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McCarthy details the bleak world that a nuclear holocaust would leave behind. The Road pulled me in from the first few pages. His writing defies convention and it works. L.W.
At the end of this well-written novel, McCarthy mercifully leaves the reader with a glimmer of hope. I truly enjoyed the read. McCarthy uses no spare words yet conveys sensory images that leave one shivering.He is an American original, deserving of the Pulitzer. I could taste the peaches, the ham, and the biscuits.
It's main theme deals with the primal instinct of the father to save his own flesh and blood i.e. People live by scavenging, taking from others, or cannibalism.I could feel the cold, the snow, and the rain. I ordered the book after McCarthy was biographed in A Great Authors documentary. No sun, no animals, no crops, and no more food production.
It deals with the central question of whether morals and ethics are more important than survival in a very thought-provoking manner. The novel fills one's mind with vivid imagery while at the same time the plot moves forward and keeps one turning the pages. his son.
It deserves its prize. A few weeks ago a jar of peaches leaked in my kitchen cupboard. McCarthy's book makes me see it again in my mind, and wonder how the rest of my stocks will fare when the world ends. The tin itself looked rusty, slightly blown.
The Road won a Pulitzer Prize, so I knew it had to have something special about it. It foreshadows everyman's last hope. The Road is a truly beautiful, masterful book, scarily real, emotionally draining, absorbing and haunting and sad. Also it's being made into a film, which is probably not the best advert.
Father and son might have found it there and discarded it rightly as unsafe. And I'm glad to have finally joined the ranks of those who have read and enjoyed it. It has an intriguing cover though, with man and boy in a gray world in the rain, so, living in rainy Oregon as I do, I decided to give it a try and was immediately hooked: From the first bleak vista, a nameless man reaching out to check the breathing of a nameless child; through miniature scenes, each carefully crafted, no excess words to describe a dying world; through steps and details and how will you open a jar when the lid's stuck and there's no tools left in the strangers' house to grip it.; through conversations with no punctuation because the words themselves punctuate the silence; through sickness and knowing what's coming and not wanting to know--and through knowing what's gone but not wanting that either; through to the point where I know the book's going to end but I hope maybe it won't; to final, lonely, impossible satisfaction. Brown sticky fluid dripped down the inside of the door into a puddle on the floor.
Part of me longed for them to find hope and survival, part of me desired for them to be released from their pain and suffering. Only the bleak overall tone keeps me from rating five stars.I'll leave out my summary, since there are plenty of those out there. I could not put this book down, could not stop turning the pages, even though very little happens in the way of plot or action. Let me first say that Cormac McCarthy is well-deserving of his reputation as "literary genius".
Before reading "The Road", I anticipated hating it. Either way, I was compelled to follow them down the road. I found myself so invested in the characters and their survival that I simply had to keep reading. I had heard the reviews: Bleak, depressing, literary (the type of book I usually have to force myself to finish and regret it in the end).
I was aware of the beauty of some of the passages and prose, but couldn't slow down long enough to really absorb and take it the depth (perhaps I will go back and reread it). A must-read. However, after the first few pages, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself completely and totally immersed in this book. Suffice it to say, "The Road" is a post-apocalyptic tale of a father and son's journey in search of survival and hope--and so much more.
I'd recommend it to any one who has the heart and stomach for a sometimes very dark book. in this genre (post apocalipse). The end is just beautiful.
The point to the story is not to examine in detail how an apocalyptic event may come to be. The reader is hopelessly pulled into the surreal and threatening world the characters inhabit. The only shred of humanity the main characters have to cling to is their love for each other. Mr. It is to explore how we as a human race, in an apocalyptic aftermath, may well lose almost all that defines us. The author takes a popular topic, a humanity-shattering apocalypse and pares it down to its most terrifying conclusions. McCarthy's novel most certainly deserves the Pulitzer it was awarded. The prose is direct and sparse, adroitly mixing stream of consciousness and character dialogue.
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