Review - The Road 💀

This was very interestingly written and the subject matter was more dreadful and bleak than anything else I’ve read. By the end of it I felt like it had taught me a lesson about the fragility of our world and shown me that commonplace imaginings of personal and societal disaster are not even close to contemplating the full existential and psychological horror that’s possible. Living in the middle panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, it helps to be look at the right panel occasionally.

Like others, I did not like the ending being possibly hopeful and positive. It felt like McCarthy pulled his punches at the end.

For some reason, I keep thinking about the last paragraph of the book. I don’t know if it’s just something in the quality of the writing that grabs me (the use of 10-dollar words seems masterful), or there’s an idea or sentiment in it that I can’t articulate nor forget.

“Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

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