Apocalypse Now

michel — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 17:32:56 +0000

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – A novel not for the squeamish or faint of heart.

This is not a happy book. It will not make you feel better or lift your spirits. In fact, you will come as close as you’ve ever been to tasting ashes in the back of your mouth without actually standing in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.
A bleak premise, an even bleaker outlook and no realistic hope for relief. Cormac McCarty’s newest novel plunges you headfirst into a tale so sordid it could push a sufficiently depressed person effortlessly over the edge (or off, in case you happen to be on a building at the time of reading).
A terse leading character on a foundation of McCarty’s hard-to-define, and seemingly sparse vocabulary makes this an ‘easy’ to read book but a very difficult cookie to digest. No adjective, adverb or noun is wasted nor inappropriate in describing a post-some-apocalypse USA.
Following the 2 destitute main characters -a desperate, dying father (yet driven by a momentous will) and his innocent albeit unwilling son- we are introduced to a landscape that resembles everything which the word loss entails. With painfully scarce resources and no idea what, if anything, awaits them at what will probably be their final destination.
McCarty bestows so little prosperity on his characters that something as small as them finding a new pair of shoes makes you heave a sigh of relief with them. But this lasts as long as the sigh itself, because nothing can truly relieve you in a world torn asunder and continuously afflicted by the consequences of the disaster that has stricken the world where our characters seem to dwell only to find their final resting place.
This book, with its vivid yet soberly painted image, is an instant classic already transformed into a celluloid copy. In today’s plethora of hypocritically acclaimed non-sense and self-help books this book might actually help you much more with almost any kind of problem.

It’s sort of like the last coke on the world. Tastes special, sweet and in some inexplicable way it feeds your soul, but leaves an everlasting bitter flavor on your palates. Because it really was the last.

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Apocalypse Now