..each the other's world entire
I've been meaning to write a review of
Cormac McCarthy's The Road but I couldn't, primarily because so many things have been said about this Pulitzer Prize winning novel already. Ironically, I first heard about it on Oprah. She chose the novel for her Book Club (a red flag for me and my wife, telling us to get away from it immediately). Oprah also was able to convince the reclusive McCarthy to indulge her in an
interview.
The premise is simple: a father and his son wander off in a post-nuclear holocaust America with "...each the other's world entire." Primarily, the novel concerns itself with the issue of keeping one's humanity intact in a world ceaselessly plummeting into anarchy and despair. If you want to read about the book, go
here,
here, or
here. You can also go to your nearest library or well, get yourself a copy.
In the latest issue of
Esquire Magazine (August 2008), a short article discusses the link between McCarthy's presentation of violence in his novels and American society's thirst for it whether physically, emotionally, personally or vicariously.
This particular curiosity about violence is deeply entrenched in
The Road. Even in the rare tranquil moments of novel, the possibility of violence is just so overpowering that at some point, I found it hard to breathe.
The Road, like McCarthy's previous novel
No Country for Old Men, has been adapted into a movie and is currently shooting. Before it comes out on the silver screen, here are some memorable quotes I copied from the novel in place of a review:
People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides.***
The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.***
Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesnt fire? It has to fire. What if it doesnt fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock?***
There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasnt about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he'd no longer any way to think about at all.***
He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not. ***
Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Ocean, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The seeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.***
What's the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat into the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.
There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasnt about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he'd no longer any way to think about at all. 
