books: 17 down, 7 to go: the road

The Road (Cormac McCarthy) - in masculine, Hemingwayesque prose that is often poetic in its fragmented simplicity - tells the story of a man and his son tenaciously clinging to survival, hope and one another set against a post-apocalyptic landscape. This book has gotten an awful lot of hype as of recent (as both a Pulitzer and a nod from Oprah will tend to do) and I'm not sure what I could say that hasn't already been said by countless others, so rather than ramble on, allow me to instead include two passages that together encapsulate everything that I found The Road to be: brutal, violent, and haunting, yet beautiful and tender all at once.

They scrabbled through the charred ruins of houses they would not have entered before. A corpse floating in the black water of a basement among the trash and rusting ductwork. He stood in a livingroom partly burned and open to the sky. The waterbuckled boards sloping away into the yard. Soggy volumes in a bookcase. He took one down and opened it and then put it back. Everything damp. Rotting. In a drawer he found a candle. No way to light it. He put it in his pocket. He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the interstate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common providence in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy, I have you.

Up Next: No One Belongs Here More Than You, by Miranda July