The Road Taken
May. 12th, 2008 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
niriniaGreat news, Katrine, I've finished The Road, and agree with you. It is blah. Terribly post-modernistic, in that it is a warning; in that he is scared of what we are doing to ourselves, our relationships, our world; in that there is very little punctuation; in that there are no names. And the list goes on. It is intriguing, as a piece of post-modernism. As a piece of writing, the work of a craftsman, it is not. Call me conservative, but I like my post-modernism with puncutation, thank you very much. I also enjoy my literature with well-crafted sentences, which McCarthy completely lacks.
The story is intriguing, and it was easily enough read for me to not throw a tantrum and refuse to finish it. But that is also it. I can't relish the writing, the soul-searching dialogue or the beautiful scenes. While a post-apocalyptic setting should perhaps rule out beauty, at least in the case of The Road, certain scenes had the capacity of heart-breaking beauty. It just didn't quite get there. The straight-forward, monotonous [fantastic word to type] prose is incapable of touching me as powerfully as the story has potential to do.
Myers wrote A Reader's Manifesto, and criticised American literature (Wikipedia article), and I agree with him on both Auster and McCarthy. I will have to get my hands on a copy of his essay. I have not yet read DeLillo, but have been drooling on his Underworld for a few years. And I think I might have found a new, wholly personal God in Myers, from what I've read of him. – Yes, I will admit that I am a nerd if you ask me to. And I want to read more literary criticism, it is.
And some educated person (I persume it is a man, for what it's worth) thinks The Road, is Post-Southerngothic. Another very interesting idea. I just have to print it out, in order to be able to read it properly.
Addendum: A Reader's Manifesto is apparently out of print, so I have to get it shipped from the US *headdesk*. But, abebooks have some very, very cheap copies. And, of course, some unnecessarily expensive ones.
(Excuse the awful pun in the title, it was, I am afraid, intended.) And I miss both New York and London.
And I found a limited edition, signed version of The Secret History.
The story is intriguing, and it was easily enough read for me to not throw a tantrum and refuse to finish it. But that is also it. I can't relish the writing, the soul-searching dialogue or the beautiful scenes. While a post-apocalyptic setting should perhaps rule out beauty, at least in the case of The Road, certain scenes had the capacity of heart-breaking beauty. It just didn't quite get there. The straight-forward, monotonous [fantastic word to type] prose is incapable of touching me as powerfully as the story has potential to do.
Myers wrote A Reader's Manifesto, and criticised American literature (Wikipedia article), and I agree with him on both Auster and McCarthy. I will have to get my hands on a copy of his essay. I have not yet read DeLillo, but have been drooling on his Underworld for a few years. And I think I might have found a new, wholly personal God in Myers, from what I've read of him. – Yes, I will admit that I am a nerd if you ask me to. And I want to read more literary criticism, it is.
And some educated person (I persume it is a man, for what it's worth) thinks The Road, is Post-Southerngothic. Another very interesting idea. I just have to print it out, in order to be able to read it properly.
Addendum: A Reader's Manifesto is apparently out of print, so I have to get it shipped from the US *headdesk*. But, abebooks have some very, very cheap copies. And, of course, some unnecessarily expensive ones.
(Excuse the awful pun in the title, it was, I am afraid, intended.) And I miss both New York and London.
And I found a limited edition, signed version of The Secret History.
