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version seven. http://demongin.org |
The Road (2006)
Cormac McCarthy
Impression published on Wednesday, 2009-04-15 | Novel | 4 stars
Two things recommend McCarthy's post-apocalyptic vision: its brevity and its incredibly exacting style. This first point is easy to explain: the "novel" is short enough to read in an afternoon or on a short flight (and this is almost always a major "plus"). The second point takes a little more justification. Basically, when I praise McCarthy's "exacting style", I'm trying to credit him for writing an incredibly vivid, striking and engaging novel that really only deals with two characters and uses almost no punctuation beyond periods and commas (most of which are creative). It's an unusually well-written book that can completely eschew orthographic means of conveying meaning and most of the other trappings of an adventure novel and still be a page-turner. And this one, please believe, is a page-turner par excellence.
