Cormac McCarthy- The Road

yow! that's bad. =(

He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down around a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

http://www.newmillenniumwritings.com/Issue14/CormacMcCarthy.html

also in general i have no problem w/ an author pushing further and further into their own millieu, except i hope that they would do something interesting, and in my own experience i have found that a lot of feted authors don't. i generally prefer when authors who pick this route actually pull back from your expectations and explore their own sources (like pynchon w/ "mason + dixon" going back to stuff like "tristam shandy" and "legend of sleepy hollow" or burroughs w/ "the place of dead roads" acknowledging his debt to "gangs of new york"), otherwise you just get the author taking a high road deep into his own sensibility and you end up with something as ridiculous, sterile and overbearing as an ayn rand novel.

for -- SPOILERS SUBSEQUENT -- those who've finished the book, can I ask how you interpret the ending? are the swimming fish hearkened to in the final stanza (clearly re. the duo's visit to man's childhood home) supposed to be symbolic of a weird generational consonance? mystical connection? some echo of circularity, of the man in the boy? i don't think i exactly get the significance of the allusion... which is to say: i 'get' what the allusion is to but not the direction in which to interpret it. it's, hah, something of a metaphor shorn of referent, isn't it?

can someone explain just what mccarthy is trying to achieve with his inconsistent punctuation? this is the first novel of his i've read and at first i thought the missing apostrophes in - say - "dont" and "cant" were a way of signifying the child's speech and defining his dialogue.

but that doesn't seem to be the case - the same thing happens with the father's dialogue, and with the narratorial voice. the more i read, the less of a pattern to it i can determine, and it's actually starting to grate.

i understand that this is something he's done in other books ... what's the deal? because, 36 short pages in, it's starting to become a real problem for me.

okay, if you don't like that sort of fiction, why read it in the first place?

A fair question, but then imagine asking, on ILM, "if you don't like that genre of music, why listen to it in the first place?" When you extrapolate like that, you can recognise the impulse (on Vahid's part?) to discern in the genre something he's previously missed? Of course, we can now say he's still missing it and he would say that's because it's not there!

Possible SPOILERS ahead.

Another thought on this novel: the critique or concept is so overused that I'm already wincing that I'm about to use it, but I was truly haunted by this book, and at regular intervals, too -- the nights where they couldn't even light a fire due to the lay of the terrain and the wind, the grey snowflakes, the one barking dog, a weird realisation that cows are probably extinct, the yellow toy truck, the distant percussive "event", the eventual heartbreaking coldness (in every sense) of the sea. And on many other occasions. Some of the detailed imagery is hard to shake. I think I might be obsessed, and not even in a good way.

Also, and this is horrible: love is more painful than death.

http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/2539/12112rg4.jpg

It certainly confirmed my sometime-suspicion that giving people such capacity to hope is one of the nastiest tricks evolution has played on us. The SPOILERS SPOILERS behaviour of the wife is much more reasonable than that of the husband; it's hope that leads him on and on. The same sort of hope that leads to genocide victims digging their own graves before they get shot in the back of the head--hope that something, somehow, impossibly, will turn up and save them before it's all too late.

yeah

but -

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

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someone, somehow, did turn up! pretty CONVENIENT!!

I must admit I'm not usually averse to a bleak hopeless ending, but I actually liked the way The Road ends, pretty much due to my own imagination surrounding the little boy being left alone becoming pretty much unbearable. Perhaps I'm getting softer hearted as I get older. I wonder if those who were okay with this ending (a tiny glimmer of hope in the darkness, really, nothing more) are the same ones who were alright with the ending of Children Of Men (the movie, I haven't read the novel)? Both worked for me, but I can understand somebody not buying it too.

A fair question, but then imagine asking, on ILM, "if you don't like that genre of music, why listen to it in the first place?"

I started The Pesthouse last night. Maybe I should just read post-apocalyptic fiction for the rest of the summer.

Yeah, that's a better question, and fair enough.

Also, have you (has anyone) read Eastward, Ho! by Jim Crace? Yet another post-apocalyptic novel.

Do you mean The Pesthouse?

'The Pesthouse' is a disappointment, I feel, both in comparison to 'The Road', and as a Crace book. An interesting failure, but still disappointing. The world in which it was set never really seemed to come alive, despite some good ideas.

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.

That sounds trite, and I didn't mean intend it that way. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I have an 8-year old daughter, so movies about kids in peril, or in circumstances with a certain kind of suffocating sadness, are hard for me to bear. Not begrudging others enjoying the book/movie, obv.

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117940928.html?categoryid=3212&cs=1

Oh dear.

on the other hand, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/sep/03/the-road-adaptation-cormac-mccarthy

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth

Anyone see this yet? I was hesitant after watching the crappy trailer, but turns out that most of the footage wasn't in the actual movie. All in all, I loved the film. I probably would recommend reading the book first if you haven't already done so.

Lacked any of the drive the book had and was fairly unsuccessful at translating the love for the boy that drove the father and made the entire narrative swallowable.

Not out in Aus for months :(

The trailer was changed a lot for the UK, but it still looks awful : (

I've seen the trailer, but I still can't imagine it as a movie unless it was filmed inside a wardrobe or something like that Cure video

Vigo absolutely killed it in this, and the kid wasn't bad either. A decent job all round.

Is there another thread for the movie? Hard to search for.

Oh, this is I Love Books.

vahid never did post his list

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?

― Scik Mouthy, Tuesday, July 1, 2008 6:48 AM (2 years ago)

ok lol

Just finished it. Despite its relative shortness, I found it pretty tedious. Only the second McCarthy I've read, and for whatever reason, I just can't get into him - maybe here it was mostly the sort of overuse of dictionary at hand language that kind of bugs me.

I disagree with it being tedious, but can see where the "dictionary" language can be distracting. You're reading pages of cant's and dont's with

Yes?

Yes.

Okay.

and then from out of nowhere comes a word like "balustrade".

I'm glad that in my mid-30s, I now know there's a word for that (we have two of them inside our house), but ffs. It is a distraction. Maybe I should know more words.

Overall, I like the book and yeah, having had a kid tints your mindset as you read it. It is tedious, but that's kind of the point. The end of the world won't be a party.

The baby thing was disturbing though I knew it was coming due to a lack of spoiler alerts in the past four years. The most disturbing part that stuck with me was the cellar with the people locked inside. And the more I thought about them, the more I realized that they were pretty much in the same situation as every other character in the book.

I just got done re-reading True Grit before I got on The Road, and I couldn't help but picture the guy with the rifle as perhaps wearing an eye-patch and serving writs to rats. The man with the rilfe was a bit too Lord of the Fliesy/deus ex machina, but hey, the boy's going to get score with the rifleman's daughter eventually.

And then, THANKSGIVING DINNER.

I disagree with it being tedious... It is tedious.

I'm kind out of practice here.

It was maybe your dad’s fault it was like that, kid.

The implication that that method of survival was the only possible way— I found not very credible. I’m not used to feeling like a hippie, but mccarthy knew humans are social animals, right?