I am going to cheat here a little bit…instead of writing my thoughts about the book I am going to share part of a review and a quote from the book.
All I can really say is that this book moved me fundamentally. To this day when I think about I am left with a distinct feeling. The writing is as beautiful as it is haunting.
Review (from Bookclub)
“The Road” is a work of stunning, savage, heartbreaking beauty. Set in the post-apocalyptic hell of an unending nuclear winter, Cormac McCarthy writes about a nameless man and his young son, wandering through a world gone crazy; bleak, cold, dark, where the snow falls down gray; moving south toward the coast, looking somewhere, anywhere, for life and warmth. Nothing grows in this blasted world; people turn into cannibals to survive. We don’t know if we’re looking at the aftermath of a nuclear war, or maybe an extinction level event – an asteroid or a comet; McCarthy deliberately doesn’t tell us, and we come to realize it doesn’t matter anyway. Whether man or nature threw a wild pitch, the world is just as dead.
Quote from the Book
“In the morning they came out of the ravine and took to the road again. He’d carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.”