Anonymole reviewed The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
A must read.
266 pages
Polish language
Published Nov. 11, 2008 by Wydawn. Literackie.
Droga
4 stars
(320 reviews)
Cormac McCarthy's tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods.
Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head towards the southern coast along carefully chosen back roads. Mummified corpses are their only benign companions, sitting in doorways and automobiles, variously impaled or displayed on pikes and tables and in cake bells, or they rise in frozen poses of horror and agony out of congealed asphalt. The boy and his father …
Cormac McCarthy's tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods.
Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head towards the southern coast along carefully chosen back roads. Mummified corpses are their only benign companions, sitting in doorways and automobiles, variously impaled or displayed on pikes and tables and in cake bells, or they rise in frozen poses of horror and agony out of congealed asphalt. The boy and his father hope to avoid the marauders, reach a milder climate, and perhaps locate some remnants of civilization still worthy of that name. They possess only what they can scavenge to eat, and the rags they wear and the heat of their own bodies are all the shelter they have. A pistol with only a few bullets is their only defense besides flight. Before them the father pushes a shopping cart filled with blankets, cans of food and a few other assets, like jars of lamp oil or gasoline siphoned from the tanks of abandoned vehicles—the cart is equipped with a bicycle mirror so that they will not be surprised from behind.
Through encounters with other survivors brutal, desperate or pathetic, the father and son are both hardened and sustained by their will, their hard-won survivalist savvy, and most of all by their love for each other. They struggle over mountains, navigate perilous roads and forests reduced to ash and cinders, endure killing cold and freezing rainfall. Passing through charred ghost towns and ransacking abandoned markets for meager provisions, the pair battle to remain hopeful. They seek the most rudimentary sort of salvation. However, in The Road, such redemption as might be permitted by their circumstances depends on the boy’s ability to sustain his own instincts for compassion and empathy in opposition to his father’s insistence upon their mutual self-interest and survival at all physical and moral costs.
The Road was the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. ([source][1])
DaveCline reviewed The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
A must read.
Sharyl reviewed The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
"No one wants to be here, and no one wants to leave."
Cormac McCarthy has a fascinating style. There's not much action in this hard and cruel journey, but I was very taken up with it. McCarthy illustrates a will to survive that doesn't seem reasonable or logical, but that does seem very real.
And the ending was a surprise to me
Jonathan Arnold reviewed The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
What a fascinatingly dark book. Probably more of a 3.5 star book, but the writing was heart-wrenchingly gloomy and sparse, and so I'll move it up a notch.
The Road tells the story of "the man" and "the boy" - never named in the book. And they are on a quest to the sea in the east, and then south, in the hopes of finding the "good people", many (7? 8?) years after some undescribed apocalypse left the landscape in ashes, and small bands of survivors, usually cannibals, searching for food. The man and boy dodge trouble and continue on The Road.
And really, that's the entire story. What exactly happened isn't every clear, maybe even The Man doesn't know it. They have a few adventures and the book ends. I guess that was one strike against it - I just didn't feel like there was a point to the …
What a fascinatingly dark book. Probably more of a 3.5 star book, but the writing was heart-wrenchingly gloomy and sparse, and so I'll move it up a notch.
The Road tells the story of "the man" and "the boy" - never named in the book. And they are on a quest to the sea in the east, and then south, in the hopes of finding the "good people", many (7? 8?) years after some undescribed apocalypse left the landscape in ashes, and small bands of survivors, usually cannibals, searching for food. The man and boy dodge trouble and continue on The Road.
And really, that's the entire story. What exactly happened isn't every clear, maybe even The Man doesn't know it. They have a few adventures and the book ends. I guess that was one strike against it - I just didn't feel like there was a point to the book or the characters, so I felt like the author could play at whatever he wanted to do. So I was on tenterhooks waiting for disaster to fall. But much like [[book:The Cider House Rules|4687], where I was just waiting for the bizarre, awful, Irving tragedy to crash down, it never did and I guess that's a good thing. I also had some trouble suspending disbelief, wondering just how some of it would really work in such a desolate landscape.
The ending was a little too trite, after all that gloom. But it was a good read, and the narrator, Tom Stechschulte, did a real good job of it. Sometimes, I wouldn't get out of the car as I awaited the next paragraph! Read it, but prepare to be depressed.
LindseyB reviewed The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I loved Blood Meridian so I decided to read another one of McCarthy's books and I wasn't disappointed. Part of me loves the post-apocalyptic story type, but it really has a much different feel from books like The Postman and McCarthy's style really works well for the material that it deals with.
fluxmind reviewed The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Wow, that was an amazing book. I love the atmospherics through out the whole book, and the interpersonal connections between the "man" and the son are brilliant.
🍄🌈🎮💻🚲🥓🎃💀🏴🛻🇺🇸 reviewed The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I saw the movie, I knew what I was getting myself into, it's bleak, but somehow it gives me hope. Maybe it's just the reminder that despite everything else, the plants are still growing. We aren't eating each other yet, and that's a cold comfort. But I think that the book--moreso than the movie--gives you the impression that the boy would not go on without his father, so when he does, almost without hesitation, it's surprisingly uplifting.
Curtis reviewed The Road (Oprah's Book Club) by Cormac McCarthy (Oprah's Book Club (57))
Review of "The Road (Oprah's Book Club)" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This is the first book I've read by Cormac McCarthy, and I really enjoyed it. I read it in less than a day. His staccato style and use of subject-deficient sentences defines the pace of the story and fits the theme of traveling both wearily and warily down an endless, all-but-hopeless road.
McCarthy excels at describing the immediate: the dust on the road before them, the squeaking of the wheel on the shopping cart, the father's automatic attempt to avoid answering the questions asked by the son and the subsequent yielding to the inane, godless, yet ultimately serene truth. There is little to remember and even less to dream about, and neither father nor son do much more than move forward.
The Road is, of course, subject to the commonality of the metaphor. It is easy to analogize the road--the gray, ash-besotted, vagrant- and thief-infested road--to the path that one …
This is the first book I've read by Cormac McCarthy, and I really enjoyed it. I read it in less than a day. His staccato style and use of subject-deficient sentences defines the pace of the story and fits the theme of traveling both wearily and warily down an endless, all-but-hopeless road.
McCarthy excels at describing the immediate: the dust on the road before them, the squeaking of the wheel on the shopping cart, the father's automatic attempt to avoid answering the questions asked by the son and the subsequent yielding to the inane, godless, yet ultimately serene truth. There is little to remember and even less to dream about, and neither father nor son do much more than move forward.
The Road is, of course, subject to the commonality of the metaphor. It is easy to analogize the road--the gray, ash-besotted, vagrant- and thief-infested road--to the path that one chooses through life. The likeness is perhaps starker and more defined for the utter lack of reference to such an analogy. But McCarthy overcomes the obvious with a simple lack of presumption.
Bean reviewed The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
It took a long time to decide what to rate this book, but I've finally decided that it works. The power in this book is not the story itself, but what it makes you think.
The Road follows a father and son in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The follow the road, scavenging for what little they can to survive. The writing style swings wildly between vivid, haunting descriptions of the wasted landscape, and banal, dry conversations between the father and son. Despite the colorful language used to describe the landscape, it still gets repetitive quickly as it's all the same - a barren, deserted wasteland.
Rather than a detractor, this depressing monotony reinforces what the lives of the father and son have become. Every day is the same, every day a struggle to survive. There is nothing to look forward to, only varying levels of suckiness.
I tend to be very …
It took a long time to decide what to rate this book, but I've finally decided that it works. The power in this book is not the story itself, but what it makes you think.
The Road follows a father and son in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The follow the road, scavenging for what little they can to survive. The writing style swings wildly between vivid, haunting descriptions of the wasted landscape, and banal, dry conversations between the father and son. Despite the colorful language used to describe the landscape, it still gets repetitive quickly as it's all the same - a barren, deserted wasteland.
Rather than a detractor, this depressing monotony reinforces what the lives of the father and son have become. Every day is the same, every day a struggle to survive. There is nothing to look forward to, only varying levels of suckiness.
I tend to be very empathic with characters, wondering what I would do in their situation. The road fed that in spades, presenting many situations of very gray morality. A very depressing book, but still good.
Jack Baty reviewed The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
Walk, push a cart, "I'm hungry.", look for food, "be careful," hide, walk more.
Bleak is okay with me. Boring is not. Points for style, though.
Mark Anderson reviewed The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
McCarthy, like every great and lesser author, has been writing essentially the same story over and over again. Except that he almost always finds a way to re-write it in a fresh, dark, and deep manner. His story is the tale of the wandering in the desert of the spirit, so to speak. He pares everything away that is false and illusory in the world to its primal and violent begetting. He writes of the ascetic journey of this stripping away of the surface world, and in most of his books one of his characters ends up on a physical equivalent of this journey, up in the mountains or Mexican desert, wandering with nothing but the direction of their instinct and a sense of immutable loss.
Here, in The Road, McCarthy has taken this essential thread of all of his stories and laid it out bare-boned and shining with his …
McCarthy, like every great and lesser author, has been writing essentially the same story over and over again. Except that he almost always finds a way to re-write it in a fresh, dark, and deep manner. His story is the tale of the wandering in the desert of the spirit, so to speak. He pares everything away that is false and illusory in the world to its primal and violent begetting. He writes of the ascetic journey of this stripping away of the surface world, and in most of his books one of his characters ends up on a physical equivalent of this journey, up in the mountains or Mexican desert, wandering with nothing but the direction of their instinct and a sense of immutable loss.
Here, in The Road, McCarthy has taken this essential thread of all of his stories and laid it out bare-boned and shining with his hardened poetry. He couldn't have done it any better. It would appear, at a surface level, that he writes out of the depths of despair and pessimism. But look deeper, and you uncover the vast depth of human warmth and spiritual yearning that underlies this simple story of a brutal, bereft and shattered world in which a father and son struggle, seemingly meaninglessly, to survive against all odds. This is a story not about a post-apocalyptic world, but about love and the bonds of humanity that take us beyond bestiality.
McCarthy, I feel, is the kind of author best read with a glass of whiskey and the growl of William Eliott Whitmore playing in the background. Timeless, tough, with a heart of beautiful granite. This is the work of a master.
Thomas Gaffney reviewed The Road (Oprah's Book Club) by Cormac McCarthy (Oprah's Book Club (57))
Review of "The Road (Oprah's Book Club)" on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Good, but maybe not worth all the hype that it's been getting. Not (at least for me) the powerful, life-changing story that I expected from a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Sean "Sharky" McMains reviewed The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'
Bleak, but not unremittingly so.
Subjects
- Regression (Civilization)
- Voyages and travels
- Survival
- Fathers and sons
- Fiction