Goodreads review: The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps this isn't one of McCarthy's best works, but I still liked it. Having recently played The Last of Us, I was curious about some of the book and movies that inspired it, so I decided to give The Road a try. I found it to be slow paced and hard to follow at times, which to me, were the only negatives. I really liked the relationship between the boy and his father because not only did they did try to cooperate and get along in a post-apocalyptic world, but the moments of the boy's disobedience towards his father were a nice touch because it gave insight to their conflicts and struggles in a hostile world. Discussion about God and other survivors and whether they're good or bad showed me that the relationship of the boy and his father was very open as well as childlike due to the boy's curiosity. It's as if their conversations were a sort of coping method as a way to deal with the world around them.

I liked the structure of the book in terms of the fact that it was a continuous story and didn't really have chapter stops. McCarthy experimented with this, in a way, in All the Pretty Horses because the chapters, for the most part, were lengthy. With that in mind, the structure, I found, worked really well for The Road because the boy and his father were on a journey that had, for the most part, no reason for there being chapter stops. It only adds, in a good way, to McCarthy's already organic use of imagery and language.

The violent and lawless landscape that the boy and his father traveled -- which is a common theme in post-apocalyptic stories -- didn't feel cliché or overused because McCarthy made it his own. What I mean by that is he didn't use that theme and not put any depth of thought into it because he took time to make it interesting, with the road almost being a character itself because, while being the title of the book, it plays a big part in the story. It has a nature -- a characteristic about it -- that seemed have to a degree of mystery, which kept me intrigued.

I have a feeling that The Road will resonate with me for a while. I'm glad I checked it out because I was pleasantly surprised. I was hesitant to at first because I wasn't familiar with it, but it hit me hard and shocked me in some places, which I probably won't be forgetting anytime soon.

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Goodreads review: All the Pretty Horses

All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As I said in my review of Blood Meridian, I had been hoping to read some more of McCarthy's work and I'm glad I did. I didn't know what to expect with going into All the Pretty Horses and I was pleasantly surprised. The lush descriptions of the landscape and the overall poetic language were what drew me in. I think that both aspects complemented each other really well since they suited the almost childlike nature of the prose. I guess it just makes sense to me that sometimes it's proper for one to have that kind of, I guess, view of the west, particularly in the Texas and Mexico areas where John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins and others spent a majority of their time.

In regards to the dialogue, I found it to be full of meaning throughout the book and I think it is something that merits further study. To cite an example, I am reminded of the conversation between John Grady Cole and Alejandra:

What do you want me to do? he said.
I want you to be considerate of a young girl's reputation.
I never meant not to be.
She smiled. I believe you, she said. But you must understand. This is another country. Here a woman's reputation is all she has.
Yes mam.
There is no forgiveness, you see.
Mam?
There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot. She cannot.

I could've picked out other examples because there are other ones that did stand out to me, but I figured I'd go with something simple that can still have conclusions drawn from it. I enjoyed the dialogue between the male characters in the beginning of the book as well. Even though the book is probably McCarthy's lightest -- or least dark -- it still has moments of darkness and bleakness that provide an interesting change of pace, such as the following example:

He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

That's rather dark but effective.

Overall I enjoyed the book and I feel that everything tied together quite well in the end. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it to everybody, but it since it's probably McCarthy's least disturbing book, it's a good place to start.

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