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Old 05-07-2008, 01:49 PM
grady
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Portland, OR
Posts: 1,160
Re: currently reading?
Quote:
Originally Posted by oceanic View Post
Just read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Started and finished in a day... absorbing isn't even the word for it. Very easy read but of the darkest subject matter I've come across in a long, long time. Post-apocalypse America is the setting and the plot explores a pilgrimage being made by a father and son from mid-western states towards the coast (presumably the Gulf-Coast around Texas). Horrifying images of societal collapse and the violence that has taken over. No faith, no morality, no hope - only desperation and the brutality that comes out of desperation. Scary in the way that only few details can conjure scariness. Did anyone feel the same way I did about Cloverfield in that the scariest thing about that movie was the many unknowns? Where did the monster come from? How old? What's it made of? Why's it angry? What's its purpose? Why here? Why now?
Same with The Road. Where did it all go wrong? When? Who started it? Where is the goodness? What's happening in the rest of the world? Where is the requisite "safe haven"? Why? Why? Why?
Disturbing and sad.

The movie is coming soon, which is an alluring and unnerving notion for me.
The last part of your message with the questions reminds me a great deal of one of the internal monologues/voice overs of a character in The Thin Red Line.

I didn't have quite as an adverse reaction to Cloverfield as the The Road but each is incredibly bleak at times and borderline unbearable in their own unique ways. I found The Road to be far more gripping in that the unknowns feel much greater and powerful. Not to devalue a giant beast ravaging the isle of Manhattan as not terrifying or gripping but rather the idea that the great nuclear apocalypse has already happen in The Road, maybe 5 years prior and we're reading about the fallout(no pun intended). What I find so amusing is that it's a post apocalyptic sci-fi-type setting but all that stuff has been stripped away. It's also amusing that it's kept in the literature section at most book sellers but could easily be kept in sci-fi.

One more bit of amusement: It was an Oprah book club of the month selection! I regaled in the image of soccer mom's and Oprah viewers reading this book and being terribly frightened or potential disgusted by the novel.

Then it went on to win a Pulitzer.

After reading The Road in the Fall 06 I've been somewhat fearful of how the eventual film translation would turn out. Particularly that you're dealing with two different mediums and so much of the novel is internalized.

The film does seems to have a good creative team behind it though. John Hillcoat is directing the film. He made a film a couple years back written by Nick Cave and starring Guy Pearce called The Proposition. If you haven't seen it do check it out, it's an Australian western. Viggo Mortensen has been cast as the lead in the film along with Charlize Theron as his wife in what I presume will be periodic flashbacks.

Over the next couple weeks the film will be shooting scenes here on the Oregon coast. Part of me wants to go rubber neck and see if anything can be seen, but I imagine they'll be shooting in pretty damn remote areas away from the peering eyes of locals and Viggo fans.

Have you read any other novels by Cormac McCarthy oceanic?

One other thing to check out is the following link to an enjoyable book review of The Road written by Michael Chabon and published in the New York Review of Books last Winter.

link

Last edited by grady; 05-07-2008 at 01:55 PM. Reason: word and sentence changes.