#6: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

12 comments:

1. What a beautiful review! This book has received accolades everywhere, but this is up there with the most poetic I’ve read.

2. I had a rant about McCarthy’s violent sentimentality half-prepared, except you people put Sebald in your top ten, so you’re off the hook.

3. This review makes me want to go purchase the book at this very moment and do nothing else but read this book till I’ve absorbed it completely.

4. Do it Derrick, you’ll have it read in a few hours and won’t regret it.

   Bradluen, I’d like to hear your rant about McCarthy’s violent sentimentality, out of interest.

5. Bradluen, I’m not sure what you mean by “violent sentimentality,” but you’ve given me the courage to say, very quietly, that i find the rapture over The Road sort of puzzling. I enjoyed the book, but I enjoyed it because it was willy-inducing and…gruesome, I guess. And it was sort of default-enjoyable because it was post-apocalyptic. Derivative is a strong word, but it seems to me that people act like no one ever wrote a story along these lines.

   My two cents.

6. I was very disappointed by this book.
   Maybe its interest wanes if someone has read a lot of science fiction.
   The book is quite touching but I found it also not very imaginative and very repetitive and Providence’s recurrent role in the story is at best really upsetting. (I’m starving…oh some apples. I’m cold.. oh a blanket. A flaregun… oh some bad guys). The plot completely bored me.
   The writing is perfect though.

   I much much much preferred ‘All the pretty horses’.

7. Please, please, please. What father wouldn’t let his son drink all the coke (even the LAST one) any where, any time, any place? What on earth is so special about that?
   The “colorless horizon” burns with…colorless horizon. This book is a travesty of the story telling art. It shows what a Big Name author can get away with.

8. Wow, why isn’t 1984 on this list, Big Brother? Censorship is quite passe on the internet, or so I thought, but when you critcisize the critic they get their feelings hurt. Here, again, is the worst line of criticism I’ve ever read:

   “In The Road, it’s the can of Coke, pulled from the guts of the vending machine. No, it’s that the soda has somehow stayed carbonated after the cataclysm. No, it’s that the father lets his son drink the whole thing. Surely this is one of the most humane and deeply inhabited moments not just in fiction from this millennium, but in all of literature.”

   The “guts of a vending machine?” A father letting “his son drink the whole” coke is “surely one of the most humane and deeply inhabited moments…in all of literature?” This is insane and asnine.

9. Complete horror with the darkest world I have ever seen. The father/son relationship a most profound story to such a backdrop. Excellent read.

10. this book bored me all the way till the end. i can’t see why it got all the good reviews. it is writing well but so are hundreds of other books that don’t get anyware near these lists.
    this book only got ware it got because it made the opra book club.i don’t think we would have even noticed it if it didn’t

11. I only made it about a third of the way through this book. I found the son to be a flimsily written foil for an author who wanted someone to speak words of innocence for the father to brood over. In a novel that is entirely about two people in a dying world, I really need both characters to be real. This novel failed that. There must be something about the father’s brooding that struck a chord with people, but it didn’t work for me.

12. “In No Country for Old Men, the glass of milk, still sweating on the coffee table.”
    This isn’t in the book, only in the movie.