Scan barcode
A review by ellis_eden
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
5.0
Post-apocalyptic fiction will never go out of style, not while we as a species continue to hold a collective death sentence to our heads. I’m fond of the genre, yet it is filled with tedious drama unfolding in a vapid setting, peopled with characters that seem too dumb to live.
The Road, however, is consuming, gorgeous, and one of the best books I’ve read in some time. Reading Cormac McCarthy is synonymous with masochism; you welcome the hand in the velvet glove, so that you may admire the mechanism while being destroyed by it.
There are moments of descriptive beauty so glorious, it’s almost possible to forgive the author for the counterbalance of horrors that now live in my brain.
The characters felt like they existed outside the page, the plot moved seamlessly, and the terror of survival amidst a twilight world of ash and destruction were elegantly composed. The only criticism I might level is that a few passages were poetically overwrought, and smacked a bit of The Jabberwock in the choice of words: ensepulchred, crozzled, etc. I’m looking forward to re-reading this novel once my heart is strong enough to take another allegorical pounding.
Please excuse me now while I weep and stock my pantry with 500 years of canned food. Oh frabjous day. Callou, callay.
The Road, however, is consuming, gorgeous, and one of the best books I’ve read in some time. Reading Cormac McCarthy is synonymous with masochism; you welcome the hand in the velvet glove, so that you may admire the mechanism while being destroyed by it.
There are moments of descriptive beauty so glorious, it’s almost possible to forgive the author for the counterbalance of horrors that now live in my brain.
The characters felt like they existed outside the page, the plot moved seamlessly, and the terror of survival amidst a twilight world of ash and destruction were elegantly composed. The only criticism I might level is that a few passages were poetically overwrought, and smacked a bit of The Jabberwock in the choice of words: ensepulchred, crozzled, etc. I’m looking forward to re-reading this novel once my heart is strong enough to take another allegorical pounding.
Please excuse me now while I weep and stock my pantry with 500 years of canned food. Oh frabjous day. Callou, callay.