Cormac McCarthy- The Road

Sorry, hereabouts I ought to say "s1ocki OTM".

it's like the book version of the video game from dreams of sex and stage diving, right?

is there a thread for the movie yet? I can't find it to post this there: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/movies/27road.html

"The sky was blue, the sun so bright that crew members were smearing on sunscreen. A breeze was carrying away the fog pumping feebly from a smoke machine. Even worse, green grass was sprouting everywhere, and there were buds on the trees. Some of the crew had hand-stripped a little sapling of greenery, but the rest of the job would have to be done electronically by Mr. Forker, who was also in charge of sky replacement."

this = hilarious

Generally speaking, that article makes me feel a little better about a film I thought might be a very very bad idea.

Just finished this; loved it, for many reasons. Must write something cogent at some point.

read it in one sitting, and i can definitely see the attraction, but that ending....?

I also read it in one sitting and enjoyed it. Someone told me Viggo was going to play the father in the film so I had him in my mind mind. I could have done with a more entirely miserable ending.

mind mind?

These days I've got into reading 1-star Amazon user reviews of things, because I figure if the criticisms of something in a 1-star review are salient then they might be more trustworthy than the 5-star ravings of most semi-literate idiots. So I read the seven 1-star reviews of this on Amazon, and all of them either criticised The Road for being dull / depressing, or else Cormac's English for being badly punctuated and with poor / incomplete sentences.

Both of these criticisms seem to miss the point of the book; while the setting and events portrayed are miserable beyond belief (so much so that I sat and cried for a few minutes upon finished the book [which I read in about four brief sittings over three days]), I actually found much of the book, largely the interactions and dialogue between father and son, to be incredibly warm and touching. heartening, even. Yes, barbecued babies are horrific, yes the tone and scene was relentlessly grey and ashen and dark, but I think the humanity of their relationship redeemed it.

I liked the way the lack of quotation marks merged their voices and characters to an extent. It was about them learning off each other. I think the use of punctuation and quotations (or lack of) added massively to the overall feel of the book by adding to the sense of the world they were living in, too; dull, monotonous, yet confusing at times.

I don't think the 'event' that lead to the world being in that state is important; Cormac has apparently said that he wrote the book for his young son, and the book does seem to me to be about a father's relationship with his son rather than about some kind of environmental disaster or nuclear fallout survival.

I don't know how I feel about the ending. I might read it again.

Is the inference of the barbecued baby that that band of survivors were deliberately getting their woman pregnant as a source of food? That's an awful, awful, frightening though, possibly the darkest thing I've ever read.

also not very efficient

think about it, that's liek 9 months for one meal.

I'm not gonna read any of this thread because it seemed to get all spoiler-ey from the get go, but my question is should I read this? I'm a-hungry for book right now I am.

how much meat on a newborn babby too? not worth it; you'd be better off eating the woman.

?

agreed, maybe she could produce another sprog -- but that's *another* nine months, and for a small yield. who has nine months?

I assumed it was someone else's baby, kidnapped to be et.

i read it as bred-specifically-for-eating, and had the same wonders about efficiency. also, i was worried at there being no mention of whether or not it was free range/organic.

^ above few posts pretty much explain problem with "barbecuing babies = horrific"

You wouldn't rely on bred-for-barbecue-baby as your sole source of food, but you would at least know that you had a guaranteed source of food every 7-9 months (I'm not imagining many would go full-term), while you scavenge what's available inbetween.

Fucking hell, how gruesome has this concept made me?

yeah but seriously, you'd have to feed the woman *and* the baby while she was pregnant -- it just doesn't add up.

yeah- eating the woman herself would probably be a much more efficient way of going about it

reading this now finally after letting it sit on my shelf for two years. it is a joy. reading this after having a child is a perfect mindfuck. oddly enough there were times over the past two years when I had to carry my son and he was way too heavy or fussy, or I've had to deal with him on very little sleep, etc, and to get myself through it I've imagined that we were in a post-apocalyptic world and that I would have to persevere despite his complaints or we would die, and it's made it bearable. also, having been a child of the 70's/early 80's, I often had nightmares of nuclear holocaust; my earliest, non-werewolf related nightmare had to do with some massive nuclear explosion.

"The Road" kind of makes me want to become a crazy ass survivalist and build a bomb shelter.

read it in one sitting, and i can definitely see the attraction, but that ending....?

-- darraghmac,

was it too happy for you?

yeah- i guess that it just seemed so unlikely, given the total breakdown in society we've been led through up til that point. i was waiting for someone to kill & eat the kid up until the final paragraph, if i'm honest.

i was waiting for someone to kill & eat the kid up until the final paragraph, if i'm honest.

(I said this upthread and it didn't go anywhere, but I've never been averse to redundancy.)

i dunno about this new cover, it's kinda lame

http://www.bookninja.com/wp-content/themes/bookninja/images/road.jpg

ergh. david cameron lookalike.

jesus that's just inappropriate.

loooool it reminds me of that mcsweeneys thing where they talked abt the movie version - 'in book, wife is dead. Rewrite this. Have her be alive and like blowjobs.'

Maybe wife doesn't like blowjobs—wife really likes blowjobs.

surely that cover is a wind-up?

lol trolled

x-post
uh yeah. do you really think today's parent is going to call the road 'heartwarming'/??

there is a baby on a spit in this book come on

http://www.bookninja.com/?p=4641

trailer - http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810037227/video/13468775/

Wow, that looks pretty bad. Like Red Dawn or something.

Er... I'm liked it! The director usually knows what he's doing. But then I'm a sucker for end-of-the-world movies and books. (But, to attempt to justify myself, I can at least recognise that 'Red Dawn' was balls.)

I liked it. Can't even type.

Looks like they're trying to sell it as more of a post-apocalyptic action flick, which makes sense from a marketing perspective

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2009/05/esquire-wasnt-kidding-trailer-for-road.html

So it was climate change all along? I'm sceptical. The contextless bleakness of the book means that the little slivers of the unknown good times (finding the coca cola) seem almost miraculous - they're hardly going to have the same impact if framed by 24-hour rolling news footage.

They mention in the Esquire article that the news reports were just inserted in the trailer and won't actually be in the movie i think?

Ugh. I hope that this is just a horribly misleading trailer.

how else are they going to sell a completely depressing + nihilistic film to the movie-going public?

I really liked the proposition, so I've got high hopes for this one

it's gotta be better than the mist, right?

I think you can sell the material as dramatic and intense without going all WHAM-BANG-XPLOSION!!! That thing is just a cliche-ridden mess. I hold out hope for the film being good, but damn. I don't think the Weinsteins know what to do with this movie.

if this movie has to be anything, it has to be very, very quiet.

This looks depressing.