The Road

[Gilberto]

Just read this bleak odyssey by Cormac McCarthy. It's a very real and interesting take on post apocalypse. Like House of Leaves (but not to such an extreme), this book uses format to mirror the story. There are no chapters. The dialogue is stripped down without quotation marks and no clear distinction between it and the prose. The characters have no names. It's very atmospheric and it puts you in that world, which is not something you always want.

[Gilberto]

I just saw the movie and thought it was a really faithful adaptation. I never heard anyone say anything good about the book or the movie and that annoys me because I think both are grossly underrated.

[broox]

Uh, if you recall I said plenty of good things about the movie. Or do you mean you never heard anything from anyone important?

And also I believe Oprah put the book on her book club deally.

[Gilberto]

Points off for the book and the movie, then.

[Scary Gary]

I saw the film. It was well made and good for what it was. It is a very bleak story, so it is hard to praise it. It's almost like recommending getting socked in the gut by someone who delivers a premium punch.

As far as the book, I've avoided it due to the non-punctuation format. I appreciate it for the style, but don't know if I have the patience to try to read it. Maybe I'll have to do the audio route with it.

[Gilberto]

Dec 18, 2011 16:41:27 GMT -5 Scary Gary said:

It is a very bleak story, so it is hard to praise it. It's almost like recommending getting socked in the gut by someone who delivers a premium punch.

That's a very good way of saying it. I was in an apocalypse frame of mind because I was doing the revisions on my own book, which is why I finally got around to it, but as I get older I find that I don't gravitate towards art that is despairing. But I was surprised to find a message of hope hidden in this story, so I'd recommend it for that.

As for the punctuation, you quickly acclimate to the form because it plays out like an oral storytelling device. The lack of format (even to the point of no chapter breaks) expresses the bleakness of the story well. It's almost ergodic, like "House of Leaves". I read about ergodic literature on Wikipedia while researching that book. It doesn't specifically refer to the use of form as atmosphere, but instead to requiring a "nontrivial" effort on the part of the reader to traverse the text. It's a fascinating topic that gets very complex, but I'd like to do some more reading on it as a linguistic device.

You could say "The Road" is ergodic, but after a while the form is streamlined in the absence of punctuation which makes it easier to traverse, so in a sense it becomes the opposite of ergodic. It gives it a stream of consciousness sort of dreamlike feel that ultimately keeps you in the story.

It's worth it, but the movie was a really faithful adaptation, so you know most of the story already. The book tends to be a bit more gruesome in telling the story and more effective in the pacing, so I'd still say it's worth it.