The Road
Cormac McCarthy, 2006
A father and son walk south through a burned America with a shopping cart, a pistol and the rule to keep going.
Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's sentences carry a spare, biblical weight, whether he is writing about a father and son pushing a shopping cart through a burned America in «The Road» or about a river town and a fisherman in his first novel, Σάτρι. Both books share a dark, patient attention to hardship and to the stubborn fact of going on. Start with «The Road» if you want the plainer, more stripped-down prose; start with Σάτρι if you want to see where that voice began.
Feels like dread, tenderness and family.
Start with The Road.
McCarthy wrote The Road in his seventies, after becoming a father again; he dedicated it to his son John Francis, born in 1999.
Whatever light is left in the world is sleeping beside him.
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 away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Books by Cormac McCarthy
Σάτρι
Cormac McCarthy, 1965
A river town, a fisherman, and a figure called the satyr: McCarthy's first novel, a dark, lyrical drift through water, poverty and the grotesque.
Yol
Cormac McCarthy, 2006
A father and his son walk south through a burned America, carrying a pistol and a fire that has to mean something. Spare, terrifying, tender.
Ο δρόμος
Cormac McCarthy, 2006
A father and son cross a devastated world, carrying the fragile work of staying alive—and of remaining human.
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