dictionary at hand language that kind of bugs me.

I disagree with it being tedious, but can see where the "dictionary" language can be distracting. You're reading pages of cant's and dont's with

Yes?

Yes.

Okay.

and then from out of nowhere comes a word like "balustrade".

I'm glad that in my mid-30s, I now know there's a word for that (we have two of them inside our house), but ffs. It is a distraction. Maybe I should know more words.

Overall, I like the book and yeah, having had a kid tints your mindset as you read it. It is tedious, but that's kind of the point. The end of the world won't be a party.

The baby thing was disturbing though I knew it was coming due to a lack of spoiler alerts in the past four years. The most disturbing part that stuck with me was the cellar with the people locked inside. And the more I thought about them, the more I realized that they were pretty much in the same situation as every other character in the book.

I just got done re-reading True Grit before I got on The Road, and I couldn't help but picture the guy with the rifle as perhaps wearing an eye-patch and serving writs to rats. The man with the rilfe was a bit too Lord of the Fliesy/deus ex machina, but hey, the boy's going to get score with the rifleman's daughter eventually.

And then, THANKSGIVING DINNER.

I disagree with it being tedious... It is tedious.

I'm kind out of practice here.

It was maybe your dad’s fault it was like that, kid.

The implication that that method of survival was the only possible way— I found not very credible. I’m not used to feeling like a hippie, but mccarthy knew humans are social animals, right?