Gets some extra points since it pulls on certain dad related heart strings that I have.

3.5/5 ( )

Indrukwekkend, maar op het eind toch weer onrealistisch optimistisch. en het zijn altijd toch een soort christelijke mensen en gemeenschappen die de boel redden. Deed me even aan i am legend ea denken. ( )

Utterly Depressing. ( )

È scritto magistralmente, cioè McCarthy ha soppesato ogni parola prima di scriverla, ecc. ecc. però la storia raccontata è un incubo, perciò nel complesso non mi è piaciuta molto. A malincuore 4 stelle. ( )

I made a mistake of reading the rest of this book last night before bed. There was a moment when the man was on a ship and the boy was on the beach, and I wanted to make sure the son would be okay so I kept reading.
The momentum from that carried me through the end where about 10 pages before the end I began to cry, and it took a while for me to stop. I felt so much for the father who tried desperately to protect his son.

This book slogs you through a dreary wasteland where a man with a young son cannot risk trusting anyone - where people are cannibals and will take everything from you.

As you follow these two, you feel all the hard choices, disappointments, fears, love. You wonder if death would be better, if it's the right thing to do. You distrust people and feel shame when the son is more forgiving and loving than you would be.

I found that the way it was written - fairly direct language breifly interspersed with near poetry - was effective. It was immersive and terribly, terribly sad.

The cycles of extreme hardship with respites of protection were an experience for me. If they were in a safe place, I felt like I could relax with them for a moment and it made the suffering they went through feel more painful.

Overall, it was a book that made me grateful to not face those decisions, and it made me profoundly sad for a man who'd tried so hard. ( )

Meraviglioso. Entra sul tappeto rosso nella top 5 dei cinque libri migliori che abbia mai letto.
Fa male.
Come fa male bruciarsi toccando la fiamma di una candela.
Ti insegna che il fuoco brucia anche se non ci passi un dito in mezzo.

Horrific. Zero redeeming factors. ( )

RECENSIONE A CURA DEL BLOG "GLI OCCHI DEL LUPO" - Pamela Perretta

“La strada” è un romanzo post apocalittico ambientato in un futuro distopico in cui la Terra come noi la conosciamo è stata distrutta e la popolazione decimata, lasciando solo pochi superstiti in continua lotta per la sopravvivenza. Pagina dopo pagina seguiremo il viaggio di un padre e suo figlio, che si spostano in continuazione percorrendo una lunga strada verso sud, spingendo un carrello con le loro cose, alla costante ricerca di cibo e acqua, sperando di trovare un luogo sicuro in cui poter stare. Durante il loro cammino vivranno momenti difficili, vivranno attimi di speranza e incontreranno altri sopravvissuti come loro, alcuni pericolosi, altri innocui, ma l’uomo sarà disposto a tutto pur di proteggere il bambino.

“La strada” è il primo libro con cui mi sono approcciata a McCarthy, dopo aver visto il film, e l’ho letteralmente divorato in un giorno!
Lo stile di scrittura è scorrevole ma atipico, a mio avviso molto ben adeguato al tipo di storia raccontata. Il libro è un unico intero capitolo, privo di interruzioni, in cui anche i dialoghi sono parte del testo, senza l’uso di virgolette o altra punteggiatura, il che rende difficile mettere in pausa la lettura.
Se ci si ferma a riflettere per un secondo, nel romanzo non succede nulla di particolare o straordinario, eppure McCarthy ha la capacità di raccontare, in circa 200 pagine, il cammino di due persone lungo una strada che non vi farà più staccare gli occhi dal libro! L’autore descrive alla perfezione lo scenario che i nostri protagonisti si trovano di fronte, è come se il lettore stesse camminando al loro fianco. In ogni singola pagina si possono avvertire solitudine, smarrimento, tristezza, paura, speranza, amore… l’amore di un padre per suo figlio, così immenso e puro da voler fare tutto il possibile per salvargli la vita.
Altra particolarità del romanzo sta nel fatto che i due protagonisti non hanno un nome, vengono semplicemente chiamati uomo e bambino, come a voler sottolineare il fatto che il sopravvissuto non è un privilegiato ma una persona come tutte le altre, e che di fronte alla furia dell’uomo o della natura siamo tutti uguali, che quell’uomo e quel bambino potrebbero essere chiunque.
Un libro toccante e profondo, che nella sua semplicità trasmette sensazioni intense. Chiunque dovrebbe leggerlo almeno una volta nella vita. ( )

Thought-provoking. Seemingly simplistic descriptions of the events and locations encountered by the central characters, and minimalistic dialogue, but packs a wallop emotionally and intellectually. ( )

Poetic and thoroughly depressing. I prefer post-apocalyptic fiction with more shotguns and yelling. ( )

I wonder why it won a Pulitzer prize. ( )

2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

At first, I found McCarthy's prose style pretentious and irritating, but once I began to care what happened to the man and the boy, all bets were off.

I lay on the brown couch in my bleak gray basement. Gray like the ashes of a dying civilization. The couch comfortable. The blanket tucked around me. A spoiled American brat who doesnt know true suffering. This book is torturing me, I say to the room. Are they going to die?

No, they're not going to die.

Because they're the good guys, right?

Yes, they're the good guys.

Okay.

The parody version of The Review has already been done. The exhausted hilarity. The dead horse beaten into dust. Something about macadam. I'll have to look that one up. I'll has an apostrophe, but wont doesnt. The irish cream necessary for me to complete The Review. Swirling into my gullet like a cyclone flushing its way into loathsome space. The soul of a dying penitent reaching out for his nonexistent God.

The mystery of the apocalypse. Why werent humans destroyed too if all of the animals were gone? The setup. The unanswered questions. The burning forests, the mostly-intact houses. The jarring, ill-fitting ending.

Query: Why did I like this book?

In all seriousness, I liked the book because it gave me hope. Maybe people who have very sunny lives (or very gentle hearts near to the surface, like my husband) don't want to deal with all the darkness. Maybe I don't even need such darkness in my entertainment, the "tragedy porn" as another reviewer aptly put it. Maybe it's wrong to equate my recent (and very first-world) suffering with a post-apocalyptic survival story.

Yet, equate it I do, as a metaphor if nothing else. This story simultaneously shames me with its tattered characters struggling to live and uplifts me with their assertion that life must continue one step at a time, for the sake of love, if for no other reason. Isn't love the only real meaning there is? ( )

Not only this book is over-written as hell, but is full of plot holes and deus ex machina bullshit. Just putting your characters in dangerous situations and then magically saving them is not a way of making a tense scene, Cormac. Just the writer putting himself in the text to save them, because he didn't want to rewrite this first draft, that won a Pulitzer. 200 pages of that. I'm pretty sure academia is laughing their asses off because people pretend this is a masterpiece, because they were told so by a bunch of people with college degrees. ( )

This was one of those book that you just get engrossed in and you are in that book and experiencing every detail and feeling of the book.

I loved this story and there were parts in this story where my heart was pounding reading. I love a book that can draw a reader in to that extent and this was one of those stories. Its a short book but a great simple story. ( )

Very gripping and engaging story one in which you can feel the tension even though not much is happening. Touches on sad and sensitive nature of such disaster but treats it with respect. ( )

I wanted to like this more, but I just didn't feel connected to the characters. I also think not know they why really contributed to the lack of 4 stars. ( )

There is no later. This is later. All things that of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy, I have you.

In a post apocalyptic world, a man and his son walk the ruined and damaged earth of charred trees, ashy waters. Scavenging for food and always on the move, always hoping. This book is so stark and depressing that I had to read it in bits and portions but still has such heartbreakingly tender moments.

I have never rooted for characters in fiction as I did for the pair and McCarthy's ability to deliver breathtaking yet precise words without overbearing paragraphs delving into description is outstanding.

I found it interesting that McCarthy does not use quotation marks or semi colons in his prose. A great introduction to a brilliant writer, I hope to read more of his works. ( )

Enjoyed it much better as an audiobook

***NO SPOILERS***

At the risk of angering--and shocking--the many passionate McCarthy fans in this world, I'm going to state, firmly, that The Road is overrated. It's a post-apocalyptic that's not even close to fully realized, and one of the most dreary books I've ever read. Dreary can be fine, but a touch of hope makes a dreary book even better, and more realistic. Readers seeking depression in book form need look no further than this.

McCarthy has also enthusiastically embraced the irritating trend of writing dialogue sans quotation marks. This isn't art; it's pretension, and it's hostile to the reader.

For those looking for superb, fully realized post-apocalyptic fiction, read Justin Cronin's The Passage trilogy, a sweeping story about a pandemic that's fantastical armchair travel like no other. ( )

ספר מצויין. דכאוני במידה מסויימת. ( )

A man and his son are heading south in a post-apocalyptic landscape, scavenging for food and water in a burned land. The story is stark. There are many unanswered questions about how things got this way and how long they have been wandering. It refers to years. There are few people and some have turned to cannibalism, so they are avoiding people but the father assures the son there are other "good guys" still around . They are malnourished yet seem to find caches of food each time they get to starvation point. I just had trouble with the believability of it all. Not sure what the lack of punctuation was supposed to signify since it wasn't consistent. Some contractions had apostrophes and others didn't.
Overall, not what I would think worthy of a Pulitzer. ( )

Not a lot of books move me to tears. Even fewer, more than once. ( )

4.5, this is probably a 5 star book but the topic is so soul-sucking I just can't give it that. I love the writing, very straightforward. The bleak scene before you contrasts with the tender relationship drawing you on. ( )

The nature of the disaster that reduced the world of The Road to this state is never detailed, only hinted at; but clearly almost everything is dead: all the vegetation (grass, trees, crops, all) and the animals (even insects), including most of humanity. A few people do remain: roving bands—of cannibals mostly, since other humans is virtually all there is left to eat—and stragglers like the father and young son of this story. Starving, they’re still alive at all thanks only to the occasional overlooked cans they find in the abandoned and ransacked houses.
    They are heading, on foot, through the gloom and bitter cold, making for the coast. We’re not sure why they are (the oceans are likely as dead as everything else) except for the vague idea that it might be warmer there. Flakes of ash fall constantly, coating the rooftops and fields like black snow—light replaced by dark, it sums this new Earth up. They wear makeshift masks so as not to breathe it in; but, even so, something which becomes plain early on is that the father is ill: he has bouts of coughing and is occasionally bringing up blood. Looming over him is the question: if I die, what will become of a little boy in a world like this?
    The prose here is stripped right down almost to nothing—minimalist writing, even the punctuation—and it mirrors the landscape they are travelling across. It’s as if language itself has been swept away along with everything else human. Or almost everything; there is still something left, some spark, and we see it in the infinite patience and tenderness with which the man cares for his son.
    I read The Road, then watched John Hillcoat’s film version straight after, and for me (unusually) this was a case where the film did actually live up to the novel: both mesmerising. ( )

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3838532813

New review/thoughts from my April 2024 read: https://tbindc.substack.com/p/the-road

Below - review from July 5th, 2023.

The Road is a stunning book. It is dark, cold, and in many ways horrible. The love of the father for the son does radiate through it and ruptures off of the page. The most anxiety-inducing and bone-chilling questions imaginable by a parent are raised directly ("Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?") and indirectly.

The vignettes of interaction with other human show the frailty of life without our social contract and suggests how fragile it is. To me, it also suggests its durability over generations, with the child's internal sense of morality so strong - even buoying the father at times.

I'll have a lot more to say about sons and fathers and how this book reads when your own father has paled in comparison to this one in my substack. That said, fatherhood both practically and somewhat cosmically are major themes. Closing with two of my favorite quotes/sections from this readthrough:

"Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground." (pg 196)

"He rose and build back the fire and sat beside the boy and pulled the blankets over him and brushed back his filthy hair. I think maybe they are watching, he said. They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back." (pg 210).

More soon. ( )