The Road by Cormac McCarthy

It's been a while since I planned to write about this book but today I've seen on the Boing Boing newsletter a link to the upcoming movie and I finally decided it was time.
The Road is a novel by the American writer Cormac McCarthy which takes place in a post-apocalyptic United States. It's the story of a father and his children struggling to survive on their journey towards the sea, a mirage of salvation in a world stripped of almost every glimpse of life.
The Road was awarded in 2006 with the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
I consider myself a sort of an avid reader and this is the second book I ever read in my whole life that was able to convey me such emotions to represent, literally, a mystic experience. I'm not joking here, I can hardly call The Road a book. It's more likeo an artifact capable to communicate with the most inner part of your self. As soon as you begin to read it you get caught in a way that has something of violent in it, you feel sometimes mentally raped; you are hit by such an emotional shock wave that you feel as if you're your world is spinning and you're losing contact with the reality beyond the book. This The Road made me feel desperation, grief, desolation and fear in such a way I can hardly say having ever felt in my life. Call me lame but at a certain point the image conveyed was so strong (perhaps because I'm a father also) that I had to shut the book in the middle of the night. I felt so disturbed that I had to move The Road away from my bed side and I felt stupid and prehistoric to act as if I had to exorcize the evil. Call me lame but I had nightmares for a whole week and I awaited three more before I felt enough comfortable to resume the reading.
As a book -a storytelling artifact- The Road is basically perfect. I don't feel comfortable to call it a work of art as because its very nature is so solid it appears as something that was never conceived, that was just there just like a rock fallen from the sky. The writing style is as barren and bleak as the world where father and son walks. The literary choices are engineered in way they are more than mere style operands, they're like code classes and functions which make the magic unravel.
The world is blasted. It's unclear what happened, it could have been a ecosystem collapse or a nuclear holocaust on a massive scale. The biosphere has gone, animals and plants have long since dead, dust has covered everything and it's whirling so thick that the sun is always covered. It's a cold bleak world. Humanity has barely managed to survive and most of the few human beings are wrecked bands of cannibals.
Realizing that they can't survive the upcoming winter, father and son decides to head towards the sea hoping to find some sort of comfort and unconsciously identifying it as the goal that makes the struggle, day after day, against the extinction constantly at their heels. The Road is full of symbolism. The father is the one which fights to protect the child and keep a walled defense of coherence against the waves of madness which repeatedly threats to overwhelm them. The child basically represents life. It's frail yet strong and so love radiating to represent even a risk to the couple own survival. They carry a gun with only two bullets which represents their last hope of salvation by committing suicide. They call themselves "the good guys" which are somehow saving the world from the "bad guys" by "carrying the fire" and they look for others of their species while they travel.
It's strange but the reader point of view is so intimate that you feel somehow like a ghost (maybe the one of the suicidal mother of the boy) which walk with them day after day, be with them as they scavenge waste and derelicted buildings in search of something to eat to prevent them from starvation. You feel you're cold sweating and panting as you're with them, crouching in the weeds trying to hide from cannibals.
You must buy The Road right now. Ask someone who owns a copy to lend it to you. Do what you can to grab this artifact then read it in the dead of the night and shiver and sob and cry. I assure you will never forget this experience.
I leave you with the trailer of the upcoming movie. At the moment I am unable to create an opinion on the base of what it shows. My sensation is that it could be a good movie but never something comparable to the book. I know everybody says that of movies based on books but if I was able to convey you even a glimpse of what is The Road or -better- you have read it, then you know what I mean. You can't recreate The Road, it'd be something like travelling through a star -physically- and then watch a movie depicting it.