
The Road
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Narrated by:
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Tom Stechschulte
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By:
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Cormac McCarthy
About this listen
Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2007
America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst this destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still, they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world of utter devastation.Bleak but brilliant, with glimmers of hope and humor, The Road is a stunning allegory and perhaps Cormac McCarthy's finest novel to date. This remarkable departure from his previous works has been hailed by Kirkus Reviews as a "novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth".
McCarthy, a New York Times best-selling author, is a past recipient of the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. He is widely considered one of America's greatest writers.
Check out more selections from Oprah's Book Club.©2006 M-71, Ltd. (P)2006 Recorded Books LLCListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"McCarthy's prose retains its ability to seduce...and there are nods to the gentler aspects of the human spirit." (The New Yorker)
"One of McCarthy's best novels, probably his most moving and perhaps his most personal...Every moment of The Road is rich with dilemmas that are as shattering as they are unspoken...McCarthy is so accomplished that the reader senses the mysterious and intuitive changes between father and son that can't be articulated, let alone dramatized...Both lyric and savage, both desperate and transcendent, although transcendence is singed around the edges...Tag McCarthy one of the four or five great American novelists of his generation." (Los Angeles Times Book Review)
Editorial Review
I hadn't cried in years before I heard this book. Cormac McCarthy's vocabulary is truly unparalleled, but you can tell he spends even more time crafting his characters and their stories than he does with words—which is really saying something.
—Michael D., Audible Editor
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Story
In a small apartment, Black and White, as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the menthough he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it.
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Wow
- By Wilfredo on 02-28-11
By: Cormac McCarthy
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Never Let Me Go
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.
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Be patient; it will pay off
- By Kc on 05-23-05
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
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I Am Legend
- By: Richard Matheson
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In I Am Legend, a plague has decimated the world, and those unfortunate enough to survive are transformed into blood-thirsty creatures of the night. Robert Neville is the last living man on earth. Everyone else has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville's blood. By day, he stalks the sleeping undead, by night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn.
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Superb!
- By Steven Casper on 01-24-08
By: Richard Matheson
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Swan Song
- By: Robert R. McCammon
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 34 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Facing down an unprecedented malevolent enemy, the government responds with a nuclear attack. America as it was is gone forever, and now every citizen - from the President of the United States to the homeless on the streets of New York City - will fight for survival. In a wasteland born of rage and fear, populated by monstrous creatures and marauding armies, earth's last survivors have been drawn into the final battle between good and evil, that will decide the fate of humanity.
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Simply an Amazing Story
- By Amanda H. on 06-21-12
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Middlesex
- By: Jeffrey Eugenides
- Narrated by: Kristoffer Tabori
- Length: 21 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
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Anything but middle.
- By Michael on 05-04-03
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Let the Right One In
- A Novel
- By: John Ajvide Lindqvist, Ebba Segerberg - translator
- Narrated by: Steven Pacey
- Length: 16 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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It is autumn 1981 when inconceivable horror comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenager is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last—revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day. But the murder is not the most important thing on his mind. A new girl has moved in next door—a girl who has never seen a Rubik’s Cube before, but who can solve it at once. There is something wrong with her, though, something odd.
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Disturbing, a modern Gothic Tale
- By Brian H. on 11-27-22
By: John Ajvide Lindqvist, and others
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East of Eden
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 25 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
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Why have I avoided this Beautiful Book???
- By Kelly on 03-25-17
By: John Steinbeck
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The Children of Men
- By: P. D. James
- Narrated by: David Case
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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The year is 2021. No child has been born for twenty-five years. The human race faces extinction. Under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiat, the Warden of England, the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the Warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere. That is, until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters. Suddenly his life is changed irrevocably as he faces agonising choices which could affect the future of mankind.
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Perfect Narrator for a Brilliant Satire
- By Peter Crawford on 12-11-15
By: P. D. James
BUT.
There was no background. No questions asked about nature or humanity. There were only 2 real characters, neither of which had names. There was no action, no plot, and almost no character development. In fact, the author seemed allergic to anything interesting. About 1/2 dozen times throughout the entire book, something of interest would start to happen. And in absolutely no time flat, the scenario was over and we were back to the trudging setting and starvation. It would all feel quite bleak if I weren't left so bored by the monotony.
The dialog structure was annoying and repetitive. Boy: 'Dad, I have a question unrelated to anything so that you can tell the reader what you want to say.' Dad: 'Here's what I want the reader to know.' Boy: 'That's what you want the reader to know?' Dad: 'That's what I want the reader to know.' Seriously, this was a large percentage of the dialog.
Props to the narrator. This book was all about tone and his was perfect in every way.
What was I supposed to get from this?
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Now I've listened to it, and even though the narrator is absolutely fantastic and the story relatively moving, I honestly felt like the author spent more time droning on and on using adjectives and adverbs which just didn't fit the nouns and verbs they were modifying.
To make things worse, McCarthy apparently doesn't feel the need to name his main characters, which is fine, I suppose, though I am more likely to care about a character that I can name, rather than "the man" or "the boy" over and over ad nauseam. Add to that the fact that he NEVER once distinguishes between "the man" = main character, and "the man" = various random encounter whilst on the road, and we have momentary contextual confusion as our brains try to sort out just which "the man" is doing or saying a thing. Even when there is no pointless third person, there are moments when the pronoun "he" is used without clarification of whether "he" is the man or the boy.
This was my first experience with Oprah's book list, and I have to say I'm disappointed, but not surprised. McCarthy has written a novel swallowed up by the "intellectual elite", which is to say he's an emperor in new clothes, and if we can't see them, we must be silly fools, though I'd be surprised if many of the people who laud this book really truly cared about it at all beyond earning the right to say "Why, yes, I read that masterpiece!".
Summary: Great narration. Decent character development. Vivid, though occasionally obscure descriptions. Gruesome, ghastly, and occasionally depressing - which, considering the setting, fit very well. Once you get past the author patting himself on the back for having a huge vocabulary (aka access to a thesaurus) it becomes easy to get lost in this sad world with these two lonesome drifters.
Disappointed but Not Surprised
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Very slow
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Finally, an author who has the talent, guts and vocabulary to tell this tale with plausibility. It will wake you up rather than put you to sleep.
Nihilistic
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Compelling
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Incredible and heartbreaking
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So dark
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Haunting
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The descriptions of the landscape are spare, apocalyptic, and vivid, like when the father and son walk past cars once caught in a conflagration, "The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts." The ubiquitous ash. The fallen husks of dead trees and the weeds falling to dust. The bones of animals, birds, and people. The colorful memories that are dangerous to recall and the awful nightmares that cannot be recounted aloud.
The journey of the unnamed father and son through the "shoals of ash" is mesmerizing. The father believes the son to be a kind of angel or son of God, though that may be the wishful and hallucinatory effect of starvation and illness. "He knew only that the child was his warrant." The relationship between the father and his son is almost unbearably poignant. The father fears and hopes so much for his precious son in such an extinct world. The son is dependent upon his father for life and companionship and learns vital things from him and in turn guides his father with his pure moral heart. They interact with honesty and love, "each the other's world entire." From the start of the book the father is wracked by a blood-spraying cough, and he wastes and weakens as the journey proceeds, and yet he always finds the strength to lead his son down the road. As he thinks at one point: "No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy, I have you."
The moments when the son forces his father to partake in some miraculous treat like a can of coke are moving. The scenes when the father tries to prevent his son from seeing some horrible sight, like a headless baby roasted on a spit, because "the things you put into your head are there forever," are harrowing. The moments when the son is upset and the father tries to reassure him and make him talk are powerful. The scenes where the father meticulously searches a house or boat for salvage are suspenseful: he could unveil a hell (a cellar full of naked people waiting to be eaten) or a "tiny paradise" (a storeroom full of stacks cans of food waiting to be eaten).
The novel is dark, yet it expresses desperate love and hope: the bond between parent and child, the need to do what is necessary without complaint, the wonder of doing good without context or reward, and the strange beauty amid horror: "Human bodies. Sprawled in every attitude. Dried and shrunken in their rotted clothes. The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.”
McCarthy's book stands apart from other post-apocalypse novels in its severity, its beauty, its darkness, its isolated father-son relationship (most other genre works depict a community maintaining and or rebuilding some form of civilization), its lack of explanation (most other genre works explain their holocausts as nuclear and or viral) and its idiosyncratic style. McCarthy writes elliptical, biblical, poetic prose marked by short sentences without verbs and grounded with simple words and afire with unusual ones (like "gryke," "illucid," "entabled," and "discalced") and illuminated by unexpected similes, such that any "like" may be a lamppost for epiphany, whether ironic ("They wandered through the rooms like skeptical house buyers") or sacred ("All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them"). And the dialogue is laconic, repetitive, and precise, because accurate communication is a matter of life or death and because anything the father and son say may be their last words.
We're going to be okay, aren't we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.
If there is a flaw in the novel, it may be that McCarthy doesn't seem to think much of women. The father and son have been abandoned by their wife/mother, who despaired and committed suicide: “I will not. I cannot.” And the man's memories of her are somehow unconvincing. This is a masculine book. But the man acts both father and mother for his son with great courage, resourcefulness, and tenderness.
Tom Stechschulte's reading of the novel is masterful: reading The Road as a book moved me, but listening to the audiobook made me cry.
I recommend The Road to parents or to people who want to imagine being parents, to people who like the post-apocalypse genre and condensed epic novels, to people who like style as much as story, and, of course, to fans of McCarthy.
If only my heart was stone
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I enjoyed this reading very much.
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