i'm a very very complex person

I finished The Road yesterday. There is so much about this book that is incredibly powerful. I’ve heard people describe it as depressing, but my emotional response was by far one of horror rather than depression. I would sit up at night reading it in my comfortable living room in my pleasant apartment, and I would gradually find myself fully wrapped in McCarthy’s world of blackness and cold, where people crawl like ants across a wasted landscape in which the threat of violence is immanent. There were images in this book that filled me with a sickening dread: the emaciated people locked in a basement, the nightmare army that passes on the road with their scraps of red fabric and lengths of pipe. The whole book has the quality of a nightmare, emphasized by McCarthy’s fragmentary prose and the very short segments of narrative, but this is a nightmare that I found all too easy to believe. McCarthy says that he wrote this book after a visit to Austin, TX during which he stood at the window of his hotel room with his young son sleeping behind him, and looked out and imagined what the city would look like in 50 or 100 years. He saw Austin a burned-out ruin, with ominous fires burning on the ridges outside the city. It is a despairing vision, to be sure, but one that seemed frighteningly plausible to me. I was perpetually tense while reading, afraid for the fate of the father and son who seem always so close to death, but I also couldn’t help wondering about myself in the world of the book: How long would it take me to die? What would I have to endure before I did?

For everything in the book that provoked horror in me, there were also many tiny moments that were heartbreaking. Many of the moments between the father and son fall into this category, both those that demonstrate that tenderness still exists in this world and those in which tenderness fails, but perhaps the thing that moved me most was a passing reference to Baucis and Philemon. That the father is a man who knows a story from Ovid, that he thinks of it even in these extreme circumstances, that somehow this pretty little myth has survived and been carried forward into this shattered world—it made me want to cry.

I don’t know what to think of the ending of the book. As I was reading I couldn’t imagine how McCarthy would end his story, and when the ending came I found I couldn’t quite credit it. After being steeped for so long in fear, desperation, and suspicion, I can’t believe that it should be so simple. And is it so simple? I don’t know what I’m supposed to make of the ending; it seems in some ways to undermine what has gone before, but the only alternatives are complete devastation or no ending at all.

Whatever reservations I have about the ending, this is a book that’s worth reading. McCarthy is fearless in pursuing his vision, going farther and farther into everything that is bleak and grim, refusing to soften his language or turn his eye away from the horror. And his language! Amazing precision! I had to turn to the dictionary a few times in this book, and every time I did I found that McCarthy had discovered the single perfect word for his purpose. It’s an amazing book, one that actually lives up to its hype, and the most absorbing thing I’ve read in a very long time.

I am still working on All the Pretty Horses. It's been going kind of slowly, mostly because I've been pretty busy with other things, trying to get ready to go home for Thanksgiving and get everything wrapped up at work so that I can afford to take the five-day weekend that I'm going to take! I've also been reading slowly because this is definitely proving itself to be a book that needs to be savored. It's such a brutal but beautiful story, written in prose that is equally brutal and beautiful. Look at this passage that I read this morning:

The sky was dark and a cold wind ran through the bajada and in the dying light a cold blue cast had turned the doe's eyes to but one thing more of things she lay among in that darkening landscape. Grass and blood. Blood and stone. Stone and the dark medallions that the first flat drops of rain caused upon them. [...] He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

I don't think I can say anything more than that.

I finished A Home at the End of the World, and it remained excellent right up to the end. I can't say that the ending turned out exactly the way I wanted it to, plot-wise, but it was still a great book. Probably a better book simply because it didn't turn out the way I wanted it to.

And now I've just started All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. I've hardly read any of it, so I can't say much yet, but it does look like it's going to be hard work. McCarthy likes extremely long sentences, and seems to almost completely disdain punctuation. This creates an interesting rhythm, but also means that I sometimes get to the period with no recollection of what the sentence about when it started and no understanding of how it got from there to where it ended up. It kind of reminds me of reading Faulkner, not only because the sentences are so long and complicated, but also because I'm having difficulty figuring out exactly who all the people are and how they relate to each other. I don't mind this kind of difficulty, though. I find it fun to read carefully and try to puzzle out how it all fits together... Every once in a while it's nice to read a book that makes you work.