November 15, 2006
Reading Queue . . .
I just finished Cormac McCarthy's latest book, The Road.
McCarthy sets this novel in a post-apocalyptic world of gray skies and little hope. It is a world where all animal life (save humans) is extinct, where death and starvation are not only pervasive elements of the landscape, they are all-encompassing.
Through this barren, ashen landscape, a weary man and his young son travel south in search of the coast. On the way, they scavenge for food and shelter, constantly avoiding groups of fellow survivors who would prey on them. The only thing that keeps them going is their love for one another.
This is typical McCarthy . . .Dennis Lehane, in his review, writes . . .
"McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith."
If you are a fan of McCarthy pick this one up!! It will take you back to the earlier works of McCarthy . . . dark and beautiful!!
Next up . . . . All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories by Edward P. Jones.
If this is ANYTHING like The Known World, it will be a pure joy to read.
It was truly one of the greatest works of fiction I have ever read!!
From Publisher Weekly . . .
Following the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Known World (2003), Jones offers a complex, sometimes somber collection of 14 short stories, four of which have appeared in the New Yorker. As in his previous collection of short fiction, Lost in the City (1992), Jones centers his storytelling on his native Washington, D.C. Here, though, Jones broadens his chronological scope to encompass virtually the entire 20th century and a wide range of experiences and African-American perspectives, from a man who has kept the secret of his adultery for 45 years, to another whose most difficult task on leaving prison for murder is having dinner with his brother's family.Often, Jones presents characters who have been away from the South long enough to mourn the loss of values and connections they traded for the too-often failed promise of urban success, but he also portrays the nation's capital as a place of potential redemption, where small curses and small miracles intertwine, and where shifting communities and connections can literally save one's life. Each of its denizens comes through with his own particular ways and means for survival, often dependent on chance, and rendered with unsentimental sympathy and force: "Caesar flipped the quarter. The girl's heart paused. The man's heart paused. The coin reached its apex and then it fell."
