Thursday, September 18, 2008

Book #28, The Road, Cormac McCarthy

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming the world." (Page 1)

"The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond." (Page 153)

"In that long ago somewhere very near this place he'd watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the sill autumn air." (Page 17)

Superb. The aftermath of the never-that-was and the never-that-always-is. Man and boy (man, not father, and boy, not son) on the road. Gray, black, everywhere death. Okay.

Reviews I enjoyed:

New York Times - "Books of the Times" Review

New York Times - Sunday Book Review

New York Review of Books review After the Apocalypse

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