The Road

this morning in a rare moment of reading, i finally finished, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. this book has seriously taken me over a year to finish. although i am somewhat glad to have finished it, because i truly think Cormac is an amazing writer, i must say that his views are just so bleak and hopeless at times, which is the reason the book drudged on for me. i love his style of writing and the dialogue between the boy and man sort of looming in the book - not hindered by grammer or quotation marks and at times there is confusion between who is talking to whom. i love the mystery behind the plot that the author never truly answers, which beats behind every breath of the character begging the question of what happened. all this to say is that i get it. i get that it won the pulitzer - but seriously...did it have to be so freakin depressing? from what i gather his themes are pretty similar throughout his other works. i haven't read any other McCarthy novels, i did watch No Country for Old Men - in fact, we own it, but it didnt surprise me. i think what intrigued me is that in most books - i guess atheistic books, which aren't necessarily atheistic, but lets just say deprived of any religion - authors tend to emphasize love as the saving aspect of humankind - they blow it up and at the end of the day love will save all of us. love becomes the hope and religion for a lot of authors with depressing themes. i think that His Dark Materials series by Pullman did this and some of Steinbeck (what with the whole breastfeeding a stranger in Grapes of Wrath for instance). anyway - i guess all this to say that McCarthy doesnt really go there with love - he kind of makes love a statement - much like - hey - its all we got in this crappy place. i dont agree with him there - i think it is more transformative than that. he chose the example of a father and son - one of the purest forms of love to kind of expound on and i think that he does admit that in a way, but never does he exaggerate it or even hype it - it is survival love. i am super glad to have finished it. did it change my life? certainly not - i think it was a beautiful piece of work, but certainly not "transformative". would i recommend it to you? i am not sure...i guess that depends on how this review made you feel...i did hear that it is being made into a movie and viggo mortenson is playing the father...seriously i couldn't think of a more boring movie...i will so wait for that to come out on DVD - i am sure they will most likely do amazing things with it, but it will probably battle Old Man and the Sea for most boring movie plot ever...