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.

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/159420120X.01._AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ_V59602266_.jpg

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."

http://www.hhv.de/images/cover5/50127.jpg

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.

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?