Oprah has a new read! And you won’t believe the kind of book she chose this time. Unlike any other book she has ever chosen, it’s post-apocalyptic. It’s a fiction, and Oprah says after the last few books that she has suggested she wanted to go away from the nonfiction book this time.

And so, the book worthy of Oprah’s blessing is “The Roadby Cormac McCarthy”. I have to admit, that I wasn’t very familiar with his book, but I’ve already ordered my copy of The Roadon Amazon.

I must admit that I’m pretty disappointed in myself, for totally not even being aware of such a caliber of talent. I’m basing this of course in terms of all the praises that McCarthy has had in the literary world. But, hopefully, in two weeks, I will be introduced to the writings of this great writer. I say two weeks, because I am still in the beginning of reading two books at once (I will give you a heads up later on next week).

Here are some of the reviews of The Road

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Violence, in McCarthy’s postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a “long shear of light and then a series of low concussions” that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea. (The man’s wife, who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, has killed herself.) They carry blankets and scavenged food in a shopping cart, and the man is armed with a revolver loaded with his last two bullets. Beyond the ever-present possibility of starvation lies the threat of roving bands of cannibalistic thugs. The man assures the boy that the two of them are “good guys,” but from the way his father treats other stray survivors the boy sees that his father has turned into an amoral survivalist, tenuously attached to the morality of the past by his fierce love for his son. McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization’s slow death after the power goes out.

From The New Yorker
In his new novel, McCarthy exchanges the bleak Western setting of previous works for an even bleaker post-apocalyptic one. As usual, lawless space engenders violence, but here a nuclear holocaust has reduced everything to ash, mummifying all but a few unlucky souls, who must kill or be killed (and eaten). The main characters are a father and his son, who was born a few nights after the bombs fell. “We’re still the good guys,” the man repeatedly assures the boy as they scavenge their way south for the winter, trying to avoid “bad guy” survival techniques. Even by McCarthy’s standards, the horrors here—an infant “headless and gutted and blackening on the spit”—are extreme, and, deprived of historical context, his brutality can seem willful. But McCarthy’s prose retains its ability to seduce—the deathscape is “like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world”—and there are nods to the gentler aspects of the human spirit.
Copyright © 2006