The Hunt For Read October

"In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."

- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

I have just finished reading The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, a masterwork of post-apocalyptic survival and one of the best novels I've ever read. A man and a boy, and sometimes other characters desperate and foul, wandering the roads looking for something, anything, better. Maybe in the south, maybe there they will get relief from the brutal cold of the never-ending winter that has shrouded their new world. Everything is ashen and gray. There are no living plants, and very few animals. All people are nameless, for names no longer matter...the only one mentioned in the book turns out to be a lie.

This all happens in the near aftermath of some black tragedy that is not described or understood, indeed, whose details don't even matter, and has taken the known world out and civilization is no more.

This is one of those books that stays with you for a long time. I'm not even sure I can start another book just yet, it seems like I need more time for The Road to sink in, otherwise I might just keep chewing on it while I mouth the words of my next book without comprehension.

The Road is just the kind of book I love, well written and honest, very descriptive and minimalist at the same time. I guess you could call it "economical" in that sense. Each sentence says so much using so few words. McCarthy's style reminds me of a cross between Hemingway and Nabokov.

It's also a very difficult book to read, because of the horrors involved in trying to survive in a world that is no longer able to sustain life. There is staggering inhumanity, cannibalism, rampant murder, and most of all an overwhelming sense of indifference. The world has been pared down to one thing: survival.

"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly 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."

At one point in the story the man and the boy find an old man wandering the roads hungry and feeble and they offer him food. He asks if he could give anything in return and the man says:

"Yes, tell me where the world went".

I am interested to see how faithful the movie is to the novel when it's released into theaters in October. I hope justice is done and Hollywood doesn't try to lace sentimentality into the story, because in the novel there is none.

...

Nevertheless, I am starting to scout new books for the one I want to read next. I read on my iPhone now, I love the format and ease of reading, no light needed, and my books are always with me. And the app I use, Kindle for iPhone, is tied in with the Kindle store on Amazon and you can send free samples of any book to your phone to try out. I usually read the beginnings of a couple dozen books before I choose one to read next. I only have so long on this planet and I hate wasting time on sub-par reading material.

Any suggestions?

"He made train noises and diesel horn noises but he wasn't sure what these might mean to the boy. After a while they just looked out through the silted glass to where the track turned away in the waste of weeds. If they saw different worlds what they knew was the same. That the train would sit there slowly decomposing for all eternity and that no train would ever run again."