The Road

[ZenCat]

I just saw that Cormac McCarthy's incredible, acclaimed novel The Road is being made into a film starring Viggo Mortensen. I couldn't be more thrilled with this casting.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0898367/

For anyone who hasn't read McCarthy (I'm a huge fan going way back), he's got a very distinctive style, compared most closely to Faulkner.

I think The Road is one of his most brilliant works. I'm not alone, it won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale describing a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted years before by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and, apparently, most life on earth. The novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

A brief synopsis from IMDB:

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and, when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing: just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food--and each other.

His writing is universally grim, almost beyond endurance. I hated some of his books but had to marvel at them, while others remain so beloved to me that I proudly display them on their own shelf in my library, and named my first labrador retriever after the main character in All The Pretty Horses, which is one of my 5 favorite books ever. Despite the terrifying bleakness and depiction of terrible remorseless evil which is a cornerstone of his work he manages, at times, to be absolutely soul-wrenchingly touching as well.

McCarthy is not for the faint of heart and though I didn't see the film No Country For Old Men, from reading the reviews, I got the impression that those who hadn't read McCarthy didn't really "get" the film.

Would love to discuss any and all of McCarthy's work - including The Road - and the upcoming film!