2009-06-07
: The Road The Road by Cormac McCarthy is an amazing novel. My new favorite in the world, I think, but I should give it the customary waiting period.
It says exactly something that I've felt, in both positions. Of course, in my life, in both positions, it hasn't been cannibals and a nuclear or volcanic winter, it's just been ... y'know, regular crap. Like The Incredibles - I don't have super strength, I'm not a tower of a guy, but I'm nevertheless too big for my cubicle.
It was occasionally canned pears though, when I was a kid.
The Road wasn't my favorite CMC novel. It did, however, make the other novels finally and fully click into place for me, which is quite an amazing feat.
As a work of myth making, I think its gotta be one of the best.
It's certainly a harrowing read. I guess the ending bothers me a bit as a cop-out. If you're going to bring faith into it at the end, suddenly there are many theological questions which deserve more than a page-and-a-half to answer.
I confess that for the first 50-60 pages I was mad at them for not doing the sensible thing, which in my mind would have been to go to a large land-grant university, where there would be lots of books to explain things, and scientific/engineering equipment, seed stocks, and many places to hide. I like to think that the communes, briefly mentioned in the novel, were thinking along the same lines.