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The Road
Cormac McCarthy, from The Road:
He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. (p. 220)
I am under the spell of McCarthy’s pen; mesmerized: what is that word, salitter? Whatever it is, the dread of horror from these words and this book stops me in my tracks.
Published in General
Yet, a great book from cover to cover…or, in my case, the audio version of that. The movie was quite good also.
On the other hand, I am still haunted by things I heard in The Counselor. Truly disturbing stuff.
I think I’ve read almost everything by McCarthy. A few scenes are hard to forget – horrifying and moving at the same time. Hard to imagine how he forms those ideas. The Road actually had an ending, unlike many of his books which sort of run out. If you’ve seen No Country for Old Men, that’s sort of how most of his books end.
That is an astonishing book. I can’t think of another book I read as slowly, savoring every sentence. I would stop and go back and read paragraphs out loud, slowly, almost not wanting to go on because at some point it would be over.
Hard to believe they could make a movie version of the story that would capture some of this experience. But they did. The movie is brilliant. Aragorn is terrific in it.
Time for me to read some Cormac McCarthy.
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A sound without cognate
What a perfect way to express this.
I just had to look it up:
I, too, commend this book.
Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” is the small triumph of Christian decency over the eternal evil that is both man and war. The child is good and the child stays good amid all the evil of the world. The world is still bad but by retaining his decency he Triumphs. In “Blood Meridian” and “No Country for Old Men” the evil in the world makes gains and corrupts the world. But “The Road” offers a small redemption for the sins of man.
Wow, you guys are better readers than I.
My son gave me “The Road” a few years ago and I read it in a weekend. I still think of it every gray, overcast day. The the scene with his wife, the scene at the end, the scene with the ship on the shore, the scene with the new born baby, still come back and horrify me briefly whenever I think of them.
Yes that’s great writing, but I won’t touch another of his books. Life has enough horror already.
Yep. Great flick, and a rough ride to watch.
All of Cormac McCarthy’s books are gritty and dark. That isn’t to say I don’t like them. The only one I couldn’t get into thoroughly was Suttee. The thing that was said of Charles Baudelaire might also be said of McCarthy. “Dante only visited Hell, Baudelaire came from there.”
I agree that life has enough horror. But that’s why I like Cormac McCarthy. There is is so much bigotry and stupidity and wretchedness in the soul of man and in my own soul that I need it expressed.
Terrific book. It stays with you long after you are finished reading it. You may be finished with it but it isn’t finished with you.