There are those books..the kind of books that knock you out of the rut, after which you can't start reading anything for a long time. Books whose thoughts pop into your head over and over again, questions that continue to haunt you for months on end. This book is one of the best I've read in a while. The compactness, the atmosphere, the philosophy - it hooked me so much that I couldn't sit down and write a review the first time I read it. Well, this is attempt number..
Cormac McCarthy was an American novelist and playwright. He wrote twelve novels in the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres and also wrote plays and screenplays. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road, and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. His earlier Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time Magazine's poll of 100 best English-language books published between 1925 and 2005, and he placed joint runner-up for a similar title in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner. In 2009, Cormac McCarthy won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, a lifetime achievement award given by the PEN American Center.
What do we think about when we bring children into this world? Their bright future. That they will be better than us. That they will make our lives happier and we will try to make them happy.
But what if the child comes into a world covered in ashes, a cold and dull world where the sky is perpetually overcast and there are no birds or trees and the air and water are poisoned. A world where a mother is capable of eating her own child just to live a few more days.
We are all driven by hope. But how to live in a world where there is no hope?
The novel asks hard existential questions, leading readers to follow the father and son. Every moment they face danger: cold, hunger, disease, cruelty. They live their lives fighting for every day they live: to find shelter, to build a fire, to inspect an abandoned house, to avoid running into cannibals and robbers, to go, go, go.
Father and son become the perfect union. The boy prevents the man from despairing and losing the will to live, and the man lives so that the child may live. The son softens the father's cruelty and makes him more human in the most difficult moments. The man teaches the boy to survive, not to be naive and overly generous - in this world empathy can be deadly.
Fighting for life literally every day, they find the strength to remain human, support and care for each other, find a place for small joys, try not to give in to despair and learn to live in this world as if it had never been different.
Walking along this road together with father and son, against the backdrop of the landscapes of a lost world and destroyed civilization, one feels that there is still hope. It is alive as long as there are those who carry the fire.
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