La Carretera

Published Nov. 11, 2008 by Random House Mondadori.

ISBN:
9788439720775

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (112 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 …

35 editions

En mi carretera

4 stars

Así como a los vinos les afecta el terroir, el clima, la contaminación ambiental, el maridaje escogido, las condiciones meteorológicas y lugar donde se prueba y hasta la compañía de quien lo cata etc., los libros se ven afectados por el lugar, el tiempo y el estado de ánimo de quien los lee. Es por ello que siempre aclaro que las estrellas con las que los califico hablan de mi disfrute, no de aspectos técnicos o la maestría con que estén abiertos. Tal es el caso de La carretera, de Cormac McCarthy.

Duda: ¿En qué difiere el nunca será de lo que nunca fue?

Este libro estaba en mi mesa de noche cuando mi papá murió. Lo comencé unos días antes. Se mantuvo sin leer casi una semana y media. Y para colmo, el tema parecía embonar perfectamente con lo que acontecía en mi vida en esos momentos. Estas …

Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Vooruit, vier sterren, omdat ik een zwak heb voor post-apocalyptische sci-fi. Heerlijk bleek verhaal, al suggereert het meer diepte dan het volgens mij bevat. Een soort Mad Max Fury Road, maar zonder autos, en in de kou in plaats van in de woestijn.

La Carretera: una obra fundamental.

5 stars

He descubierto a Cormac McCarthy. Acabo de leer su obra cumbre, La Carretera, y vaya si me ha calado. Por su estilo, directo, poético, duro y bello, que me gusta mucho y que me resulta afín y ameno. Pero también por su temática, que me parece fundamental. ¿De qué trata? Para mí trata del sentido de la vida para nuestra generación, época de Cultura del Shock y cúlmen de la Sociedad del Espectáculo. Cualquiera que tenga mis casi cincuenta, más si está criando a un hijo, se habrá sentido de una forma íntima, difícil de explicar, una o muchas veces, en esa carretera que recorren los protagonistas del libro, en la que uno busca un futuro para él y para los suyos, un rayo de sol en un mundo en apariencia gris, decadente e inseguro, que amenaza en convertirse en ceniza de una manera más o menos literal, según el …

A deeply human love story

4 stars

This book is powerful. Not a lot happens but I couldn't set it down.I don't understand the man's intentions on the surface. But, on some level I want to understand their actions. I was drawn to the characters and their relationship to each other. The love the man has is healthy in a dying world. The two face the world in stoic resistance. I will need to unpack this book over the next few days. This is a love story on a human level. I recommend reading it.

Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

The day-to-day of a father and son in a post-apocalyptic USA. This is falls under my category of books read once for a class and long since forgotten about. The straightforward dialogue between father and son are the best parts.

Are we still the good guys? he said.
Yes. We’re still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
Okay.

Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I love post-apocalyptic stories, and this one is very well done. I'd compare it to the likes of "A Canticle for Lebowitz", which is of a high caliber.

I didn't want to put it down, which says something.

The only thing I didn't like was the ending. How do you end a story like this? I wasn't sure how McCarthy would do it, but I took faith that it would be excellent. I was a little disappointed, but it's no reason not to read the book. The ending doesn't hold the book together - each section does that on its own.

Review of 'The Road' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Re-Read
This is a story stripped to the bare essense of all humanity. There is nothing left of the physical realm. No life. Not even shelter or small comfort. No distractions of time or place, only survival. Only ugliness, hopelessness, death. Relecs from a seemingly make believe world, useless. Even dreams are void. Humankind reduced to scavenger at best. At BEST. For the most part now, at worst, more depraved and without remorse than the lowest form of animal. Monstrous even. Both hunter and hunted. The smallest glimpse of beauty, now exceedingly rare, the love of parent and child. That's it. It is a desperate love, all consuming, relentless. It also is the saddest love as one will have to leave the other, the hardest thing especially in this terrible landscape. Some humans still, despite the desperation, carry the fire, the goodness, the will to strive forward against all odds. …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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