May 30, 2010

Book Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy



I've been lucky enough to live in a marvelously literary world, with beautiful books still being penned. I love fiction because it's more inclined towards unparalleled realism (yeah i know that's a paradox). Fiction, in it's literal context, would mean a tale crafted upon imagination. A tale unthinkable, completely dissimilar to real life motivations, is the extremest defining criteria of the Fiction section. After Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, this piece of writing makes me realize yet again how capable a book is, to lift & take one's thoughts into another world, a fictitious world, which the writer intends to craft out.

In a post-apocalyptic world, a nameless father walks with his son, in quest of finding the last good that might have been spared of humanity. He holds a gun to salvage themselves from the big dark ash laden world. His son is all that he has left for bleak motivation. & the child, ignorant of how the world has been as we know; yet he does know how to love his father, he's ingenuinely compassionate to a false world, he knows fear pretty well. They walk, & they walk; things unfold & complicate as their journey proceeds. The best father words can portray; the best son a pen can describe. The worst of situations one can think of in his wildest dreams.

I'm not inadvertent to being teary eyed. & that is precisely what i was while reading the closing pages of the book. A remarkable story with startling simple truths of life we all behold. Our basic fears. & an unimagined end to the entire journey.

The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. Last fall, a movie was crafted on it as well.

A short read. Recommended to one & all.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

After reading your excerpts, this post has tempted me to read that marvelous novel.

lets see when i can get the time to read it.

Share your more thoughts with the world about your reading.