Wow, I can't believe a month has gone by--been very busy. Somehow I'm doing less in more hrs. Go figure.
I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy this weekend. It's about a father trying to find some semblance of humanity amongst burned out towns and cannibalistic tribes for his son. I meant to nurse it over the next few weeks, like only eating two pieces of Halloween candy a day, but there was no way. Few books have compelled me to read them immediately and even fewer that didn't accomplish it through mere plot manipulation. I knew what would happen in this book; what I wanted were the emotional details.
It was beautiful in its own post-apocalyptic way. After I finished it late last night, I shed a few tears and then went into my youngest son's room and hugged him while he slept. It seemed an appropriate, albeit cliched, way to finish up my torrential relationship with the book. But the hug didn't ward off danger--early this morning his awoke throwing up.
9 comments:
we listened to The Road on the way to Canada, well some of it. We never finished it, and it's still in my iTunes. I feel conflicted about the book now because I feel compelled to see the sad journey to its end, but somehow I just can't get myself to finish it. I saw a woman finishing it at a coffee shop and I almost asked her how it ends up, but I was too embarrassed to say that I couldn't bother to finish an audio book.
I'm very glad to hear about this--I will give it a try. I started some McCarthy book, but I was put off by the style (Faulkner wannabe, I thought)--but have also thought that perhaps I judged too quickly.
I'm aching here--didn't finish?? Faulkner wannabe?? I must protest.
I first read *All the pretty horses* and then *The Crossing*, both in his border trilogy. The rugged bareness of the land and of the emotional journey of these novels stuck with me for weeks.
Take this passage from The Crossing where 16 year old Billy Parham takes a marauding wolf to the mountains of Mexico instead of killing it. As one might guess returning the wolf to the "wild" doesn't work out so well. The locals take the wolf from him and fight it against dogs in a pit. The boy is forced to kill the wolf: "Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and the now. He'd carried the wolf up into the mountains in the bow of the saddle and buried her in a high pass under a cairn of scree. The little wolves in her belly felt the cold draw about them and they cried out mutely in the dark and he buried them all and piled the rocks over them and led the horse away. He wandered on into the mountains. He whittled a bow from a holly limb, made arrows from cane. He thought to become again the child he never was" (129).
To me McCarthy's work resurrects the vulnerability of the male through the male lens. That is none of this pansy, emotional male created by some feminists (both male and female) to rehabilitate the male which in the process loses his masculinity.
Counterintuitive,
I guess what you are saying is that McCarthy is a "man's man." If so, I'd have to agree with you. I've read All the Pretty Horses while I was out camping for a week in the sage-brush steppes below the towering Easter Sierra of California. Lis and I went out there after my Defense last march, so the trip was a milestone of sorts where I could let my mind quiet down from the monumental thing it worked so hard for in the last six years. What struck me about the writing is what an intense meditation it was. His characterizations of landscape are very important for his writing, and reading his book in the desert air where the spring snow starts up those massive peaks was a perfect thing.
However,
I kind of found "The Road" to be a little over the top in terms of word sparsity. I started chuckling every time he would write the sentence "It was cold."
Will: intense meditation--exactly.
A bit over the edge on sparsity, I hear ya and I'm not sure I'd dare listen to The Road out loud. Not only many "It's cold" but also many, many "I don't know."
I loved Pretty Horses and found the next one unreadable and pretty much stopped. I'm not sure I'd still love it if I went back, though I did like his prose then.
I want to read No Country, just out of curiosity. Also heard good things about The Road. The problem with stylists is that they sometimes parody themselves. But I'm willing to give him another chance.
I haven't read McCarthy, but I'm certainly intrigued by this statement:
"To me McCarthy's work resurrects the vulnerability of the male through the male lens. That is none of this pansy, emotional male created by some feminists (both male and female) to rehabilitate the male which in the process loses his masculinity."
So how then are you defining masculinity (and how do you lose it?)? Also, I don't imagine you think that the rehabilitated masculine male is non-emotional but that's what you seem to be saying. Clarification?
I acknowledge that a complete new post might be in order to give a satisfactory explanation. ;)
Stg72861 next door here. I agree with some of the other comments as to his sparsity of words. His rationing of dialogue (and proper sentence structure throughout) is just his style. At first I found it bothersome, and while I admit I am only two thirds of the way through, I can't put it down.
Much like Hosseini's Kite Runner and Thousand Spendid Suns, I am anything but uplifted by this book at this point, and can not imagine listening to this in the audio form.
I've already checked out No Country for Old Men, and have reserved The Crossing, so that speaks volumes (sort of a pun?) as to my attraction to this talent. Hemingway could take a lesson or two from McCarthy on storytelling and other aspects of writing (OK, I'm almost over the wasted two weeks I spent a couple months ago laboring through the awful, over-rated, much ballyhooed piles of crap that were For Whom the Bell Tolls and A farewell to Arms.)
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