The other day I got a spam mail from “Fentress Telling” who, in addition to having a name like a Jedi, sent me a mail entitled: “The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water.”
Do you know the source of this quote? It’s the last line of one of my favorite books.
I’ll not do a “he’s a little bit country, she’s a little bit rock-n-roll” comparison, but Oprah has chosen for her book club the sparse, scary, and beautiful as a razor blade novel “The Road” for her book club selection for the month as reported by the Chicago Tribune.
I’m still in awe of this book.
Much hay is being made of the “Will the Wally Lamb fan set” who adhere to the Prophetess of the Miracle Mile be willing to ditch the South Beach and Hoodia chick-lit to which they’ve been accustomed for a world so isolated, devoid, and scary?
Ultimately, The Road, for its post-apocalyptic setting and disturbing themes is a story of paternal love and adults’ search for meaning as thrown into stark relief against the innocent optimism of a child. The loneliness of the road is merely metaphor for that dark road we all have occasion to walk when the stars are hidden, our loved ones are sleeping, and we wonder if we are truly understood.
And the want of understanding is certainly something universal.
I headed back from San Jose yesterday and used the time to finish up Volume 3 of The Baroque Cycle: System of the World. I could do with a little less mass in my bookbag, so I’m glad to be finished with the work.
But it was an enjoyable undertaking: ideas, gold, and the tying up of several plot threads that ran for the previous 1700-odd pages. One of my biggest complaints about Stephenson’s work is that he can’t relieve the exciting frission of tension he builds up in the preceding pages.
He acquits himself, decently this outing. There are no ridiculous deus ex machina devices ( I’m looking at you Cryptonomicon ), but I can’t say that the climactic resolutions that you feel you’re owed all happen ( some do, some don’t quite, and some flat-out don’t ). Nevertheless, to see how it all ends up between The King of The Vagabonds, a wily duchess, and an alpha-geek, after you’ve made the commitment to the previous tomes makes reading the 3rd book a bit of a requirement. You owe it to yourself at that point.
I actually can’t say too much more, because to do so would ruin the experience of the other books, so I’ll remain mute and wait for The Social Bobcat to finish it off.
I also had a chance to pay attention to my recently purchased Morrissey live at Earl’s Court record. One of the highlights was his cover of Patti Smith’s incongruously boppy reggae song about a disappearance / suicide “Redondo Beach”. Past that, Morrissey’s voice has aged wonderfully, turning from a fair champagne lilt to a richer, wiser, VSOP cognac. I recommend it highly for Morrissey fans, Patti Smith fans, and the Venn intersection therebetween ( Looking at you Mice-man ).
That said, I’m off to Houston this week for training in Java. While I’m more into strange an edgy languages at the moment ( Erlang, Haskell, and Ruby ), it can’t hurt to know how to play in 4/4 time either.
Yesterday, while I had proof of residency and a lot of documentation on me, I headed down to the Austin Public Library and got a library card.
I checked out Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe. Wozniak mentioned the book being very inspirational to him. I figured it might be inspiring to me as well.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday I took the opportunity to read the autobiography of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, iWoz.
So I never got any exposure to religion. Church, mass, communion. What is that? Seriously I couldn’t tell you.
As for religion, if I asked, my dad would say, no, no, he was scientific. Science was the religion. We had discussions about science and truth and honesty, the first discussions of many that formed my values.
…I still believe engineers are among the key people in the world. And I believe that I will be one forever, and i have dedicated my whole life to engineering.
First things first, there is nothing manlier than the name Cormac McCarthy.
I think if it were that name stitched into a leather belt…
versus
…a Ford F150 with a poker table in the bed around which cowboys were drinking a case of Black Label while arguing over football while getting straightrazor shaved by strippers while puffing on Cuban stogies
…I think the name on the belt may have an edge.
If you have a last name that can bear that manly weight, then I beg you, give us more Cormac-en.
About The Road, it’s an unsentimental and very realistic portrayal about life after a global firestorm. Was it nuclear, asteroid, alien? No one knows, but the earth is now covered with a fine layer of ash which stirs ideograms of desolation into forgotten western landscapes.
A father, who has only bitter memories of a wife that seems to belong to another time, is taking his son down an interstate highway, pushing a shopping cart that carries the only tools that will help them survive.
Unlike Mad Max ( which actually presupposes an astonishingly developed model of civilization ) where Good and Evil face in pitched battle for the right to control the what-comes-next, “The Road” gives no such meaning to the apocalyptic landscape. There is the father, his son, their cart, their plastic tarp and the unending narration of their few miles gained each day.
They’re headed South from North where it’s just gotten too cold. I believe their path to be somewhere in Nevada through Northern California on into the Big Sur region. Along the way there are the inevitable highwaymen ( “road rats” ), rapists, shuffling dead, and agonizing hunger and thirst.
Yet the boy, who never knew anything of the world before, merely trudges on: curious, scared, sick, and gaunt.
The book features no chapter headings and no real sense of time. On this road there is no history of meaning, no future of value, and the present day is a routine in survival and walking.
I was stunned by the bare prose, verging on blank verse poetry.
The layout was also great and thoroughly assisted in the portrayal of the post-apocalyptic, vast, nothingness. With wide margins and ample line spacing the spartan presentation adds to the void and empty prose.
Picture is worth a thousand words:
Invariably I found myself asking what I would do in such a situation. I’ve always been a bit more into eschatology than people should be. When I was still a regular attendant of church services and the preachers were spouting nonsense I usually found myself reading those grim bits of insanity in the last chapter of the Bible. I suppose my Gnostic interests found their root there - in the symbology and transformational hidden content.
Where would one start? It seems that nothing grows? How would one catalyze an agricultural existence? It appears that all the wildlife perished in the great firestorm?
How would you begin? In light of that weight, how would you continue? Would you fight for botulized tins of old food, eat bark and hope not to get murdered in your sleep by roving brigands? What sort of world is that to live, is that truly a life? And what, pray tell, would help you go on?
It’s all very fine, heavy existential work that, as all questions of this sort do, touch on those fine works by Kierkergaard. In all, it was a fine book.
Upon posting my “Finished” response, Dedman asked the question that I ( consciously ) skirted the entire time: “Yeah, but did you like it?”.
Well, i think the plot was derivative, the setup failed to deliver, and there were a host of other problems but, yeah, I liked it.
I think that when the plot and structure sag, you can find a real sense of bliss is passages like this where the writing is ephemeral and beautiful:
That was what insomnia was, after all - an excess of consciousness, an excess of life…she couldn’t will herself to fall asleep. The only way to fall asleep was not to care whether you fell asleep or not: you had to relinquish your will. Most people seemed to think that you fall asleep and then started dreaming, but as far as Minny could tell, the process was exactly the reverse - you started dreaming and that enabled you to fall asleep.
These episodes of linguistic painting are one of the best reasons to read the book.
Dedman has been on my case for many moons now to read this book and I finished it today.
Setup
The dead move to a city (the city) after undergoing a crossing which has no objective standard (wandering a desert, a forest, going underwater, etc.). The dead or, more precisely, the living dead, rest in the city until those who remember them die at which point they go into a different beyond.
Good setup.
The population starts swelling as a pandemic wipes out the population: sending people into the city by the barrel-load and, given the setup, the people who remember them, into death quite quickly. Thus the city swells and then empties, with only a few hundred survivors wondering why they’re still there.
The reason is that they’re still remembered by the last person on earth who is trekking across Antarctica trying to find some contrary evidence to the inescapable conclusion: “I am the last person on Earth”.
…et La Peste
As I was reading this story I was more and more reminded of Camus’ The Plague, which contemplates how humans relate to one another as a city vanishes ( in this case, the much more pedestrian aspect of the population dying ). In Camus’ Oran we watch as the people we love vanish bubo-covered body by body. In this we have a much more mysterious Nothing that erases parts of the city ( appropriate for the generation that grew up to The Neverending Story ). In both of these scenarios the intractable end can’t be avoided, and against Camus l’Absurde, the characters find the Existentialists resolve to be good, to live a jubilant life ( or afterlife ), even when there’s no reason to it.
Some of the Amazon reviews seem to forget there is a beauty in Brockmeier’s style of delivery, a calm sort of collected sobriety with a Romantic nostalgia that was what I liked best of the sci-fi / horror / Gothic romance The Time Traveler’s Wife.
The Last Man
I’d also say that there’s a certain similitude between this book and Vonnegut’s amazing Cat’s Cradle. You can read more about that after the jump, I don’t want to spoil your read of Cat’s Cradle.
In all, a fine book, but I’d suggest you wait for paperback or a library rental. At 250 pages without much re-read value you might be best saving a few dollars.
I didn’t like it.
It’s not to say that Augusten Bourroughs can’t put a pretty funny spin on growing up with a mentally unhinged family, getting adopted by said mother’s psychotherapist’s family, and having a boyfriend double his age (!), but the tragicomedy loses its Royal Tenenbaum’s “Hey life is surreal and filled with crazy people!” feel quickly and moves into that sick to the stomach feeling that comes when someone is so desperate for attention he doesn’t know he’s being raped.
I suppose I had this coming, I was biased by the film trailer which promised something zany, quirky, insane, but not quite horrid. I was expecting drug experimentation, yelling matches, New England prep-school ennui, but sadly, these were only fleeting themes and instead I read the particularly horrible tale of a very unfortunate boy leading a very tragic existence.
I’m going to get into The Brief History of the Dead this afternoon to see if I can’t change the tenor.
It would appear that someone at Bookpeople has taken the position that children need more exposure to the Great Old Ones:
