Already a classic!
Just finished reading ‘The road’ and that’s how I would describe McCarthy’s last novel. WHAT AN AMAZING READ! This is a novel that should be read and not talked about. Its bone-chilling quality can be traced, first, in the landscapes the two main ‘characters’ ‘visit’. ‘The man’ and ‘the boy’ are heading for the south, for the coast, and their journey consists only on getting on with something to eat, to cover themselves, and simply endure. And, secondly, through its concise and abrupt dialogue between father and son, dialogues that are so transparent, abrupt and palpable, that one feels there’s nothing that could be added. (Most of the paragraphs stand by themselves, as condensed poems).
This is a novel about creation and destruction, a narration that makes us aware of the universe’s very throes, the feeling that the universe itself is watching its own end.
Tenderness could be the most present feeling in the novel, a sort of love story between these two characters; tenderness ‘in extremis’, a precious and almost mystical delicacy among desperation, death and what remains of nature. As always with McCarthy's prose, his 'biblical' style also cries out here the need for human conscience. (In several sections I had in mind Michael Haneke’s masterpiece, ‘The Time of the Wolf’).
However offensive to rank a book, or any work of art, I think this is the year’s novel!
This is a novel about creation and destruction, a narration that makes us aware of the universe’s very throes, the feeling that the universe itself is watching its own end.
Tenderness could be the most present feeling in the novel, a sort of love story between these two characters; tenderness ‘in extremis’, a precious and almost mystical delicacy among desperation, death and what remains of nature. As always with McCarthy's prose, his 'biblical' style also cries out here the need for human conscience. (In several sections I had in mind Michael Haneke’s masterpiece, ‘The Time of the Wolf’).
However offensive to rank a book, or any work of art, I think this is the year’s novel!
1 comment:
I liked it but was not overwhelmed with enjoyment. In some ways it reminded me of JM Coetzee's "Life and Times of Michael K.". Yet although it shares the same economy of means and sparseness of prose and plot, it lacks Coetzee's transcendental power and never really emerges as more than a story.
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