Friday, November 27, 2009

The Road

For years, friends have been critisizing me for having 'unclassy' inclination towards today's popular literatures. Meaning, I only read those tie-in books with soon-to be released Hollywood adaptation of them.

While there maybe a certain truth to that, I have to admit, I gravitate towards neat packages and great marketing. I believe great cover usually translates a great story - always judge a book by its cover (no matter how incredulous it sounds). So yeah, I guess maybe I am not that classy, so deal with it.

Anyhow, by being a little ahead of the movie premier, I got to complain, whine and point snoobishly to my friends, if and when, the movie version isn't as good or not up to my "expectations". Now, that feels good, isn't it?



So having said that, my current "squeeze"- in the most literature and Hollywood sense is - The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

The story is pretty simple. It follows a man and his son who are trying to get to the coast (where the 'good people' are) when the world has been burnt to the ground and the bad guys are trying to find and kill them.

And when I said 'simple', by golly, it really means simple. All the characters have no names or at least purposely never mentioned for the duration of the book. The book also never discussed what happened or caused the apocalyse and why. In this world, things are bleak. Really, really bleak, with the land bereft of nearly all plant and animal life. The only thing that get our hero going, is the love he has for his son, who by the way is too young to understand the calamity around him.

I think The Road is the book that has affected me more strongly than any other. In the most brutally bleak post-apocalypse scenario that could ever be envisioned, a father and son trying to stay alive, plodding on, weighed down by constant misery and fear because it's all they can do. Cormac McCarthy has broken pretty much all issues in life to their bare, terrible bones. Father and son, removed from all context of family or home, are like two dogs watching out for one another. Memories are everywhere and yet so distant.

There’s no why: whatever catastrophe took place is essentially unexplained, and it doesn’t matter anyway because the ruin of the world is so complete that they often seem out of recognizable time and space altogether.

And O yes, I got misty eyes, cough, cried once or twice not because seeing the death of humanity but rather foreseeing how Hollywood is gonna make out of this terribly fantastic take on life and yet managed to be so profound.

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