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About "The Road"

Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2010 5:25 pm
by wilde
Amazon page for "The Road"

In 2006, "The Road" won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Also in 2006, "The Road" was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
In 2007, "The Road" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

"The Road" was even one of Oprah's Book Club novels in 2007! And Oprah is almighty, right? :shock:



Plot Summary/Review by Dennis Lehane (from amazon)
Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane

Re: About "The Road"

Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2010 5:26 pm
by wilde
Also, because "The Road" has no chapters, the threads are divided up by page. If you find your book differs from those pages, each section ends on a break (the ......'s) in the book. :)

Re: About "The Road"

Posted: Wed Oct 27, 2010 12:58 am
by etudiant
I saw the movie version a little while ago. Bleak hardly describes it. The faint-hearted must have been clamoring for their Prozac.

It made some powerful statements though about how horridly inhuman some can be, and how sublime it can be to retain that humanity against the odds.

Re: About "The Road"

Posted: Sun May 01, 2011 11:45 am
by Harry Marks
I thought one of his main points was the idea that wanting to pass on our values in some sense makes them real for us. If the man had no son, he probably would have given up, as it is implied the wife did, long ago. Biological continuation may have less ability to bring us to life than continuation of values.