Friday, July 18, 2008

The Road

I had never read a Cormac McCarthy book. Not until his most recent novel, The Road, a post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's struggle to survive in an ash-covered dead world. The story is beautiful and tragic, uplifting and heart breaking. McCarthy's writing style is terse, yet contains moments of intensity and magic. The characters are beautiful and sympathetic, and the book delves into the horrors that live within the human heart.

The novel is a quick read for it's size and there is little punctuation, no chapters per se, and it bounces between the present in the book and flashbacks the father has about life before the apocalypse (which is never explained.)

I loved this book, plain and simple. I have not read a book this dark and depressing, yet beautiful and cathartic as this novel in a long, long time. For those of you who have never read McCarthy (as I hadn't) I highly recommend it.

No comments: