영성, 몸-마음, 젠더, 생태, 평화 Scapbook

2018/09/23

The Road by Cormac McCarthy | Goodreads

Want to Read

Rate this book
1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Preview

The Road

by
Cormac McCarthy
3.96 · Rating details · 610,928 Ratings · 41,311 Reviews
A searing, post apocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits ...more

GET A COPY
Kobo
Online Stores ▾
Book Links ▾

Hardcover, 241 pages
Published September 26th 2006 by Knopf
Original Title
The Road
ISBN
0307265439 (ISBN13: 9780307265432)
Edition Language
English
Characters
The man, The boy
setting
United States of America

Literary Awards
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2007), James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction (2006), The Quill Award for General Fiction (2007), Puddly Award for Fiction (2010), National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Fiction (2006) ...more

Other Editions (75)

All Editions | Add a New Edition | Combine ...Less Detail edit details

Edit MY ACTIVITY

Review of ISBN 9780307265432
Rating
1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Shelves to-read
edit
( 188th )
Format Hardcover edit
Status

September 22, 2018 – Shelved as: to-read

September 22, 2018 – Shelved
Review Add a review

comment

FRIEND REVIEWS
Recommend This Book None of your friends have reviewed this book yet.

READER Q&A
Ask the Goodreads community a question about The Road

Britt Badgley alamo not at all. In fact, this book makes you want to live.
flag
Would you say this book is appropriate for a 15 year old boy? He needs something for an English essay that he can read independently and compare to its movie version. Thoughts or recommendations on something better would be appreciated.

10 Likes · Like
4 Years Ago
See All 27 Answers

Rylee Well I'm 13 and I didn't kill myself after reading it so yeah
flag
See all 34 questions about The Road…

LISTS WITH THIS BOOK

Best Books Ever

52,797 books — 185,108 voters

Best Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

3,020 books — 23,168 voters

More lists with this book...

COMMUNITY REVIEWS
(showing 1-30)
Rating details

Sort: Default
|
Filter

Apr 01, 2008 J.G. Keely rated it did not like it
Recommended to J.G. Keely by: Mother
Shelves: novel, fiction, reviewed, post-apocalyptic, america
The Road is unsteady and repetitive--now aping Melville, now Hemingway--but it is less a seamless blend than a reanimated corpse: sewn together from dead parts into a lumbering, incongruous whole, then jolted to ignoble half-life by McCarthy’s grand reputation with Hollywood Filmmakers and incestuous award committees.

In '96, NYU Professor Alan Sokal submitted a paper for publication to several scientific journals. He made it so complex and full of jargon the average person wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it. He wrote a conclusion that would deliberately flatter the preconceptions of the journals he submitted it to. As he predicted, it was accepted and published, despite the fact that it was all complete nonsense.

The Sokal Affair showed the utter incompetence of these trusted judges. They were unable to recognize good (or bad) arguments and were mostly motivated by politics. The accolades showered upon works like The Road have convinced me that the judges of literature are just as incompetent (and I’m not the only one who thinks so). Unlike Sokol, McCarthy didn't do it purposefully, he just writes in an ostentatiously empty style which is safe and convenient to praise.

Many have lauded his straightforward prose, and though I am not the most devoted fan of Hemingway, I can admire the precision and economy of a deliberate, economical use of words. Yet that was not what I got from The Road:

"He took out the plastic bottle of water and unscrewed the cap and held it out and the boy came and took it and stood drinking. He lowered the bottle and got his breath and he sat in the road and crossed his legs and drank again. Then he handed the bottle back and the man drank and screwed the cap back on and rummaged through the pack. The ate a can of white beans, passing it between them, and he threw the empty tin into the woods.

Then they set out down the road again."
Simple? Yes. Precise and purposeful? Hrdlt. The Road is as elegant as a laundry list (if not as well punctuated). Compiling a long and redundant series of unnecessary descriptions is not straightforward, but needlessly complicated.

We're supposed to find this simplicity profound--that old postmodern game of defamiliarization, making the old seem new, showing the importance of everyday events--but McCarthy isn't actually changing the context, he's just restating. There is no personality in it, no relationship to the plot, no revealing of the characters.

Perhaps it is meant to show their weariness: they cannot even muster enough energy to participate in their own lives, but is the best way to demonstrate boredom to write paragraphs that bore the reader? A good writer can make the mundane seem remarkable, but The Road is too bare to be beautiful, and too pointless to be poignant.

Once we have been lulled by long redundancy, McCarthy abruptly switches gears, moving from the plainness of Hemingway to the florid, overwrought figurative language of Melville:

"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."
There is no attempt to bridge the two styles, they are forced to cohabitate, without rhyme or reason to unite them. In another sentence he describes'dead ivy', 'dead grass' and 'dead trees' with unerring monotony, and then as if adding a punchline, declares them 'shrouded in a carbon fog'--which sounds like the world's blandest cyberpunk anthology.

Another example:

"It's snowing, the boy said. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire like the last host of christendom."
McCarthy seems to be trying to reproduce the morbid religious symbolism of Melville when he plays the tattered prophet in Moby Dick. But while Melville's theology is terribly sublime and pervasive, McCarthy's is ostentatious and diminutive, like a carved molding in an otherwise unadorned room. Nowhere does he produce the staggeringly surreal otherworldliness Melville achieves in a line like "There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within".

Often, McCarthy's gilded metaphors are piled, one atop the other, in what must be an attempt to develop an original voice, but which usually sounds more like the contents of a ‘Team Edward’ notebook, left behind after poetry class:

". . . Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. . . ."
I love how he prefaces that like an Asimov robot. Sardonic Observation: I'd almost believe he was one, since he has no understanding of beauty or human emotion. Biting Quip: However, he violates Asimov's first law, since his awkward prose harms human ears.

Sometimes, smack in the middle of a detailed description of scraping paint with a screwdriver, we suddenly get a complex jargon term which few readers would understand. These terms are neither part of the world, nor are they aspects of specialized character knowledge, so I cannot assign them any meaning in the text.

One of the basic lessons for any beginning writer is 'don't just add big words because you can', it's self-indulgent and doesn't really help the story. It would be one thing if it were a part of some stylistic structure instead of bits of out-of-place jargon that conflict with the overall style of the book--more textual flotsam for us to wade through.

The longer I read, the more mirthlessly dire it became, and the less I found I could take it seriously. Every little cluster of sentences left on its own as a standalone chapter, every little two-word incomplete sentence trying to demand importance because it actually had punctuation (a rare commodity), every undifferentiated monosyllabic piece of non-dialogue like a hobo talking to himself--it all made the book overblown and nonsensical.

It just stared me down, like a huge drunk guy in a bar daring me to laugh at his misspelled tattoo. And I did. I don't know if my coworkers or the people on the bus knew what 'The Road' was about (it was years before the movie), but they had to assume it was one hilarious road, with a busfull of nuns hiding a convict in disguise on the run from a bumbling southern sheriff and his deputy; a donkey is involved.

Without mentioning specifics, I will say the notorious ending of the book is completely tacked on, in no way fits with or concludes any of the emotional build of the book, but instead wraps up, neat and tight. It certainly bears out McCarthy's admission on Oprah that he "had no idea where it was going"when he wrote it. We can tell, Cormac.

As you may have noticed from the quotes, another notorious issue is the way the book is punctuated, which is to say, it isn't. The most complex mark is the a rare comma. It's not like McCarthy is only using simple, straightforward sentences, either---he fills up on conjoined clauses and partial sentence fragments, he just doesn't bother to mark any of them.

He also doesn't use any quotes in the books, and rarely attributes statements to characters, so we must first try to figure out if someone is talking, or if it's just another snatch of 'poetic license', and then determine who is talking. Sure, Melville did away with quotes in one chapter in Moby Dick, but he did it in stylistic reference to Shakespeare, and he also seemed to be aware that it was a silly affectation best suited to a ridiculous scene.

It's not only the structure, grammar, figurative language, and basic descriptions which are so absurdly lacking: the characters are likewise flat, dull, and repetitive. Almost every conversation between the father and son is the same:

Father: Do it now.
Son: I'm scared.
Father: Just do it.
Son: Are we going to die?
Father: No.
Son: Are you sure?
Father: Yes.
Remember, you won't get little tags so you know who's speaking, it'll all just be strung out in a line without differentiation. Then they wander around for a bit or run from crazy people, and we finally get the cap to the conversation:

Son: Why did (terrible thing) just happen?
Father: (Stares off in silence)
Son: Why did (terrible thing) just happen?
Father: (More silence)
And that’s it, the whole relationship; it never changes or grows. Nor does it seem to make much sense. The characters are always together, each the other's sole companion: father and son, and yet they are constantly distant and at odds, like a suburban parent and child who rarely see each other and have little in common. McCarthy never demonstrates how such a disconnect arose between two people who are constantly intimate and reliant on one another.

But then, McCarthy confided to Oprah that the is book about his relationship with his own son, so it makes sense why the emotional content is completely at odds with the setting. Perhaps he just sat down one say and thought “I’m an award-winning author and screenwriter who has a somewhat distant relationship with my son. You know what that’s like? That’s like the unendurable physical suffering of people in the third world who are trying to find food and escape crazed, murderous mobs.” So then he wrote a book equating the two, which is about the most callous, egotistical act of privileged self-pity a writer can indulge in.

At least now I know why the characters and their reactions don’t make much sense. The boy is constantly terrified, and his chief role involves pointing at things and screaming, punctuating every conflict in the book, like a bad horror film. Cannibals and dead infants are an okay (if cliche) place to start when it comes to unsettling the reader, but just having the characters react histrionically does not build tension, especially when the characters are too flat to be sympathetic in the first place. Another Creative Writing 101 lesson: if you have to resort to over-the-top character reactions to let the audience know how they are supposed to feel, then your 'emotional moment' isn't working. It's the literary equivalent of a laugh track.

You know what’s more unsettling than a child screaming when he finds a dead infant? A child not screaming when he finds a dead infant. And really, that’s the more likely outcome. The young boy has never known another world--his world is death and horror. Anyone who has seen a picture of a Rwandan boy with an AK can see how children adapt to what’s around them. And you know what would make a great book? A father who remembers the old world trying to prevent his son from becoming a callous monster because of the new one.

But no, we get a child who inexplicably reacts as if he’s used to the good life in suburbia and all this death and killing is completely new to him, even though we’ve watched him go through it half a dozen times already. The characters never grow numb to it, they never seem to suffer PTSD, their reactions are more akin to angst.

Every time there is a problem, the characters just fold in on themselves and give up. People really only do that when they have the luxury of sitting about and ruminating on what troubles them. When there is a sudden danger before us, we might run, or freeze, but there’s hardly time to feel sorry for ourselves.

There is no joy or hope in this book--not even the fleeting, false kind. Everything is constantly bleak. Yet human beings in stressful, dangerous situations always find ways to carry on: small victories, justifications, or even lies and delusions. The closest this book gets is ‘The Fire’, which is the father’s term for why they must carry on through all these difficulties. But replace ‘The Fire’ with ‘The Plot’ and you’ll see what effect is achieved: it’s not character psychology, but authorial convenience. Apparently, McCarthy cannot even think of a plausible reason why human beings would want to survive.

There is nothing engaging about a world sterilized of all possibility. People always create a way out, even when there is none. What is tragic is not a lack of hope, but misplaced hope. I could perhaps appreciate a completely empty world as a writing exercise, but as McCarthy is constantly trying to provoke emotional reactions, he cannot have been going for utter bleakness.

The Road is a canvas painted black, so it doesn't mater how many more black strokes he layers on top: they will not stand out because there is no contrast, there is no depth, no breaking or building of tension, just a constant addition of featureless details to a featureless whole. Some people seem to think that an emotionally manipulative book that makes people cry is better than one that makes people horny--but at least people don’t get self-righteous about what turns them on.

This is tragedy porn. Suburban malaise is equated with the most remote and terrible examples of human pain. So, dull housewives can read it and think‘yes, my ennui is just like a child who stumbles across a corpse’, and perhaps she will cry, and feel justified in doing so. Or a man might read it and think ‘yes, my father was distant, and it makes me feel like I live alone in a hostile world I don’t care to understand’; he will not cry, but he will say that he did.

And so the privileged can read about how their pain is the same as the pain of those starving children they mute during commercial breaks. In the perversity of modern, invisible colonialism--where a slave does not wash your clothes, but builds the machine that washes them--these self-absorbed people who have never starved or had their lives imperiled can think of themselves as worldly, as ‘one with humanity’, as good, caring people.

They recycle. They turn the water off when they brush their teeth. They buy organic. They even thought about joining the Peace Corps. Their guilt is assuaged. They are free to bask in their own radiant anguish.

And it all depresses me--which makes me a shit, because I’m no more entitled to it than any other well-fed, educated winner of the genetic lottery. So when I read this book, I couldn’t sympathize with that angst and think it justified, just like I couldn’t with Holden’s. I know my little existential crisis isn’t comparable to someone who has really lost control of their life, who might actually lose life.

But this kind of egotistical detachment has become typical of American thought, and of American authors, whose little, personal, insular explorations don't even pretend to look at the larger world. Indeed, there is a self-satisfied notion that trying to look at the world sullies the pure artist.

And that 'emotionally pure, isolated author' is what we get from the Oprah interview. Sure, she's asking asinine questions, but McCarthy shows no capacity to discuss either craft or ideas, refusing to take open-ended questions and discuss writing, he instead laughs condescendingly and shrugs. Then again, he may honestly not have much insight on the topic.

Looked at in this way, it's not surprising he won the Pulitzer. Awards committees run on politics, and choosing McCarthy is a political decision--an attempt to declare that insular, American arrogance is somehow still relevant. But the world seems content to move ahead without America and its literature, which is why no one expects McCarthy--or any American author--to win a Nobel any time soon.

This book is a paean to the obliviousness of American self-importance in our increasingly global, undifferentiated world. One way or the other, it will stand as a testament to the last gasp of a dying philosophy: either we will collapse under our own in-fighting and short-sightedness, or we will be forced to evolve into something new and competitive--a bloated reputation will carry you only so far.

But then, the Pulitzer committee is renowned for picking unadventurous winners--usually an unremarkable late entry by an author past their prime. As William Gass put it:

"the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill"
To any genre reader, this book will have a familiar and unpleasant taste, the same one LeGuin has often lamented: that of the big name author slumming. They pop into fantasy or sci fi with their lit fic credentials to show us little folk 'how it's really done'--but know nothing about the genre or its history, and just end up reinventing the wheel, producing a book that would have been tired and dated thirty years ago. Luckily for such writers, none of their lit fic critics know anything about other genres--any sort of bland rehash will feel fresh to them, as long as you have the name-recognition to get them to look in the first place.

So, McCarthy gets two stars for a passable (if cliche) script for a sci fi adventure movie, minus one star for unconscionable denigration of human suffering. I couldn't say if McCarthy's other books are any good; I will probably try another, just to see if any part of his reputation is deserved, but this one certainly didn't help. All I see is another author who got too big for his editors and, finding himself free to write whatever he wanted--only proved that he no longer has anything worth saying.

"Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are merely lists ... Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's ... not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world ... most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?"

-David Foster Wallace
(less)
flag 1062 likes · Like · 828 comments · see review

Mar 03, 2009 Jason rated it liked it
This wasn't nearly as funny as everybody says it is.
flag 779 likes · Like · 100 comments · see review

Feb 19, 2008 Scott rated it it was amazing
I really feel compelled to write up a review of McCarthy's The Road as this book really worked for me (for those of you who haven't read it, there are no real spoilers below, only random quotes and thematic commentary). I read it last night in one sitting. Hours of almost nonstop reading. I found it to be an excellent book on so many levels that I am at a loss as to where to begin. It was at once gripping, terrifying, utterly heart-wrenching, and completely beautiful. I have read most of McCarthy's other books and am already a big fan, but this one is different, perhaps his best in terms of lean, masterful prose, plot presentation, and flat-out brilliant storytelling.

Take this passage for example: "The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle." Happy times! The word choice and imagery is classic McCarthy yet is leaner and more honed, tighter and in turn more intense. The whole book follows this pattern. No word, not a single one, is extraneous. This is perhaps my favorite single sentence in the book: "By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp." I just love that.

Clearly this book struck a chord with me due to the two protagonists and their predicament, a father and his young son struggling in a post-apocalyptic world. To say I could identify with their interactions would be a huge understatement. McCarthy absolutely nails their dialog, making me marvel at how well he has mastered presenting on a page the way we communicate (it isn't exactly how we talk, of course, it just seems that way. Through some sort of magic, he writes dialog that comes across more realistically than actual dialog. Witchcraft for sure.). The young son was especially well done and was most certainly the most complicated character in the book. McCarthy presents him as a sort of supernatural being (Christ figure?), of only the best sort, full of goodness, a thing not of the world in which he finds himself. He is effortlessly drawn down the path of the righteous throughout the book, as if he is God's right hand man. The reward appears, at least superficially, to be key moments of luck.

It almost wouldn't work from a literary standpoint if it didn't serve so well as a vehicle to reinforce the central theme of the book: the undeniable power of love over all else. The theme of love, mostly presented through the bond of the father and son, is so well done as to evoke strong emotions, even now, as I consider how to present its keen development throughout the novel. To be so desperate, in every way and at all times, and yet to survive and at times thrive, to persevere through terrible events of unbelievable horror (think Steven King's The Stand on steroids) would strike feelings of great, sad compassion in even the most tempered soul. But it is much more than that of course. Consider this passage, a speaking passage from father to son, spoken during one of the most tense and horrifying scenes in the book: "You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?" In this one passage, McCarthy shows the great contradiction in this theme of love, the idea that violence and beauty can spring fourth from the same well, can come from the same fountainhead. Interestingly, the father often resorts to violence in his role as a servant of love (he sees it as his duty, in a religious sense, as stated in the quote). Yet the boy never does and appears better for it, in so many ways, even in that terrible place. He is the embodiment of pure goodness, and sets up the other, better side of love, the side that is unsullied by the world, that never resorts to baseness and violence, that finds beauty in even to most unlikely of places. Like seeing a picture better when you hold it up to the light, the contrasts between these two sides is masterfully provided, page after page, in only the most well written and considered prose.

The often repeated promethean phrase "carrying the fire," agreed upon by the two protagonists as pretty much the whole point of their continuing, embodies this central theme. The boy is carrying the fire for us all, and is perhaps the most important survivor in that shattered world, bearing the torch of love for humanity to share when it is again ready. Not to belabor the point, but the way McCarthy handles this, all the way until the end, is nothing short of genius. Can you tell I liked the book yet? I am amazed that I missed this book for so long, me being a huge McCarthy fan and placing him squarely at the top of the "big four" (with DeLillo, Roth, and Pynchon). The book is so "it's own" that as soon as I felt myself feeling an influence (for example, I swore I smelled Hemmingway's Old Man and the Sea in terms of prose/theme, and the more terrifyingly cruel parts at times rang so much like Kosinski's The Painted Bird ), McCarthy would insert the perfect McCarthyism, solidly planting the flag (so to speak) of a phrase or sentence into the passage to claim it forever for himself, like a prosaic explorer figuratively pushing out into the unknown through deft assemblages of words and phases impossible to all but him (ok, that metaphor was way too much….time to wrap it up). Of course I have more to say but am beginning to risk (actually have already thoroughly risked) repeating myself and sounding like some deranged, McCarthy stalker-type. Check this one out. It is superior literature. (less)
flag 509 likes · Like · 33 comments · see review

Jan 20, 2009 Evan rated it it was ok
Shelves: pulitzer-prize, 2009-reads, none-too-good, scifi-utopia-dystopia, oprah,parody-review
He palmed the spartan book with black cover and set out in the gray morning. Grayness, ashen. Ashen in face. Ashen in the sky.

He set out for the road, the book in hand. Bleakness, grayness. Nothing but gray, always.

He was tired and hungry. Coughing. The coughing had gotten worse. He felt like he might die. But he couldn't die. Not yet.

The boy depended on him.

He walked down the road, awaiting the creaking bus. It trundled from somewhere, through the gray fog. The ashen gray fog.

He stepped aboard, ...more
flag 443 likes · Like · 65 comments · see review

Jun 18, 2008 Maren rated it did not like it
I'm a terrible person because I didn't really like "The Road" and I'm not sure how I feel about Cormac McCarthy. Honestly, I think there's something wrong with me.

I just finished reading "The Road" today - it only took a couple of hours to get through, because it's not that long a book, and I think it was a good way to read it because I felt really immersed in the story, which is told like one long run-on nightmare of poetic import. The characters don't get quotation marks when they speak, and for some reason McCarthy also does away with the apostrophes in words like "couldn't" and "shouldn't" - I'm still not really sure why that was necessary, it seemed a little unjustified.

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world but the apocalypse itself is never really described or explained. I still don't really know why the world is the way it is as the story begins, other than that everything suddenly started burning and there are few survivors. What survivors remain are generally split into "good guys" and "bad guys" - the good guys are just trying to get by and the bad guys usually kill and eat people and steal their things. A man and his boy are walking south, yet we never really know why - to get to what? Even the man, whose plan this is, never explains the rationale more than once when he thinks that it will be warmer there. We're meant to think that they're in America, I think, only there's little indicators of an American world or otherwise. At one point, near the end of the book, most of the artifacts they find are written in Spanish, which led me to think they had made it to Mexico possibly, but it still snows there, I think, which would be unusual.

In other words, there are few concrete details, and a lot of small conversations between the man and the boy - the man usually says "we have to keep going" or "we have to stay" and the boy says "i'm scared" or "don't leave me" and the man says "Don't be scared" or "Okay". That was probably my biggest frustration with the book - the mundane repetitiveness of the dialogue. While many will argue that that criticism is *exactly what the author intended* (along with the amorphous location and lack of details) in order to bring about the black ethos of the novel's post-apocalypse, I just felt like it made for an uninteresting read.

The language is definitely poetic and it's peppered with abstract observations about the world or life or death, but I wasn't very moved by them or the story. I didn't feel like I got to know the characters any better as the story went along - they remained distant to me emotionally, endless travelers that I could empathize with (as you would empathize with any soul wandering a post-apocalyptic desert) but I didn't really feel close to anything that happened because the narrative's disjointed and abstract tone just pushed me away as much as it made me reflect on apocalypse.

I read José Saramago's novel, "Blindness" a year or two ago and, to be honest, felt that it dealt with mass epidemic of an apocalyptic nature in a much more convincing, original and powerful way. It contains language of stunning beauty, dialogue that lacks distinction and punctuation, and dire situations but the characters are infinitely more real, more compelling and the situations far more disturbing. What McCarthy only hints at, Saramago dares to depict throughout "Blindness".

So, like I said, I'm sure I'm a terrible person and there's just something that I'm not getting, but I was really disappointed by "The Road" and generally find McCarthy and unenjoyable read. (less)
flag 347 likes · Like · 77 comments · see review

Apr 19, 2017 Bookdragon Sean rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: 4-star-reads, contemporary-lit, darkness-horror-gothic
The Road is a truly disturbing book; it is absorbing, mystifying and completely harrowing. Simply because it shows us how man could act given the right circumstances; it’s a terrifying concept because it could also be a true one.

It isn’t a book that gives you any answers, you have to put the pieces together and presume. For whatever reason, be it nuclear war or environmental collapse, the world has gone to hell. It is a wasteland of perpetual greyness and ash. Very little grows anymore, and the air itself is toxic. The survivors are made ill by their surroundings, physically, mentally and spiritually. They cough and splutter, they struggle to carry on and lack the will to live. Civilisation has completely collapsed, but its remnants remain: the roads remain.

“On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.”

Thus, the man and the boy (that’s the only names we are ever given for them) walk down them. They communicate rarely, when they do it is bare and in seemingly inane phrases. At times, especially at the start of the book, when no sense of history orr time were relayed, the conversation was highly reminiscent of that in Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. The exchanges had little to no point and were totally lacking in any substance, as the two central characters longed for something that seemed out of reach.

It’s a brave narrative device, one that seems to have put off many readers. But it also articulates much about the psychological states of the man and the boy. There’s just not that much to talk about when you live in a world where you’re under constant threat from roaming gangs of cannibals catching you, dying of starvation and perhaps even exposure along with the knowledge that you will have to kill your son should the said cannibals finally catch up with you. Not to mention the sheer level of trauma and stress both characters are operating under. Staying alive is all that matters, wasting energy on words in such a situation is fruitless where you barely have the strength to walk down the road for another day.

“What's the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.”

A dark and seemingly hopeless story unfolds. The farther and son are travelling to the beach, a distance of several hundred miles. With them they push all their worldly possessions, and resources, in a shopping cart. Such a journey seems like a fool’s errand. But what other choice do they have? The two cling onto something, a fire, a hope, that life can somehow get better. And then it continued to burn even after the mother has killed herself. This, for me, captures a large part of the human psyche: an indomitable will to survive.

The Road is suffocating; it is claustrophobic and it is entrapping. What McCarthy shows us, is that no matter how shit human society may become (has already become?) it will always have the possibility of rejuvenation. There is light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. The entire novel is an allegory, one that is not revealed until the final few pages.

“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.” (less)
flag 266 likes · Like · 25 comments · see review

Apr 21, 2014 Glenn Russell rated it it was amazing

The view that there are two independent, primal forces in the universe, one good and one evil, is called dualism. According to dualism, the good God does the best he can to promote good and combat evil but he can only do so much since evil is a powerful counterforce in its own right. The ancient Gnostics were dualists with their scriptures emphasizing the mythic rather than the historic and positing our evil world of matter created not by an all-powerful God but by a flawed deity called the Demiurge. In contrast to the Demiurge, the good God of light resides above our earthly material universe in a pure, spiritual realm called the Pleroma.

I mention dualism and Gnosticism here since I read in Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country For Old Men the following dialogue between a good old Texas boy by the name of Sheriff Bell and his old Uncle Ellis:
Sheriff Bell asks: “Do you think God knows what's happenin?”
Uncle Ellis replies – “I expect he does.”
Bell then asks – “You think he can stop it?”
To this Uncle Ellis answers – “No. I dont.”

By these answers, whether he knows it or not, Uncle Ellis is expressing Gnostic dualism. Of course, McCarthy's worldview isn't necessarily the worldview of one of his characters, in this case Uncle Ellis, but my sense after reading No Country for Old Men McCarthy's worldview isn't that far removed from Gnostic dualism; rather, the world and society McCarthy creates is absolutely soaking in evil. The evil is so strong in this McCarthy novel, one could say evil is the primal force of the universe.

A world where evil is the primal force is given an even more complete and deeper expression in McCarthy's post-Apocalyptic novel The Road, where a man and his son travel south to avoid the oncoming winter cold. Why am I saying this? Let me offer a couple observations around two quotes:

We read a reflection of the man when he was a boy about age thirteen prior to the apocalypse, "Standing at the edge of a winter field among rough men, watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number; the dull tubes of them beginning to move sluggishly in the cold hard light. Like the bowels of some great beast exposed to the day. The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be. The burning snakes twisted horribly and some crawled burning across the floor of the grotto to illuminate its darker recesses. As they were mute there were no screams of pain and the men watched them burn and write and blacken in just such silence themselves and they disbanded in silence in the winter dusk each with his own thoughts to go home to their suppers." One can only wonder what brought about the actual apocalypse in the novel. Perhaps, similar to these men, world leaders attempted to remedy the image of evil on a macro level.

Here is a typical scene the man and boy come upon: "Beyond a crossroads in that wilderness they began to come upon the possessions of travelers abandoned in the road years ago. Boxes and bags. Everything melted and black. Old plastic suitcases curled shapeless in the heat. Here and there the imprint of things wrested out of the tar by scavengers. A mile on and they began to come upon the dead. Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling." No more quotes are needed as I am sure you get the idea - a shadowy, menacing, ash-filled landscape populated by humans hunting and killing and eating one another.

What creates the drama in this dark, sinister, stinking world is the love the man has for the boy, his son, and the love the boy has for the man, his papa. Also, the compassion the boy has for those they encounter on the road. All through their experience on the road, can we say the man holds a Gnostic-like dualist view? He experiences the intensity of the world's evil to be sure. However, his belief in a Gnostic light realm is paradoxical. Sometimes he reflects there is only this evil world of matter, harrowing and unrelenting; and yet sometimes he recognizes the boy as a messenger come from that otherworldly realm of light.

Rather than attempting an answer, I suggest reading with these ideas of dualism and Gnosticism in mind as one way of contemplating and appreciating the philosophical dimensions of McCarthy’s bleak novel.

Cormac McCarthy - American novelist and independent spirit par excellence
(less)
flag 235 likes · Like · see review

Mar 03, 2011 Ian "Marvin" Graye rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: cormac, read-2015, reviews, reviews-4-stars
How to Write Like Cormac McCarthy

1. Make sure the first sentence contains a verb.

2. But neither the second.

3. Nor the third.

4. Repeat until finished.

5. Or sooner deterred.

We'll Become Well Eventually

The Boy: Papa?

Papa: Yes?

The Boy: What's this?

Papa: It's an apostrophe.

The Boy: What does it do?

Papa: It takes two words and turns them into a contraction.

The Boy: Is that good?

Papa: Years ago people used to think it was good.

The Boy: What about now?

Papa: Not many people use them now.

The Boy: Does the world already have enough contractions, Papa?

Papa: I hadn't thought of it like that. But you might be on to something.

The Boy: What difference would it make if we threw away all the apostrophes?

Papa: Not much. I don't think.

The Boy: I wonder if we could get rid of the apostrophe, then maybe...

Papa: Yes?

The Boy: You could say we'll be well.

Papa: You're right. You know. But it could get confusing. If you wrote it down. Without an apostrophe. "Well be well."

The Boy: But really, Papa, if we could take away just one apostrophe, do you think we'll become well? Eventually. All of us?

Papa: We could.

The Boy: Well, then, if we can get rid of all of the apostrophes, we will.

Papa: But then there wouldn't be any contractions!

The Boy: Papa!

Papa: Haha. I wish your grammar could hear you talking!

In Praise of the Verb to Grow

Out of ashen gray
Frequently grow sentences
Of colored beauty.

All Things of Grace and Beauty
[An Assemblage of Favourite Sentences]

Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. No fall but preceded by a declination. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom. No one travelled this land. Ever's a long time. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark. On this road there are no godspoke men. How does the never to be differ from what never was? By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp. The ash fell on the snow until it was all but black. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands. The day providential to itself. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance of pain. We're survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp. A black billcap with the logo of some vanished enterprise embroidered across the front of it. In the darkness and the silence he could see bits of light that appeared random on the night grid. The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. The dark serpentine of a dead vine running down it like the track of some enterprise on a graph. A single bit of sediment coiling in the jar on some slow hydraulic axis ...a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no longer existed. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. There is no God and we are his prophets. They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo... Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of. One vast salt sepulchre. There were few nights lying in the dark when he did not envy the dead. I will not send you into the darkness alone. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. A living man spoke these lines. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today.

Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - "The Beach" (The Road Soundtrack)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bN-u...

Alternative Dystopian Ending Haiku

(view spoiler) (less)
flag 228 likes · Like · 43 comments · see review

Aug 01, 2013 Jayson rated it really liked it
Shelves: author-american, 200-299-pp, genre-post-apocalyptic, read-in-2010
(A-) 84% | Very Good
Notes: Dreamlike and deeply moving, it’s thin on plot, with dialogue that’s often genius, but also inauthentic and repetitive.
flag 224 likes · Like · 34 comments · see review

Oct 14, 2008 Robin rated it did not like it
Recommends it for: No one
Recommended to Robin by: Book Club
Shelves: bad-books, not-worth-it
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
flag 217 likes · Like · 87 comments · see review

Dec 07, 2009 Justin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Ladies and gentlemen of Goodreads, I present to you my first five star review of 2018- The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

And, ladies and gentlemen of Goodreads, here is the crazy thing. This is my THIRD time reading the book! My THIRD time! And y’all wanna know how many stars I rated this book last time? TWO! TWO WHOLE STARS! I didn’t even write a review. I just gave it two stars and moved on with my life. And now here I am with a five star review, and, folks, I can’t even explain what’s happened to me. I don’t know why I’ve had this change of heart. I don’t know why all of a sudden this book grabbed me and held me in its arms like a little baby and crushed me in the end.

I have one theory though. I LISTENED to the book this time around. I’m sorry for capitalizing so many words. It just feels right for some reason. It feels RIGHT. Listening to the book forced me to slow down a little bit and take in the writing in a much different way. It allowed me to really savor the book and chew on the words a little bit before swallowing them. The book is beautiful, man, and I think it’s beauty flew right past me the first two times. Not this time though.

I love apocalyptic books anyway. I loved Station Eleven. The Stand is alright. I Am Legend was awesome. But, man, McCarthy comes in with The Road and you can literally feel the bleakness and the emptiness and the desperation in his writing. You can see and smell and blackness and the ash and the cold. It’s hard to read (or listen to) sometimes because it’s just so hopeless, and you know nothing good is coming. You know there can’t be some happy ending waiting for you. There’s no way. Not in the world he’s created.

But for a book so cold and dark, it’s also poetic and beautiful. McCarthy’s short sentences and minimal words in his dialogues work great in this world, and it all adds to the overall tone of the story. Boy howdy, I’ve had an awesome JanuMcCarthyary so far.

On to Blood Meridian!!!!! Can’t wait!!!! Yeaaahhh!!!! (less)
flag 182 likes · Like · 29 comments · see review

May 23, 2012 F rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: seen-movie, 2013, usa
One of my favourite of all time.

Loved everything.
Terrifying.

flag 178 likes · Like · 6 comments · see review

Jul 10, 2009 Paquita Maria Sanchez rated it it was amazing
Shelves: literature
I finished this novel quite a few days ago. Normally, I would hop right up and start composing my little goodreads ramble, publish whatever nonsense came out, and go about my day. This novel, however, left me feeling like an incubus was on my chest, paralyzing my brain and limiting my mobility. I set it down and stared at the ceiling. I rolled around in bed feeling anxious and nostalgic and terrible and serene. I hid it in my backpack so I wouldn’t continue to be tortured by seeing the spine, and contemplating how it was defeating me. This loud-mouth, this rambler, this conversational ram-rodder had, in a rare instance of humbling, found herself with nothing to say. So many thoughts, and no words to frame them in. I finally placed the book back on the shelf, acknowledged that I had read it through the meager gesture of rating, and started with something else. After a few days had passed, I decided to try and pin down the numerous specimens that are my thoughts. I won’t wow you like the story does. I won’t offer any insight that isn’t present elsewhere on goodreads in the many, many fantastic reviews that have already conquered this territory to the extent that it is conquerable. I will get a bit self-indulgent and tell you embarrassing, private things that you may or may not care to read about concerning my life and my family, because this novel is largely about the preciousness of life and the preciousness of family, of the horror and the beauty and everything in between. It is a somber meditation on subtle, enormous things.

I am predisposed toward loving post-apocalyptic novels. In many ways, I blame this on my obsession with the “Boxcar Children” books whenever I was a kid. Though these books are, of course, NOT post-apocalyptic tales, they do depict a world that is about as barren and frightening as a 9 year old lower-middle-class girl can wrap her mind around. The idea that you have no home, no parental figures, no reliable source of food or comfort, and basically nothing save your siblings, is a scary and fascinating thing to think about. With a home life as precarious as my own, it didn’t seem terribly far-fetched to some day find myself destitute, and I found deep comfort in the children’s will to survive. Unfortunately, I eventually did find myself in a comparable situation when, in the midst of my parents’ divorce, my 5 year old sister and I went to live with our father in this giant, shadowy house on a stretch of land in one of Oklahoma’s smaller towns, a place far from the protection of my mother, and far from all of the friends I had grown up around and came to trust and love. In a consuming fit of depression, my father basically isolated himself from the realm of the living, sleeping most hours, and silently and heavily self-medicating in a darkened den when “awake.” I was 11, and was forced to take on the domestic duties of a full-grown woman in order to care for my sister, ensure we both ate, walk her to school and back every day, maintain a moderately clean home, tiny, shoddy Christmas trees out of tree branches, etc etc etc. Though I realize this sounds like a sob story, let me assure you it was short-lived, and that when I finally abandoned my blind loyalty to my father and made with the truth, we were snatched up that very day, and the world was bright and rosy again from then on. Also, I am actually pretty glad that it happened. My brief experience in this alternate reality had some enormous character-building effects, and was actually sort of fun sometimes in this “I’m really living out this whole self-reliance thing that I’ve read so much about” sort of way. I mean, it got old quick. However, the most important effects that it had on me as a person (aside from making me feel capable of handling a whole lot of bullshit, weathering the storms of life, yadda yadda) were a) binding my sister and I in an unbreakable way and b) making me see seemingly obvious bits of the process of living (food, tiny little gifts, things like Christmas lights and Easter eggs and really warm gloves) as the precious objects that we so often forget that they are. But we are discussing The Road, here.

The emphasis on precious little things composes much of the story. There is a lot of what some may call “filler” throughout the novel; descriptions of meals, the process of preparing the meals, of the characters disrobing layer by layer in order to clean themselves in the extremely rare warm bath they manage to take, washing every bit of themselves and every layer of clothing, stitching up a wound, wrapping up the wound, pulling a pant-leg over the wound. Though the form of each sentence, of the entire novel even, could arguably be considered curt, it is a conscious choice. Each sentence is presented like a precious object, a simple little thing which is, in its very simplicity, some exquisite testimonial to the process of living and loving. Even the dialogue is stripped bare, exhibiting the boundless love of the Man and the Boy in the simplest of exchanges more effectively than some sprawling monologue or melodramatic, Shakespearean dialogue would have been able to. They don’t even have to say “I Love You.” It simply is.

It’s so rare to find a voice such as McCarthy’s that can say so much with so very little. I have spent a lot of time reading about Japanese culture, and one of the many immensely interesting things that I have come across is the lack of a direct translation of the phrase “I Love You.” There are, of course, ways to express affection, and adoration, and even obsession. Yet, the notion that we attach so much meaning to, the three words you may hear from a lover and feel anything from overwhelming, butterflies-in-the-brain-like joy to crap in your pants and the early symptoms of a heart attack, the three words that can make or break a human connection, these three words are not translatable in a literal sense. This fascinated me enough to approach one of my college professors from Japan and ask her to tell me why. Her response was to say that something so enormous just couldn’t be put so simply, should not be flattened down and thrown around in the way that this limited phrase allows, and that it is almost obscene to assume everything involved in deep love can be encompassed in such a stunted bit of words. Though Japanese culture has sort of “whipped up” some ways to express a similar sentiment, it is more often than not used to placate Western lovers, is still quite limiting as to how they really feel, and even then is rarely used. Expression of the emotions coded in “I Love You” is preferably accomplished through a culmination of millions of different actions, tiny little kindnesses that aren’t named as kindnesses, minuscule, stacking pieces of the “I Love You’ puzzle. Well, this novel feels distinctly Japanese in this, along with many other, ways. Bare-bones, humble respect for every cell of every mass of the life process. The simplest of gestures binding together to communicate giant feelings. Reverence for the smallest bits of life, as they are crucial elements of the whole. At the risk of contradicting everything I just said, I would argue that the sentence which most communicates the moral underpinning this wonderful story is this: "When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them." Allow me to be a bit clearer: I strongly suggest that you read this book.

(less)
flag 174 likes · Like · 50 comments · see review

Jul 18, 2011 Lyn rated it really liked it
A good friend gave this to me to read. I told him I already had an audiobook working and he said, "you'll want to read this one".

I could barely put it down.

Mesmerizing.

McCarthy's prose is simple, fable like, yet also lyrical, like a minamalistic poet. The portrait he has painted is dark and foreboding, difficult and painful, yet he carries "the fire" throughout, a spark of hope and love that must be his central message to the reader.

Having read the book, not sure if I want to see the film, it may spoil my vision of McCarthy's art. **March 2017 and I still have not seen the film and still don't think I will.

(less)
flag 159 likes · Like · 52 comments · see review

Sep 25, 2012 Jeff rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: buddy-reads

I have nightmares similar to what Cormac McCarthy depicted in his book.

I’m with my family. Sometimes, it’s just my son and I. The dystopia might not be the nuclear winter portrayed here, but it has the same type of vibe. Rampant fear and chaos, breakdown of society, everyone pitted against everyone else and my only thought is to somehow hold my family together and protect them.

Or we’re traveling or holed up somewhere and everything is quiet and we’re suddenly overrun.

Fear is the core. Fear is the motivator. Fear is the wind; the element that upsets the precarious balance on the tightrope of our existence. We straddle the thin rope that encompasses our hope and will. It’s a long way down into the abyss, but the dark looks comforting – inviting.

In light of this, the specific situations depicted in the book raise some questions for me:

I love my family but could I be as resourceful as “the man”?

Under the dreadful circumstances, would I have the same patience as “the man”?

If faced with the dilemma of no food, would I give up?

Would I consider myself one of the “good guys”?

Would I carry "the fire"?

This was a buddy read with Kelly and Ashley *Hufflepuff Kitten*.
(less)
flag 152 likes · Like · 46 comments · see review

Sep 06, 2017 Melissa ♥ Dog/Wolf Lover ♥ Martin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This is one of the saddest books about a father and child that I have ever read in my life . . yet.

There were a couple of happy times. Not so much though =(

Mel ♥
flag 151 likes · Like · see review

Jun 29, 2009 Ian rated it did not like it
Shelves: best-sellers-that-suck, unfulfilled-expectations, not-for-kids
I just read some guy's review of The Road that contained the following:

"In the three hours that I read this book I found myself crying, laughing, shouting, and most of the time my lip was trembling. ... As soon as I finished it, I sat there feeling numb, but not in a bad way, actually sort of like I was high."

Wow, dude. I mean, really? Your lip was trembling? And you felt high? And your lip was trembling? Pherphuxake, what do you even say to someone like that?
---------------------------------------------------------------------

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is an awful, awful book. I have to consciously restrain myself from judging those of you who believe the book has merit. Don’t worry, the fact that I’m part of a very small minority in this regard (only the smartest 3% of my fellow Goodreads bibliophiles also gave The Road a one-star review) has not escaped me. I am nevertheless convinced of the objective correctness of my position—notwithstanding the inherent subjective nature of any literary discussion—and I will maintain with my dying breath that The Road should have been named The Rod because it represents nothing more than Cormac McCarthy’s attempt to proclaim to the world that he has a big literary dick.

I have constructed a list of factors that increase a book’s suck quotient and I fear The Road exhibits most of them. Let’s check my list and see which things appear in The Road:

• A plot that lacks clear beginning or ending (check)
• Important characters who don't grow or learn from their experiences (check)
• Important characters whose actions lack clear motivation (check)
• Scenes and dialogue that are repetitive or unoriginal (check)
• Violence and gore included for shock value (check)
• Locations and settings that are ambiguous (check)
• History and backstory that are ambiguous (check)
• Grammar and punctuation used in a pretentious or self-indulgent manner (check)
• Pronouns and punctuation used in an ambiguous manner (check)
• Metaphors and analogies that appear contrived, forced and disjointed (check)

Okay, to be fair The Road doesn’t exhibit most of the suck-quotient factors; it exhibits all of them. It's as though McCarthy deliberately designed his book to be the antithesis of what I think makes for quality reading.

Now before I get any further, let’s get a couple of things out of the way. Much is made of McCarthy’s failure to use quotation marks and other punctuation, with some finding it brilliant and some finding it pretentious and self-indulgent. I make my home in the pretensions-and-self-indulgent camp. In fact I find McCarthy’s treatment of punctuation nauseating; it is his way of saying:

“My words are so beautiful, perfect, and complete that they stand on their own. I require no punctuation to convey my meaning. Indeed my message is too powerful to be contained by the same convention that restricts the middling novelist, too important to suffer the vandalism of punctuation.”

Thus, leaving out punctuation can be not only confusing for the reader, but also revoltingly self-indulgent and arrogant. However, that being said, I don’t believe The Road sucks merely because it lacks quotation marks. I’m okay with such a tool if it’s used for a purpose that adds to the message being conveyed, à la Blindness. So punctuation is not the only suck-quotient factor here. Instead, I believe The Road sucks because it sucks every possible way a book can suck. The purposeless lack of quotation marks and other punctuation is merely one symptom of the enormity of the book’s suckitude.

It’s important to understand that this is not just a matter me disliking The Road. I have an almost vehement reaction to The Road and to the rather large group of slobbering, screaming, panties-throwing admirers. In the interest of intellectual honesty, I challenged myself to figure out why this is. Why can’t I just abhor The Road while letting other people have their moronic fun? Why must I look down on people who love The Road with a feeling of disgusted superiority? Why do I care if others enjoy the mental equivalent of dipping bread into horse diarrhea and pretending it’s award-winning fondue?

It took some soul-searching to learn the answer: I react vehemently to The Road because fans and critics of literature love to stroke McCarthy’s Rod, while works of science fiction—my favorite genre—are dismissed regardless of their merit. Critics praise The Road but glibly waive off sci-fi as a genre for people who never grew out of their childlike amusement for light sabers or their adolescent fascination with space battles. Sci-fi is relegated to its own awards and events, left out of consideration for broader literary honors, leaving me with the impression that the literary world does not perceive sci-fi to be real, legitimate literature. But from my point of view The Road is the adolescent work. By the standards under which I would judge a quality sci-fi novel (or any quality novel), The Road is shallow and simple, along with unoriginal and obvious. The Road is to my favorite sci-fi as a toddler’s splashing pool is to Lake Tahoe. It is beyond me how The Road can be the guest of honor while much deeper books with beautiful language and original, thought-provoking ideas are not even invited to the party because they happen to be sci-fi.

Of course the other 97% disagree with my assessment of The Road as shallow and unoriginal. They believe that I just didn't get it, that I couldn’t see past McCarthy’s prose and unconventional punctuation. They tell me The Road is rich and deep. They tell me to forget the quotation marks and the nameless characters and look at what McCarthy is trying to tell us. The Roadtells us this, and it talks about that, and speaks to this other thing.

Then the 38% who gave The Road five stars lose themselves in their collective self-amplified group hysteria. “The Road is so so so great!” they yell in unison. “Please take my panties, Mr. McCarthy!” they yell at some imaginary stage. “Here, Mr. McCarthy please sign my boobs!” And that’s where I have to walk away.

The thing is, though, I didn’t have a difficult time seeing what The Road tells us and talks about and speaks to; I just didn't find any of it to be especially deep, enlightening, or insightful. The book was easy to read and simple to comprehend. It didn’t make me think. Everything was right there on the surface, served with a spoon, and what we were served had no flavor, no spice, no originality. So it’s not that The Road lacks all substance. If it weren’t for the nonstop nauseating self-indulgence I would have given it two stars and might recommend it to people who are new to the reading scene. My problem is that, for something so beloved and critically acclaimed, for something written by a writer with such talent, The Road fails utterly, a shell without substance that collapses in upon itself in a heap of triteness and unoriginality. To put it yet another way, The Road was just so goddamn boring.

I want a book that makes me pay attention and use my noggin. I want to work at peeling back layers and making connections. When I find them, I want the author's ideas and insights to be original, edifying, and thought-provoking. I want artful prose, relatable characters, realistic motivations, and poetic plot points. And guess what, I find no shortage of books on the sci-fi shelves that meet those criteria.

Now let’s see if we can tie things together. There are plenty of truly excellent books of contemporary literature; I have read and enjoyed several, including one or two that have touched me deeply. Likewise there are plenty of truly excellent books on the sci-fi genre. For some reason one genre is invited to the party and the other isn’t. I don’t know why that is, beyond an apparent assumption made by haughty critics and readers that sci-fi is for kids. Now, I’m not trying to say that all sci-fi is wonderful. There’s plenty of crappy sci-fi out there, just like there’s plenty of crap in any genre. My point is simply that, despite the dismissive attitude of many literary critics, the sci-fi shelves contain books that are as good as anything out there: books as rich and complex, as insightful and layered, as edifying and beautiful as anything in contemporary literature. So when something likeThe Road is hailed as a masterpiece while some truly brilliant works of sci-fi—works that could mop the floor with The Road in every facet— are acknowledged only by a roll of the eyes ... well, I think you see why I can’t be happy just to dislike The Road and let everyone else have their fun.
(less)
flag 146 likes · Like · 38 comments · see review

Dec 14, 2009 Joshua Nomen-Mutatio rated it it was amazing
Shelves: fiction, survivally, within-the-dark-there-is-a-spark, dystopic
The main point I want to deal with is how I managed to walk away from this book with a trenchant sense of gratitude at the forefront of my mind. I certainly won’t mislead and paint this story as one that directly radiates things to be happy about, but I do think it does so indirectly (and the term "happy" is far too facile for my purposes here).

This is an extremely dark tale of a world passed through a proverbial dissolvent. A world stripped of its major ecological systems. Small pockets of homo sapiens remain and virtually all other animal and vegetative life has vanished. For the Father and the Boy—the core characters of the novel who are holding onto to their existence by the most tenuous of threads—for them nearly every moment consists of terror and misery. Food is extremely scarce. Fellow humans are often very likely to kill and eat them. There’s an utter lack of good prospects on the horizon. And when terror seems less immediate and they have a moment to become lost in the luxuries of long-term memory, the thoughts tend to be ones of painful regret and helplessness and are just as bleak as the immediate surroundings and circumstances. A REALLY, REALLY SAD AND SCARY TALE. Okay.

It’s fitting—albeit in a superficial, mundane coincidence type of fashion—that I’m reading The Road for the first time as soon as the temperatures in my cartographic slice of things have just plummeted to single-digit degrees. The slow death of autumn has given way to the inescapable, temporary halt of much organic hustle and bustle. The skies often tend to merge with the washed out grays and whites of the landscape. As almost goes without saying, the world of McCarthy’s unexplained apocalypse is one in which each day is more gray than the last. So there seems to be some veneer of kinship between this world and my current surroundings, but what’s more important—far, far more important—are the manifold differences. Compared to the bleak world of the book that sits to my left, the nonfictional winter of the Chicago tri-state area is a veritable paradise. Colors are still abundant, if you choose to notice them. The buildings, cars and clothes we encase ourselves in—in sum—still display a wide range of colors, patterns, novelties, and so on, which to an eye accustomed to and expectant of tattered gray wastelands would appear as an orgiastic celebration of beauty and eyesight like none other. Though sunlight is less abundant now than in other seasons we are still, often enough, visited by a warmth and illumination that comes from that distant, worship-worthy star above, as opposed to a random explosion from some chunk of flammable infrastructure releasing its dying breath, or from a meager fire knelt over and struggled to bring to life.

In full disclosure, I can’t say that anyone has ever accused me of being an optimist. I’ve held the deed to boatloads—jam-packed harbors of them—of cynicism, despair, and all the other synonyms for negative emotional states and psychological dispositions. But I also feel that the struggle against nihilism, apathetic numbness, and ascetic ideology of all stripes is The Great Foundational Struggle for myself, and for my fellow strange hairless primates to take up and take up with vigor. To be able to look uncertainty, intuitive pessimism, our own impending demise, and even the gaping void of eternity squarely in its facelessness and still wrest away something profoundly good and meaningful.

I’ve also been no stranger to the wishful-yearning to abandon my human cognitive faculties, our apparently unique ability to look forward, to anticipate, to construct possibilities, outcomes, goals, to direct wonder and desire at and upon the world around and within us, and to reflect upon these very things and the reflection itself, the reflection itself, the reflection itself... These useful evolutionary adaptations (and their attendant byproducts) often feel like a burden to those who also have the aforementioned boatloads somehow connected to their person. The burden is simply in the fact that where one can see ahead they can see ahead to miserable outcomes.

I used to mentally nod in agreement when Craig Schwartz, in Being John Malkovich, remarks to his wife’s pet chimpanzee that "Consciousness is a curse." I used to quasi-proudly cite the Samuel Johnson quote at the beginning of Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas that "He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." And one dramatic evening the man singing the song [which has been removed from the top of the review now] literally slapped me and metaphorically awoke me from this nihilistic slumber by pointing to the words "pain of being man" which were scrawled, in my hand, upon a miniature American flag and screamed something to the effect of "This is something you can't ever fully get rid of!" What is basically an obvious truth hit me like a ton of bricks, the way that certain obvious yet somehow elusive truths are want to do. It was a moment that, say, Nietzsche would’ve been proud of, as he was brilliant at and adamant in his fight against nihilism and opposed to treating pain as something merely to be avoided rather than faced and even, in some ways, embraced.

In sum, wishing away our nature, our circumstance, our humanity—this is no better and no less cowardly than blissfully strolling along as if everything’s coming up roses when the world crumbles around you. It’s a rejection of the present world--a sigh of resignation, signed, sealed, delivered. We have to learn to do something with our terror and woe. Pronouncing it terminal and sitting back to watch the world turn to cinders and dust is no longer an option, and precisely because of how dire many of our situations truly are.

There’s a tremendously powerful scene in which the Father and the Boy discover an underground bunker filled with food and various supplies. The joy and relief they feel in that bunker is the metaphorical core of where gratitude lies in terrible situations. My bunker, our bunker, is generally much more vast in the present nonfictional world of circumstances--both the circumstances that we share and the ones that are enclosed within. And yet somehow this gratitude is not really any easier to find and possess in a lasting way than the literal bunker that briefly acts as a protective womb for the central characters of this dark and harrowing tale.

This is all to say that there is something very important about finding realsilver linings and that in rejecting so many false ones we may accidentally toss out the genuine ones. Genuine goodness gets caught so easily in our blind spots.

"What a wonderful thing to be alive and given to hungering."
—Death Rattle Orchestra, "The Hand's Mouth"

Books like this that contain such magnificently terrible visions of a doomed planet, also contain the impetus to appreciate things once taken for granted and to cherish and protect these things with every fibre of one’s being. They also contain a pulse of something that is purely beautiful such as the relationship between the Father and the Boy. Clearly, they represent some sort of triumph of perseverance, but not at all in the glib, mindless language of motivational posters, but in a hard-nosed, realistic manner that taps into deep and serious feelings and verifiable realities, rather than delusional slogans recited to keep general unpleasantness at bay. The story doesn’t end happily ever after, not by a long shot, but there are real triumphs all along the way and these don’t vanish simply because we aren’t served up every fulfilled desire on a silver platter. Such is life. The world is not drained of meaning simply because it is finite and partially composed of fallibility, uncertainty, and things generally that fall short of our yearned-for ideals. The triumphs are real.

He held the boy by the hand and they went along the rows of stenciled cartons. Chile, corn, stew, soup, spaghetti sauce. This richness of the vanished world. Why is this here? the boy said. Is it real?
Oh yes. It's real.

Anything that can shake a person to their core and set off a chain of thoughts that leads to the desire to live better than before, perhaps ethically, or to allow them to feel things more profoundly—such as gratitude and amazement at the very fact of anything existing at all—deserves all the praise it can get. As far as I’m concerned Cormac McCarthy’s writing is now praise-worthy in this way. (less)
flag 141 likes · Like · 122 comments · see review

Oct 05, 2008 Will Byrnes rated it it was amazing
Shelves: fiction
A man and his young son are traveling along a highway, hoping to get far enough south to avoid the onslaught of winter. It is a post apocalyptic landscape, heavy with ash, in which you can hear the absence of birds chirping or bugs buzzing. The language is remarkable. I was reminded of Thomas Hardy for beauty of language, but it is a different sort of beauty. McCarthy uses short declaratives, as if even language was short of breath in the devastation, and terrorizes generations of elementary school english teachers by tossing off verbless phrases as sentences (p 27 - A river far below.) He is effective in turning nouns into verbs, as on p4 – “when it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below.” Forgetting the content of the narrative this is a masterwork of style. I was deeply moved by not only the technical skill with which he molds language to his purpose, but the effective emotional impact of the work. This is a book to read slowly, to savor, not one to speed through to hasten ingestion of the plot. There are events that are exceedingly grim in this, focusing on despair, suicide, cannibalism. Yet the love of the father for his son is palpable and despite the omnipresent gray ash, there remain slivers of hope. Highly recommended, but this is not a book for those with a weak stomach.
(less)
flag 142 likes · Like · 35 comments · see review

Jul 21, 2009 Cecily rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: miscellaneous-fiction, dystopian, canada-and-usa, landscape-protagonist
Phew. This is a brilliant, bleak, beautiful book, but an emotionally harrowing one, albeit with uplifting aspects (they always cling to a sliver of hope, however tenuous).

PLOT

There isn't much. But that's fine by me. In the near future, a man and his son traipse south, across a cold, barren, ash-ridden and abandoned land, pushing all their worldly goods in a wonky shopping trolley. They scavenge to survive and are ever-fearful of attack, especially as some of the few survivors have resorted to cannibalism.

Much of the time almost nothing happens, yet that makes it all the more compelling.

The boy is very imaginative, empathetic, moral and scared - a difficult combination in the circumstances. There is a deep love and care between man and boy, each projecting their own survival instinct on to the other. In their anxiety, aspects of their relationship take on a ritualistic tone, and some of their conversations are almost liturgical, invariably ending with an assurance that they're the "good guys" and things will be "okay", yet without becoming banal.

Sometimes they are more wary of being seen than others, and at one point I wondered how much was "real" and how much might be imagined or paranoia, but that doubt passed. Whatever disaster caused the destruction (it is never explained) was some years before and the father realises that despite their closeness, in some ways "to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed."

WRITING STYLE

Very distinctive and controversial. It is written in a sparse, somewhat poetic style ("cold autistic dark"), often detached (the characters are never named) and fragmented, to match the setting of the book. Even quotation marks and apostrophes are almost absent (used only where their absence might create ambiguity, e.g. we're and were).

Initially, I found this pared down language and especially punctuation distracting and infuriating, but when I let go of that, treated it as more of a poem, the minimalism became integral to my appreciation. In fact, it somehow enhances the impact of the story, rather than distracting from it.

If it were typset as a prose poem, it might raise fewer hackles. In fact I think I think one reason some people don't "get" this book is that they read it as a novel that hasn't been proofread, rather than immersing themselves in it as a prose poem.

Much has been made of the intriguingly odd phrase "The snow fell nor did it cease to fall", which leapt off the page at me and is also discussed on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/....

RELATED WORKS

A film is coming out in the autumn. It could be excellent, but if they try to make it too cheerful, it would lose its purpose.
UPDATE: I saw the film, and was impressed (and surprised), but still prefer the book.

WARNING: Having enjoyed this, I had high hopes for Outer Dark (my review here http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), but unfortunately I really didn't like that. I'm unsure whether to read more Cormac McCarthy now.(less)
flag 135 likes · Like · 76 comments · see review

Oct 26, 2008 Chris rated it did not like it · review of another edition
Recommended to Chris by: Clack....what did I ever do to you!
I’m trying to find solace in the fact that I’m probably not the only one to be humiliatingly hoodwinked into taking the time to read Cormac McCarthy’s much-celebrated yawn-fest “The Road”, although this hardly makes this bamboozling something to boast about. In spite of the fact approximately three-fourths of the world seemed to readily embrace this as worthy fare, I managed to keep my distance for some time, mainly through ignorance of the general plot of the book and my usual stubborn reluctance to blindly jump off a bridge with the masses. I should have obeyed my gut instinct and remained one of the few spared the tedium of “The Road”, but then I had to go and actually examine a copy from a carefully-arranged pile resembling some kaleidoscopic, symmetrical form that some unfortunate, underpaid bookslut had to labor over for hours to create, and noticed that not only did this win the Pulitzer Prize, but happened to be a post-apocalyptic tale, and nothing stirs my loins nearly as vigorously. I’d even had it suggested by one of my fellow goodreaders, and after brief contemplation as to whether to waste my money on this alleged masterpiece or another box of nitrous cartridges, I decided that it was time to see what all the fuss was about (regarding “The Road”, I think I can understand the allure of the EZ Whip cream chargers, especially when you’ve got one of those bigass punch-ball balloons).

I sat in a numbed stupor while I read this, completely baffled as to how the hell this managed not only to win awards of great prestige, but, more importantly, just how it managed to be a commercial success with the ordinary reader. I’m almost interested to hear why someone might have actually enjoyed “The Road”, in which McCarthy somehow managed to make boring the concept of post-apocalyptic America. While I usually happen to be a fan of the genre, I found this to be everything which I don’t desire within that intriguing realm. At this point, I’m obviously begging for someone to come along and tell me that I ‘didn’t get it’, and probably point out that I’m a moron for good measure. I’m not denying that these are certainly valid arguments, but convincing me that I didn’t like this book is going to be impossible, my cheeky little friend.

So, what did I get from “The Road”, which stupefies me with its status as a #1 bestseller and Pulitzer-winning tour de force? Several things, all of them sucky; a whole lot of repetitive and boring conversation and redundant let’s-trek-towards-the-coast plodding, a lot of stupidass and harebrained compoundwords, and an insipid amalgam of fiftyword paragraphs that seldom accomplished anything as far as entertaining me as a reader.

Here’s the story in a nutshell, for anyone who might be inexplicably reading this without having read the book; probably because they were wise enough to invest in the EZ Whip instead, and are now dicking around with their iTunes trying to find the song that best complements that flanging sound in their head. Some sort of catastrophe has befallen planet Earth, and I have to admit I was pretty interested to find out the nature of this calamity, but McCarthy decides to keep that a secret for some reason beyond my grasp, maybe as the highlight of “The Road 2: Thoroughfare”. Ok, I can dig it, whatever it was, I know that it had no trouble fucking up Earth’s weak and fragile little blue ass. Score; Unexplained Devastating Event 1, Earth 0. Does it really matter what might have happened, seeing as all it resulted in was the end of almost all life as we know it? Actually, yeah, the lack of any sort of input regarding the origin of this chain of events does suck, and badly. Score: Utter Buffoonishness 1, Cormac McCarthy 0.

In the wake of, well, whatever cataclysmic shit happened, we’ve got a father and son struggling to survive in the resulting aftermath, and things aren’t very promising for this enterprising duo, as whatever wiped out the inhabitants of planet earth also eradicated not only all plant and animal life, but in a shocking display of sheer spite also managed to do away with quotation marks, colons, semicolons, and most hyphens. Survivors of this worldwide holocaust are few and far between: scattered bands of humans that have largely resorted to thuggishness and cannibalism for lack of other hobbies or nutrition, a few mushrooms, and question marks, periods, and a wily subset of apostrophes have managed to escape extermination. The father and son have managed to eke out a regrettable existence for an unknown number of years, and the approaching winter promises to be outrageously cold, so they make way for an unnamed southern coastline, where I can only presume they're expecting to encounter something more accommodating.

Their journey is perhaps the most ridiculously boring shit I’ve ever read. They push a shopping cart along with their scant supplies while alternately stomping through ash and sleeping in ditches. Once in a while they encounter another survivor, each meeting completely preposterous and without substance. They ransack homes and forage for food, they abandon the weak and feeble, they ramble incessantly, engaging in snippets of pointless conversation, usually about how they cannot give up, as they are ‘carrying the fire’. I’m assuming that ‘the fire’ is the inextinguishable hope for mankind, a barely flickering light personified in the child, or maybe the fact that any chance of repopulating may depend on their ash-coated and unwashed swinging schlongs, who the hell knows, the ‘fire’ could be their undiminished belief in god which they’ll impart on the cannibal savages running unchecked when not feasting on fetus.

That’s it. Seriously, that’s the story, and I’ve long since abandoned any attempt to discover what all the hype surrounding this supposed ‘story’ is.

Despite my generally low opinion of our collective taste as a species, I found myself shocked that “The Road” was deemed favorable by so many. But what I really can’t wrap my head around is the critical acclaim, which applauds this for reasons I’ll never understand, and sincerely hope the critics don’t either. I found the storytelling utterly regrettable and lacking in all possible aspects, once in a while McCarthy bizarrely waxed poetic, and he also made the completely unforgivable mistake of mentioning how the ‘sun went around the earth’, which, if intended to be literal, at least offers an explanation as to why the planet is becoming so inhospitable. Otherwise, all Cormac has to offer is a bunch of really short, uninteresting sentences, banal murmurings between father and son, and a whole lot of tedium. I might almost be impressed that on several occasions McCarthy busted out some word which I’ve previously never seen before in my life (woad and siwash come to mind, both forever burnt in my brain as examples of meaningless gibberish), but when the use of these words is considered next to the rest of the prose, composed of rudimentary language, all it called to mind was the disheartening suspicion that McCarthy stumbled across these relics from some Word-Of-The-Day vocabulary-enhancing calendar, making them seem improbably forced into the story:

June 14th: WOAD: n, some absurd, obscure shit.

“Hmmmm,” Cormac ponders this treasure, “I may have to have the protagonists come across a load of woad.” He chuckles idiotically. “A load. Heh. Of woad. Heh heh.”

While the Woad Incident was bad enough, McCarthy also uses ‘wonky’. Christ, the last time I heard wonky used was in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, coming from Master Blaster. This made for a pretty fitting connection between the two, both being pieces of post-apocalyptic poodle piddle. After getting an unsavory sampling of the author’s propensity for rarely-seen words, I was half expecting to see rampike, which would have actually worked in the context of the story on countless occasions, but apparently that one was included in Roget’s Word-Of-The-Day and our man McCarthy was given the Merriam-Webster last Christmas.

Now I’m just nit-picking, for lack of anything else to comment on, since this was so devoid of action, intrigue, or anything remotely thought-provoking.
(less)
flag 133 likes · Like · 30 comments · see review

Aug 29, 2012 David Schaafsma rated it it was amazing
Shelves: fiction-20th-century, father-brother-sons-book, books-loved-2014, best-books-ever, cli-fi-class-spr-18, dystopian, science-fiction, environment
“What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.” --McCarthy

4/6/18 Re-reading this for my spring 2o18 Climate Change class, and even knowing how it ends, I am wrecked, just devastated by this book, so horrific and so beautiful and moving. Sobbing as I do at the most intimate of losses, but feeling the intensity of any great passionate beauty, too. The beauty of a great book that helps you see what matters.

9/1/14 Original review, edited a bit in the light of my most recent reading.

An amazing book. So powerful, understated, majestic, moving. Just blew me away. Some one said this was a "dictionary" book, meaning that they had to look up words a lot, and yes, it is a book that loves language, some of it ancient and forgotten, maybe befitting the subject of loss, but McCarthy is always this blend of Faulknerian epic-loss-language and Hemingway's power-through-simplicity-language. Some of the cadences are Biblical, as in King James elevated language, as in The Grapes of Wrath and Cry, The Beloved Country. And the simple, devastating power of Of Mice and Men and The Old Man and the Sea. Books of allegorical significance and moral power.

In a way, this tale, set years after nuclear holocaust and environmental devastation, is a kind of guide for the apocalypse--any apocalypse, the Big One, your own or a loved one's death, the end of anything--with principle, with character, dignity and love; in this case, it is a father and son facing oblivion, moving forward, Pilgrim's Progress, "carrying the fire" against all odds, never giving up, and it is heartbreaking and devastating. You wonder, like them, whether you could or can go on. This simple, bleak tale has a kind of echo in it of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," where Thomas urges his own father to fight death and not just acquiesce to it, or give into it. The man in this story teaches his son to fight to stay alive and be one of the "good guys" (or, ethical) with any means available at their disposal. In this simple, bleak dystopian story, we are very possibly at the end of time, in an ash, Beckettian landscape, waiting for Godot, people reduced to their most animal selves. And yet, there are relationships that remain, with simple pleasures, enjoyed by fathers and sons. The find a can of Coke, they eat a can of peaches, they tell each stories, they draw pictures, they play a primitive flute they have made, the arts comforting and sustaining them when they need it.

Recently, we had the suicide of Robin Williams, someone we had come to believe we knew well through movies where he played characters urging us to laugh and seize the day, every day. But he was playing characters in movies, and we began, as we do, I suspect, to make the mistake of believing that the convincingly hopeful characters he played were internalized in his own soul. And maybe they were, for a time. Camus said, post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust, that suicide was the only important philosophical question that remained, and McCarthy, aging as we all are, helps us contemplate this question, too, as we face or imagine facing devastation, death, that nuclear winter.

Throughout the book the man speaks to or reflects on his wife, years gone, who made another choice than he has, and given what they faced, she faced, a reasonable one, and one the man teaches his son to passionately resist, though in his quietest moments, he longs for it himself. When they encounter an old man, a kind of dark seer, on the road they speak of luck and what it can mean in such a time, and neither are sure what it even means anymore: Is it luckier to live or die in the face of the very end? The man has no hope, though:

“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.”

The old man says to the man, “There is no God and we are his prophets.”

But the boy believes in and his shaped by his belief in God. They are the good guys who draw the line at barbarity, even when it makes some sense to succumb to it.

Recently, in the Chicago area, I wept to read of another suicide, one of an 82 year old man whose wife was in hospice and living with his two aging children, developmentally disabled; the man first murdered the family everyone knew he had deeply loved, then killed himself. (I know, sorry, this is bleak). But no one in their neighborhood or family questioned his love for his family or even his choice. Who can blame this man, facing an inevitably harder end, his friends seemed to say. Not me, the father of two sons, one with severe autism and the other also now diagnosed autistic. I'm 61. What will happen to them when I am gone? Sam, 18, autistic, living during the week in a group home, comes here to my house every other weekend, and so many of the minimum wage folks he works with are caring and loving, but 3-4 years ago we took a young man to trial for pushing him down a flight of stairs, where he was knocked out and his arm badly broken. He can't speak to defend himself. What future does he have, and what future especially without a loving parent to help defend and speak for him? What does his "road" hold for him? Sometimes, in my worst moments, and thankfully they are few, I think we are Liam Neeson, in The Grey, facing the wolves of destruction in the Arctic (as Neeson himself did when he lost his wife to a skiing accident, facing his own emotional holocaust and nuclear winter), knife in hand, to the end.

I have heard this is McCarthy's most personal novel, and since he is a father, and dedicates the book to his own so John Francis McCarthy, I can guess this maybe this is true. I can imagine it as a letter to him, or to all fathers and sons, to help them face down their own terrible moments with grace and resourcefulness. In this book, the man is handy, he is always problem-solving, fixing what he has with the tools available to him, scavenging, finding food and water, reading and telling stories to his son with lessons he sometimes barely believes himself anymore. Whatever he does, McCarthy tells us the son watches his father, and learns. Without his son, there is only death, and he must to the end teach his son how to be handy, to be resourceful, to go on, to live, the best he can.

My own father, the weekend before he died on the operating table for his second bypass surgery, at 76, dropped down to slide under the chassis of my aging Chevy and check out my fading brakes, to the end urging me to care about my stuff, to do the right thing, mentoring me in the right way to live. That night he held one of his last great grandchildren in his arms; less than 48 hours later he was dead, which was still the most devastating moment of my life. Reading the father-son relationship that is at the heart of this book through my own loss makes it tender, gives it depth and rich sentiment. I mean, it is harsh, and bleak, this world the father and son live in, but the story is fundamentally sweet and moving. It's about what matters, as the best of books always are.

McCarthy urges me and us to go on, to be resourceful, to care for each other, and to care for the Earth we were given. There are images so terrible in this book that the man tries to shelter from his son, though the son sees them anyway, and we see them, too. Are they useful to see? I surely don't want some of them in my memory, but there they are, reminding me of past genocides and tragedies and prefiguring the ones surely yet to come on personal and global levels. Maybe it's useful to remind me of the "bad guys" who the man and boy meet on the road, who make the immoral, the wrong choices. What evil is humanly possible? But also, what good? What do we need to do to save the planet? Do we really want to? How long can we keep our heads in the sand, as humans with the power still to (maybe) reverse the environmental end? McCarthy teaches us how to live, and why it is so important: Because of love, and family, and the beauty of the planet.

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”--McCarthy

Camus suggests that we humans, post WWII--the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and Stalin, all of it- juts push that Myth of Sisyphus-boulder up that hill without any assurance of meaning beyond the doing of it. I can't go on; I'll go on, Samuel Becket has his narrator say at the end of The Unnameable, and that's what the man does and perhaps we should do in the worst of circumstances. McCarthy know his Beckett, but finally, McCarthy is not Beckett, as much as this tale owes to McCarthy's master; McCarthy gives us just a little more dignity and hope than Beckett, I think.

I think, too, in my darkest moments that I understand Robin Williams, facing Parkinson's disease, and that 82 year old man, seeing the bleak future for him and his wife and children. I am not and have never yet been suicidal, but I understand their choices. I understand Camus and Beckett on these important subjects. I may have to reread this tale again and again to keep me on the road the man took instead of the one his wife chose. After all, I have sons (and a daughter) to care for. Maybe I'm gonna hug my kids a little bit harder tonight. (less)
flag 121 likes · Like · 72 comments · see review

May 29, 2017 Matthias rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: my-reviews, out-of-the-box-reviews
The road is a promise.

A father and a son, survivors of an anonymous apocalypse, hold on to that promise. Cormac McCarthy follows them closely on their march through barren wastelands, dead forests and decaying towns. The footsteps they leave in the ubiquitous dust are swept away by the cold ashen breath of the grey earth. Whatever gets left behind ceases to exist.

The promise is brittle. Hold on to it too tightly, dream of it too violently, and both the promise and the road will turn to dust, leaving you in a desert with nowhere to go.

The father and his son know this in their hearts. Yet they go on, together, carrying the fire ever southwards. Every step they take is a rebellion against a world turned cold and dry.

On a planet that no longer indulges the luxury of life, the road of stubborn survival only knows one destination. Defiantly, a father and a son, scavengers of canned goods and memories, hold the fire against the indifferent skies and hold on to each other.

Ssh. It'll be okay. (less)
flag 123 likes · Like · 43 comments · see review

Nov 28, 2015 Glenn Sumi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: contemp-classics, pulitzer-winners, guardian-1000
Excuse me please while I cover my face with my hands and quietly sob.

In a scorched and dangerous post-apocalyptic America, an unnamed father and son scavenge for food, look for shelter and try to avoid bandits and people who’ve resorted to cannibalism. The two, pushing along their rusty cart, travel the road simply because they must. The alternative is death.

I admire the fact that there’s no explanation about how the end of the world happened and why certain people survived. There are a couple of flashbacks, but they have to do with human relationships, not some plague, and have a dreamlike quality about them.

This is my first Cormac McCarthy, and it took a while to adjust to his writing style. There are no dialogue quotes. Sentences are often verbless. Contractions have no apostrophes. The language is poetic yet not flowery or excessive.

Initially, I found the novel painful to read. It was so bleak and unrelenting, and the characters had no goal except survival: finding that next stash of canned goods, locating oil for a lamp, finding blankets to protect them from the cold, making sure their shoes held out.

Ultimately, the love between father and son gives the book its heart, and offers up a bit of hope to the reader. The man must, through example, pass on his knowledge and humanity to the boy. But in a way the boy teaches his father just as much. None of this is remotely sentimental.

By depicting a barren universe where nothing grows, McCarthy is surely asking us to appreciate the mysterious bounty of the earth.

A moving and timeless post-Thanksgiving theme. And an unforgettable book.
(less)
flag 112 likes · Like · 59 comments · see review

Aug 19, 2017 Jaline rated it it was amazing
Shelves: xx2017-completed
Five Stars For Brilliant Story Telling: It really doesn’t get any better than this. The story is a journey, an epic journey, a hero’s journey. The prose is sparse and real in its immediacy. We not only read it but feel it, smell it, taste it. That is a rare treat for any reader.

Five Stars For Best Father and Son Relationship: The father and his son in this book have such a strong bond, it is both heart wrenching and inspiring to share it. On their long journey, they teach each other, mostly by example, how to live in a world that is unlivable. How to survive, how to protect, how to love.

Five Stars For Most Creative Environment: The world of this book is not beautiful. It is filled with ash, the sun is barely visible through the thick pollution of the atmosphere, most trees destroyed or falling down; roads have melted and then cooled again, streams and rivers and even the ocean an off-shade of gray. It is a dead world that has not yet begun to come back to life, and we do not know if it ever will.

Six Stars For Pulling Me Out of my Comfort Zone and Making Me Like It: Post-apocalyptic or dystopian writing is not a genre I feel comfortable with for various reasons. Having said that, this is one of those very rare stories that seems to cut across all genres, grabs hold, and doesn’t let you go – even after the last page.

I loved this book, and recommend it to anyone who might be interested in the above Star points. (less)
flag 104 likes · Like · 72 comments · see review

Nov 29, 2016 Matthew Quann rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: favourites, pulitzers
The Road is a painful, beautiful, horrifying, heartfelt, and compelling novel about a father and his son that astounded me from its opening pages through to its conclusion.

I’ve made known my disparagement for post-apocalyptic stories, which all seem to eventually fall into the same tropes ad museum. You’ve read or watched the stories where one band of survivors tries to survive only to run into another band of survivors who, despite initial appearances, have devolved from society into little more than beasts. The Road is patently not that story.

Where much of post-apocalyptic literature sets itself apart by small increments, The Road moves as far away from the mores of the genre as possible. McCarthy’s novel focuses on an unnamed father and son who trudge through what is possibly the bleakest future I have ever read. The world is covered in ash, the sun blotted out, food is so scarce that cannibalism is the norm, and as winter approaches our two leads are placed in immense jeopardy. With this grey, black, and white palate, McCarthy paints a relationship in vivid colour.

For this novel is truly a novel of fatherhood, unyielding love, and the lengths we go to for the ones we love. A recurring conversation between the boy and his father is their status as carriers of the fire. While at first it seems like a cheap contrivance, by the novel’s end I was dazed by how they truly do illuminate the novel. The moments shared between father and son demonstrate love overtly and subtly. In the man’s struggle to keep the darker parts of the world from his son despite their ubiquity, the reader comes to know the character of the man. The moments are so many and too well written to be sullied by my meager paraphrasing. Suffice to say that these moments are delivered without artifice, pretense, or falseness.

The novel is raw, and it comes through not only from the world or emotion, but also from the writing. My only previous encounter with McCarthy was a good four to five years ago when I attempted to make my way through Blood Meridian. Though it has been a long time between my abandonment of that novel and my reading of The Road, I have to wonder if I was too harsh on the former. McCarthy ignores a great deal of grammar, preferring to eschew commas, quotation marks, and apostrophes for the bare minimum required to convey his idea. Though I normally wouldn’t appreciate this, it was impossible for me not to be drawn in by the poetry in this language which, much like its setting, is stripped of pretense.

The Road is a harrowing read, there’s no doubt about it. Though for all its horrors and inhumanity, I came to the novel’s end thinking it to be an ultimately hope-filled novel. What's more, it is a compelling adventure in that it is a story about the struggle to survive. What this novel has is what other post-apocalyptic fiction lacks: heart. Against a tide of incessant desolation stand a man and his son, and their love holds aloft the fire of humanity, the essence upon which our societies are built. I cannot recommend this novel enough, and it will definitely not be my last from McCarthy.
(less)
flag 97 likes · Like · 40 comments · see review

May 17, 2008 Annet rated it it was amazing
Recommends it for: Emily and Esther
Shelves: wilderness-books-can-usa, favorites, heartbreaking, apocalyptic, dark,beautiful-poetic, wow-impressive
This book is shocking, loving, groundbreakingly impressive, beautifully written. I read through it without breathing, I mean I just had to know what was coming on the next page, and cried several times. Without a doubt one of the best books, if not the best, I read, ever...
flag 96 likes · Like · 7 comments · see review

Oct 16, 2012 Orsodimondo rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: americana
NON C’È NESSUN DIO E NOI SIAMO I SUOI PROFETI

”The Road” dell’australiano John Hillcoat, con il magnifico australiano Viggo Mortensen, e la splendida sudafricana Charlize Theron, la canadese Molly Parker, l’australiano d’adozione Guy Pearce, e Robert Duvall. 2009

In un mondo desaturato trionfo del grigio, pieno di cenere polvere e fumo, che costringe i pochi rimasti a vestire mascherine, in un mondo con più castigo che delitto e i giorni contati, dove sopravvivere è meno auspicabile della morte, dove alzarsi la mattina è un autentico atto di coraggio, dove si prova invidia per i morti, dove 'la strada' non indica viaggio, avventura ricerca scoperta, ma fuga, paura, minaccia (infatti è meglio tenersi fuori dalla strada per evitare brutti incontri), in un mondo così, Cormac McCarthy il biblico, qui diventato apocalittico (o post-apocalittico), mette in scena una meravigliosa storia d'amore, straziante totale viscerale tra un padre (l'uomo) e suo figlio (il bambino).

È la grande invenzione di questo romanzo, considerato il suo capolavoro (a torto, secondo me: il suo libro migliore è da cercare tra i meridiani di sangue e la trilogia della frontiera), adattato per lo schermo in un film molto bello che ho visto due volte, e che paga pegno al testo da cui è tratto esclusivamente per il finale, questo sì, superiore sulla pagina.
Per un padre chioccia quale io sono, si è trattato di un viaggio lungo poco più di duecento pagine attraverso delizia e atrocità per approdare a un finale che non posso raccontare e quindi nemmeno commentare.

Non ero abituato a un Mccarthy così dedito al dialogo, nei suoi libri i personaggi mi sono sempre sembrati tutto meno che loquaci: invece, qui, la chiacchiera abbonda e non è la parte migliore del libro.

Quando ce ne saremo andati tutti qui resterà solo la morte, e anche lei avrà i giorni contati.

Il bambino ci provava a parlare con Dio, ma la cosa migliore era parlare con il padre, e infatti ci parlava e non lo dimenticava mai.

(less)
flag 95 likes · Like · see review

Oct 13, 2016 Bradley rated it it was amazing
Shelves: sci-fi, dystopia-yes-pls, 2016-shelf
I seem to be the last one on the planet to have read this "Dystopian Masterpiece" destined to go down in history as blah blah blah. :) Yeah, it's good. Simple tale told extremely simply. Poetic in places, very realistic in almost all ways, and it was true to human nature, both in the good and in the bad.

People are scared. It's how we deal with the fear that makes us good people or average or just plain bad.

This is true at all times, of course, not just when the rubber tires on the highway have melted into the pavement. If we deal with the terror with optimism and decency, such as the kid deals with it, we see it as how we would like to be, but how the man deals with it is a lot more realistic, full of self-deception and compromise and desperation.

The best part of the novel is in the descriptions, the heavily oppressive setting. I personally thought these two characters were a bit too everyman for extended consumption. Fortunately, this classic is also rather short, so it didn't really bother me that much.

Well! Now I can say I've read the classic, even though it's pretty much like all the bookcases of dystopian literature I've already read. :) Nothing groundbreaking, just solid writing and a universal feel.

I suppose this is what makes classics, classics.
(less)
flag 95 likes · Like · 22 comments · see review

May 05, 2012 Nandakishore Varma rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. There are some books which literally sweep you of your feet and leave you gasping for breath. As one grows older and the reading palate more jaded, the chance of finding such a book becomes rarer and rarer; so the actual discovery of one is all the more delightful.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is such a book.

By all means, the story ought to have been a cliche: it explores the hackneyed dystopic theme of a group of people moving across a blasted landscape. The fact that it turns out to be one of the most powerful reading experiences instead, is due to McCarthy's narrative power, and the story's focus on the father-son bond rather than the horrors of the road.

The unnamed protagonists are moving south across an America of the future in search of warmth and food; a land which has been destroyed by a massive cataclysm which is never described. Some kind of deflagration is suggested (maybe nuclear). There are no animals left, and dead and charred trees dot the landscape. The sun is seldom seen, and it rains ash almost constantly. Nightmare people populate this nightmare landscape: cannibals who keep people penned up in basements for meat and roast infants on spits.

The strength of the novel is that most of this information is incidental. McCarthy does not dwell on the horrors, but mentions them in passing and moves ahead. The focus is always on the man and the boy, and their stubborn will to survive.

The cataclysm has occurred suddenly: the man remembers a time when everything was "normal" (in our everyday sense of the word). For the boy, this is "normal". Both father and son have adapted to their dismal environment seamlessly. Their lives are reduced to the basics of any living organism: food, shelter and the avoidance of death. As the story unfolds, we find the man slowly moving towards an animalistic state of existence; all vestiges of altruism, of “humanity”, are stripped away. He will do anything to survive, even if he destroys other human beings in the process. The only person he cares about, other than himself, is his son.

As the story moves towards its resolution, the mood of quiet desperation mounts uncontrollably, reaching a crescendo on the father's death: however, the author does not let us down. The small flame of hope kept alight throughout the novel is left burning at the end, so that The Road ultimately proves redemptive.

There are no chapters in this novel. It is written in short sections, and perfectly parallels the endless procession of nights and days of the journey. The dialogue is staccato, repetitive and Hemingway-esque. I found McCarthy's signature way of writing without punctuation apt for the subject matter. The many dialogues between father and son, mostly consisting of the word “okay” repeated many times (when things are definitely not “okay”-nice bit of tragic irony here) revolve around a single theme: the father assuring the son that they are not going to die, and they will find the “good” people. Instead of being boring, the repeated theme is strangely effective.

The man’s sense of nostalgia for a time irrevocably lost and his love for his son comes across with an emotional force which is almost painful. In fact, the child is almost deified. Consider the following passage (which is sheer poetry):

In the morning they came up 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 he fell back and 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 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 travelling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.

The boy takes on mythical overtones here (Krishna with his flute or Pan with his pipes): a remnant of a pastoral idyll which has been sadly burnt away. We know instinctively that the child will survive. Because, as the man says in his dying speech, he is the carrier of the fire…

You’re going to be okay, Papa. You have to.

No I’m not. Keep the gun with you at all times. You need to find good guys but you can’t take any chances. No chances. Do you hear?

I want to be with you.

You cant.

Please.

You cant. You have to carry the fire.

Is it real? The fire?

Yes it is.

Where is it? I dont know where it is.

Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.

This is the true Promethean fire, burning forever inside mankind’s heart, even while suffering eternal punishment at the behest of gods. This is the fire which is passed down from generation to generation, igniting the mind of the scientist, the artist, the writer and the revolutionary. As long as one knows one has passed it on, one can die peacefully.

This novel is an emotional onslaught which will rip you apart, will shatter your world so that it can never be reassembled together in the same way again (I was in tears by the end). Very highly recommended. (less)
flag 91 likes · Like · 28 comments · see review

========

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham

Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play).

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane

Read less
Review

"His tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful. It might very well be the best book of the year, period." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Vivid, eloquent . . . The Road is the most readable of [McCarthy's] works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization." —The New York Times Book Review

"One of McCarthy's best novels, probably his most moving and perhaps his most personal." —Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Illuminated by extraordinary tenderness. . . . Simple yet mysterious, simultaneously cryptic and crystal clear. The Road offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever be." —The New York Times

"No American writer since Faulkner has wandered so willingly into the swamp waters of deviltry and redemption. . . . [McCarthy] has written this last waltz with enough elegant reserve to capture what matters most." —The Boston Globe

"There is an urgency to each page, and a raw emotional pull . . . making [The Road] easily one of the most harrowing books you'll ever encounter. . . . Once opened, [it is] nearly impossible to put down; it is as if you must keep reading in order for the characters to stay alive. . . . The Road is a deeply imagined work and harrowing no matter what your politics." —Bookforum

"We find this violent, grotesque world rendered in gorgeous, melancholic, even biblical cadences. . . . Few books can do more; few have done better. Read this book." —Rocky Mountain News

"A dark book that glows with the intensity of [McCarthy's] huge gift for language. . . . Why read this? . . . Because in its lapidary transcription of the deepest despair short of total annihilation we may ever know, this book announces the triumph of language over nothingness." —Chicago Tribune

"The love between the father and the son is one of the most profound relationships McCarthy has ever written."

—The Christian Science Monitor

"The Road is a wildly powerful and disturbing book that exposes whatever black bedrock lies beneath grief and horror. Disaster has never felt more physically and spiritually real." —Time

"The Road is the logical culmination of everything [McCarthy]'s written." —Newsweek

==

Top customer reviews

supervalu
5.0 out of 5 stars Dark but beautifulSeptember 22, 2015
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

To say that The Road is a rather dark book would be quite the understatement....
As far as dystopian literature goes, this is quite a step.
The story of a father and his son, walking to the sea through a ravaged, cold and grey world, hoping to somehow, find a better place, doesn't leave much space for a happy ending. Bleak is truly bleak here, not a lot of silver linings!
And yet...and yet, this is a beautiful book.
The writing is fantastic, for starter. The style, with short and descriptive sentences, carries the story to perfection. It also has a poetic quality that softens what is said/described and gives it another dimension.
The real beauty of the novel isn't on the outside though, but resides inside, in the incredible bond uniting father and son, a love so deep and unconditional that it seems to erase age gap and life experience, to only focus on their desire to care for each other. This love and concomitant sense of humanity stripped to its essence, manage to give sense and meaning to their otherwise hopeless journey.
On a deeper level, it also seems to invite us to reflect on what makes a life meaningful: beyond a primal survival instinct, what makes life worth living even when there is no hope in sight? The Road's answer is that, ultimately, what matters isn't "what" makes your life, but "how" you choose to live that "what"...

98 people found this helpful
Helpful
Not Helpful Comment Report abuse

Todd Templeman
5.0 out of 5 stars Excruciating. Beautiful.April 17, 2015
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I hate to give this book five stars.

I'm a father. I read The Road years ago when my son was nine. I honestly had no idea at the time that I was picking up a book about a father and his roughly nine year old son. That's not a spoiler, you find that out on the first page.

Look, Cormac McCarthy writes so well I actually come back to his books on my shelves and open them up randomly, just to read a page and soothe my brain. But he digs the knife in so deep. I've actually hesitated to review his books before because there is so much beauty in the writing I just don't have the first ability to get a sense of it across.

More than that. I actually resented him after finishing this book. I wanted to shake his hand and punch him in the face. Maybe that's why I waited so long to finally admit this book deserves any accolade I could give it.

I finished The Road while sitting on a plane in Hong Kong, waiting to take off in the rain. I was a grown man, struggling so hard not to sob out loud that I started to choke. You might want to try "All the Pretty Horses" first, or even "No Country for Old Men," but those will grip you, too. I've never seen the man pull a punch. I think it also might depend where you are in your life. Just take my advice, if you're a father and you have a young boy, hold off on this, or at least read it when no one is around.
Read less

46 people found this helpful
Helpful
Not Helpful Comment Report abuse

William Edward Schenck
5.0 out of 5 stars A grim roadJune 11, 2017
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

"The Road", is a story of unrelenting dread and nearly hopeless struggle. A father and his son are walking together in a postapocalyptic world heading to what they hope is salvation on the southern coast many miles away from where they are. They have major crosses to bare. They have to find food in a desolate landscape that suffered some catastrophic event that wiped out all living things but somehow not all humans. They have to defend themselves and avoid at all cost humans who have chosen cannibalism as a means of survival and they have to face the possibility that they are not going to find the hoped for promise land when they reach the ocean. The father and son represent the good in the world of evil. The author structured the story to highlight the father's unwavering love for his son and the son's innocent belief that there is still good in the world and that they are carrying the fire of hope. The poignancy of danger is present throughout the novel and is not lifted until the final few pages. If you can bare the melodrama the book is a stunning rendition of the deep loving bond between a parent and their child.

8 people found this helpful
Helpful
Not Helpful Comment Report abuse

Fernando
5.0 out of 5 stars Cormac has produced a post apocalypticmasterpiece with The Road.October 20, 2017
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

The Road bumped to the top of my TBR stack after the huricane struck our island. I thought there'd be no better time to identify with this book...oh how wrong I was. For a while me and my family felt the desperation and need for survival in our island but Cormac once again paints a world like no other.

This is my third McCarthy read and it is definitely my favorite. The love of a mother nurtures the heart and the leadership the father shapes the character. The man (nameless father in the story) does everything to keep his son alive in this post apocalyptic world filled with danger and malice. This is a beautiful and admirable depiction of a father's devotion to his son. My favorite line(s) in this book are morbid and conflicting with my afromention protection but there was a moment where this instruction was the lesser of two fates:

"If they find you you are going to have to do it. Do you understand? Shh. No crying. Do you hear me? You know how to do it. You put it in your mouth and point it up. Do it quick and hard."

This book kept me humble and sane after living through a catastrophic hurricane and the havoc it wreaked on our way of life.

Five stars Cormac has produced a masterpiece with The Road. I could not stop reading it.
Read less

2 people found this helpful
Helpful
Not Helpful Comment Report abuse

See all 4,558 reviews
Write a customer review

2018/09/22

An Essential Reading List from George Monbiot | Five Books

As an investigative journalist, it seems that over the years you have found yourself in various types of trouble.

Well, I started work at the BBC as a radio producer in 1985. I was taken on to make investigative environmental programmes, of which there weren’t any at the time. I spent the last year and a half at university hammering on their doors and I got the post with the words: ‘you’re so fucking persistent you’ve got the job’.

It was all going incredibly well until Thatcher launched her coup against the BBC in 1987. The BBC had been probing deep into some of the machinations of government, particularly with its Secret Society series and a programme called Maggie’s Militant Tendency. It was doing what a national broadcaster ought to be doing.

But, unfortunately, government has ultimate power over the BBC. Thatcher swept in, and sacked the Director-General Alasdair Milne. On the day that Milne was sacked, my boss came in and said that there were going to be no more investigative programmes.

I was a young man of twenty-four when the coup happened. I had already been working on what I had intended would be a radio series investigating what was happening in West Papua, where Indonesia was moving vast numbers of people from Java and Bali onto the outer islands, including this annexed state of West Papua. Basically, Suharto was using the Javanese and Balinese to displace the indigenous people and create a sort of monocultural state that supported his dictatorship, and so to assert control over this vast archipelago. This was accompanied by devastating environmental destruction and, in some cases, genocidal killing and every imaginable form of brutality.

I rang my old friend Adrian Arbib, the photographer, and said that I had just got a contract to go to Indonesia and West Papua, and that it would be extremely dangerous. He said ‘yes’. I said: ‘I haven’t asked you a question yet’. He said: ‘the answer is yes!’

“‘You’re so fucking persistent you’ve got the job’”

And so, the two of us—who were greatly under-qualified and under-resourced—found ourselves in this fantastically perilous situation. Two previous journalists who had tried to do a similar thing had both been killed there.

The only way of getting in was on a special government permit, and we just couldn’t get this permit. What eventually happened was that, after many days going backwards and forwards to the central police station in Jakarta, I was walking down the corridor one day looking for a glass of water when I saw this door which was ajar that said ‘Head of Immigration Police’.

So, I thought I’m just going to go in and talk to the man himself and see if I can persuade him. I knocked on the door but there was no answer. I pushed the door open and there was no one there. But on the desk was a pad of headed notepaper and a stamp. I thought: ‘okay, here’s my chance’. So I stole them.

With the help of an Indonesian friend, we wrote ourselves a letter of introduction saying that if anyone messed with us, they would have to come to this man in Jakarta. And it got us out of and into a lot of trouble. It got us through various army and police blocks. But there was one point at which they just didn’t believe us. They didn’t believe the letter. This guy just kept shaking his head. They took us into custody while they spent three days trying to make radio contact with Jakarta to check out whether we were bona fide. My hair was coming out in clumps. It was a very frightening period.

They couldn’t make radio contact, and so eventually they just let us go. I had really thought we were going to be shot at that point. The only way to get to where we wanted without getting caught was to walk over the mountains and canoe through the swamps. This took three or four weeks of getting lost in the forest and running out of food, eating stick-insects and rats, getting swept away down a mountain river, and stung almost to death by hornets. It was an adventure. But we got the story.

Was it in Brazil that you read a story in a newspaper about your own death?

That’s right, yes. On the basis of my book on West Papua, I got an advance to go to Brazil and do a similar thing looking at land expulsions and the resulting mass movements into the Amazon.

First of all the story of my death appeared in the local newspaper in Maranhão, but then it got picked up by Folha de São Paulo.

I got beaten up by the military police when I was investigating the land-grabbing that was going on in the state of Maranhão. The human rights lawyers whom I was working with told me to leave the state immediately. They told me to leave on the night bus because the police would come after me, and might kill me. One of them must have said something to someone else, which started a rumour.

It got into the local paper as me being found garrotted behind the police station in the town of Bacabal. This was picked up slightly more cautiously by the Folha de São Paulo, which said: ‘it is believed that…’.

“I got beaten up by the military police when I was investigating the land-grabbing that was going on in the state of Maranhão.”

So, I took the bus back overnight, and eventually got to Manaus where I was living. The following day, I went into the office of a group that defends indigenous people and land rights. The man who had set me off on that particular investigation was talking on the phone.

He passed the phone over and said that it was Jan Rocha from the Guardian. I didn’t know her at the time. She said: ‘I don’t know if you can help with this but I’m investigating a British journalist who had been killed in Maranhão. It sounds like he was killed by military police’. I said: ‘I’m not surprised, they’re total bastards. They beat me up as well’.

She said: ‘yes, one report said that he was found garrotted behind the police station in Bacabal’. I said: ‘Bacabal! That’s extraordinary, that’s where I’ve been! If I had known there was another British journalist, I could have teamed up. But this is terrible! Who was this person?’ She said: ‘I’m not sure how to pronounce his name, I think it’s George Mon-biot’. I said: ‘Ah. I think that story might not be entirely accurate…’

Would it be accurate to say that, since these early days in West Papua and Brazil, the environment has been one of your abiding concerns?

It is one of them, but I see myself as embedded in a wider circle of concerns, all of which are linked. So, whether one is talking about environmental destruction, social justice, human rights, corporate power, neoliberalism, international power, and cultural power, it all meshes. I guess what I was doing in those six years abroad was educating myself, because I had a very conservative education.

You studied zoology?

I did. Zoology teaches you about the wonders of the living world, but it doesn’t teach you anything else. I was extremely frustrated as a student that my course was so narrow. I wanted to know about philosophy, history, literature and politics.

There were so many other issues, but we were living in a specialist bubble. I think it’s crazy when you’re that young to have to narrow your interests so severely. So, I came out of this elite education knowing almost nothing of the world. Slowly, both through experience and reading during those six years, I began to develop some inkling of an understanding of the world. But that process of education continues to this day.

“Zoology teaches you about the wonders of the living world, but it doesn’t teach you anything else.”

After six years abroad, I had a powerful urge to come home and start applying some of what I had learnt. As it happened, just as I did come home, the roads protests were kicking off in the UK. A friend persuaded me to come to Twyford Down and see what was going on there. I began to realise the links involving land alienation and the overriding of local people’s will, with what I’d been studying abroad.

I began to understand that the only fundamental difference between what I’d been seeing abroad and in my own country was that the things to which I had been witness—the mass brutality, land alienation and killings—had happened earlier in Britain. I began to understand Britain for the first time, as a result of my experience abroad. And, ever since, my task has been to try to apply that understanding to our own situation.

Buy

I was intrigued that one of the books you chose was a work of fiction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

I think this is possibly the most important environmental book ever written. It is a thought-experiment that imagines the world without a biosphere. That is the fundamental thought-experiment at the heart of environmentalism.

All the horrors of that story arise from the disappearance of the biosphere, leaving people without any means of feeding themselves and without any means of survival. They are thrown into a brutal and fatal competition where the only thing left to eat is each other.

As both a thought-experiment and a metaphor, it is incredibly powerful and valuable because it reminds us that without the biosphere we have nothing, we are nothing and we can do nothing except to tear each other apart. By describing such a scenario, it reminds us of just what a precious and magnificent thing we have in the living world.

“I think this is possibly the most important environmental book ever written.”

If I were to compile an environmental reading list for anyone, the first book I would give them to read would be The Road because that is the Ground Zero of environmentalism. It imagines the extreme scenario of losing everything. The consequences are conveyed with McCarthy’s brilliant sparseness and starkness, and his total refusal to offer hope where there is no hope.

By contrast, the film version of The Road did try to offer some shreds of hope in an entirely hopeless situation. As such, I felt it was dishonest.

I thought that the opening scenes in the film, which show desolated landscapes and expanses of felled trees, convey this idea of the destruction of biosphere particularly powerfully.

In many ways it was a great film. The cinematography was astonishing. But it was not true to the book, because it kept trying to offer us glimpses of hope and a way out, whereas McCarthy is saying that there is no way out.

I felt that the ending of McCarthy’s novel was completely misunderstood by the film. I saw the ending of the novel as looking back to what had been lost. You can’t conceive brook trout from nothing. If there are no trout then there can be no trout. It is this contrast which is moving and terrible.

By contrast, in the film the ending became a message of hope and renewal. Yet there would be no chance within any human span of hope and renewal. In hundreds of millions of years, perhaps, the biosphere could return. After the Permian–Triassic extinction, it was tens of millions of years before marine biodiversity got back to what it was. It happened eventually but it would not happen again during the period in which humans were extant on earth, especially if we had lost the biosphere.

So, the film ending was a cop-out in that respect. But it almost had to be because McCarthy is so uncompromising: it’s almost too much to bear.

Is apocalypse a useful paradigm for thinking about environmental damage?

There are many different versions of apocalypse, both religious and secular. And there are various environmental situations that readily lend themselves to apocalyptic description.

Think of the Iraq War, which played out in a post-apocalyptic landscape. This was the cradle of civilisation: the very first cities and the very first agriculture began there in Mesopotamia. The British zone is where the Epic of Gilgamesh was set. There were a series of extraordinarily rich, diverse civilisations that had existed in what is now a grey desert littered with the burnt out remains of Saddam Hussein’s tanks.

Every one of those civilisations has been completely erased, but for certain archaeological artifacts and the odd mound sticking out of the desert. All of them have been destroyed by a combination of environmental change and human agency. The primary reason was the rivers changing course: suddenly these city states had no sustenance because the rivers no longer provided irrigation for their fields.

What you see in Mesopotamian history is a whole series of civilisations rising, often lasting for many hundreds or thousands of years. The empires lasted far longer than empires do in the modern age. And you see them not just collapsing but utterly disappearing into the grey dust. If you remember back to all those scenes of soldiers fighting in the desert, they were fighting over the remains of those previous civilisations.

So, apocalypse is there in the entire history of civilisation. We live in a sort of civilizational interglacial. We live in a little period of respite from apocalypse. But in all civilisations, people forget how lucky they are to be in that respite. And through a combination of environmental change and endogenous civilisational collapse (which might be accelerated by raiders and opposing empires and armies), all civilisations eventually fall and succumb to apocalypse.

So, the idea of apocalypse as discussed by environmentalists is not some far-flung black fantasy. It’s simply what happens to everyone eventually.

“We live in a little period of respite from apocalypse.”

In the case of The Road, what makes its environmental apocalypse particularly notable is that humans take most life-forms with them. Human beings are remarkably resilient. This is one of the things that the novel suggests: everything else has gone but there are still human beings on the planet. That seems quite plausible to me: we are a highly adaptable generalist species which can survive when we have wiped out all of the specialist species and then most of the generalist species as well. And it is quite likely to come down to rats, cockroaches, human beings, and not much else.

So this could happen?

It is an extreme scenario. On the spectrum of potential apocalypses, it is the ultimate one, when you lose everything. But along that spectrum are a whole series of other losses, some of which we are experiencing at the moment: look at what’s happening to coral reefs, rainforests, ice caps, insects, and megafauna on both land and at sea.

This makes me think of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, and their projection of different possible future scenarios. The Road seems like a fictional imagination of one of the most extreme IPCC scenarios; even imagining such a scenario could be enough to galvanise us into acting.

Well, it should be. And I think Cormac McCarthy has done us a great service in creating that thought-experiment. It is a challenge to all the economists who say that the environment is just an ‘externality’, and that we don’t need to worry about it because the market will sort it out. Well fix that then, market!

Buy

Indeed, you selected several provocative books on economics, including Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

We’re at a time of crisis. We obviously face an environmental crisis but at the same time we face a political crisis, and a series of economic crises. These things cannot be separated. Our primary task in all such situations is to understand the roots of these crises.

I choose this book for two reasons. First of all, in the economic sphere, Piketty explains the economic crisis that we face in ways that also explain the political crisis. He does this by talking about the rise of what he calls ‘patrimonial capital’: wealth arising from inheritance, rent, and interest payments which greatly outweighs any wealth arising from hard work and enterprise. Patrimonial capital creates a class which is effectively inviolable: a class whose position cannot be challenged economically and therefore cannot be challenged politically.

You can take Piketty’s argument a little further and say that patrimonial capital breeds patrimonial politics. It creates a class of people who cannot ordinarily be displaced by democracy because they are able to buy their way back into power through our unreformed political-funding arrangements, the use of dark money, funding think-tanks, social media astroturfing, and sock puppetry. That solid and unredeemable core of wealth creates a solid and unredeemable power block.

When you have got an elite that is far richer than the rest of the population, they become much less amenable to political demands. And their eventual aim is to release themselves from the constraints of democracy.

Now, when you consider that these people are by far and away the most damaging people in environmental terms with their vast carbon footprints, their consumption of rare fish sushi, their use of mahogany fittings, super-yachts and private planes, and the huge demands that they make (especially with the help of their dark money funding networks) for their complete release from environmental regulations and the destruction of those regulations, you realise that the power of patrimonial capital also presents an imminent environmental threat.

“Patrimonial capital creates a class which is effectively inviolable: a class whose position cannot be challenged economically and therefore cannot be challenged politically.”

As well as offering a meta-analysis of our current crisis, Piketty provides some withering statistical analysis. The most important part of his work was his extension of the Kuznets curve to the present day. The Kuznets curve was supposed to show that inequality diminishes over time.

However, Piketty was able to show that inequality diminished in the post-war decades only because of the vast taxation of the very rich that took place. The average rates of taxation were about 80-90%. It was the Second World War followed by the rise of Keynesian social democracy on both sides of the Atlantic that eroded the position of the very rich and removed their massive economic and political power, and created more egalitarian societies.

So, there were the Trente Glorieuses (as the French call them) between 1945 and 1975 during which there was a great redistribution of both wealth and power. And then, of course, it closed up again with the new era of patrimonial capital, which now begins to resemble that of the years before the Great Depression—the first quarter of the twentieth century. We’re heading back into that territory now, with the help of a justifying ideology which is similar to but not the same as the laissez-faire ideology that led to the Great Depression. And this justifying ideology is called neoliberalism.

However, one complaint that I have about Piketty is that, while he brilliantly analyses the problems that we face, his solutions are in no way commensurate with the scale of the problem.

He calls for a global tax on inherited wealth.

Which is good as far as it goes, but it only goes ten per cent of the way towards challenging the scale of the economic and political power that he exposes.

But worse still, he has nothing to say about the environmental crisis. His solutions are all about Keynesian stimulus measures. These would actually exacerbate the environmental crisis by seeking to ensure that the rate of economic growth resumes.

This is one of the fundamental problems that we face: the two great narratives of the twentieth century—Keynesianism and neoliberalism—are the only two political narratives we still have. And there has been little effort within mainstream politics on the left and centre, since Keynes wrote his General Theory, to develop a new narrative which allows us to live in the twenty-first century in a way that benefits human beings without destroying the living world on which we depend.

Buy

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine explores what she calls ‘disaster capitalism’. What is that?

The Shock Doctrine explains some of the mechanisms by which patrimonial capital acquires power and enhances its wealth. It’s a brilliant piece of work, and one of those rare books that changes the way you perceive the world.

By showing how neoliberals, in particular, use disasters to create opportunities to extend their programme in ways that would never be accepted in ordinary circumstances because they are profoundly undemocratic and exclusive, she was able to explain a series of phenomena that we see operating all over the world.

She is able to fill in some of the gaps in Piketty’s account. Piketty demonstrates quite rightly that there is an organic momentum in patrimonial capital, in that once you’ve got money you can increase that money through what is laughably called ‘investment’.

As Andrew Sayer points out in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, ‘investment’ means two completely different things. It means investing in creating new products, ideas and things that did not exist before, and it also means putting money into things that already exist in order to multiply that money. These are opposed meanings. The second one should be called ‘speculation’. But it disguises itself under the term ‘investment’ in order to justify the simple harvesting of rent and interest payments.

“This is a brilliant piece of work, and one of those rare books that changes the way you perceive the world.”

Klein shows that the organic momentum of patrimonial capitalism is greatly enhanced by being extended through the doctrine of capitalising on crises, which is what neoliberal advisors, governments and corporations have been doing from Iraq to New Orleans.

They move in and hit any place that has suffered from catastrophic disruption as hard as they can with a whole series of new policies that people are in no state to resist. These policies basically involve transferring public or generally shared wealth into the hands of a private elite.

We saw something very similar in the UK following the financial crash—a financial crash caused by the neoliberal policy of the deregulation of the banks—which was used to enhance neoliberal policy. While we were reeling, George Osborne and others moved in and said right, we’re having that. Basically, through austerity, they transferred a great deal of public wealth and public sector assets into the hands of their chums in the city and in corporations.

Naomi Klein attributes the most succinct formulation of the shock doctrine to Milton Friedman and the Chicago school.

Yes. Milton Friedman and the Chicago school are just one component of a global movement that began in 1947 with the formation of the Mont Pelerin Society. This was set up by Friedrich Hayek and others following the success of his book The Road to Serfdom, which really laid out the territory for neoliberal philosophy. It created ‘a kind of neoliberal international’ (as Daniel Stedman Jones called it in his book Masters of the Universe) composed of academics, journalists, think-tanks, and a whole series of independent thinkers around the world who gradually worked this up into a series of strategies and tactics—of which the shock doctrine was one.

Very patiently, they waited for Keynesian economics to get into trouble, which it did in the 1970s. They were able to move in and say that they had got the solutions: a completely different way of doing economics and a new way of organising society. This was then picked up by Thatcher and Reagan, and then by Clinton and by Blair, and became hegemonic.

What we’re lacking now is a new narrative that acknowledges that neoliberalism has failed, but offers a new story to replace it. We can’t go back to Keynesianism. It ran into all sorts of problems in the 1970s which have not gone away.

When people say they’re Keynesians today, they’re just talking about a very small fraction of the Keynesian program: they’re talking about stimulus spending and interest-rate manipulation. But there is a lot more to it than that: capital controls, foreign exchange controls and the International Clearing Union, and a whole series of all other issues that were essential for his program to be carried out. But it’s very hard to see how they could be brought in today. We can certainly recruit elements of Keynesianism but we can’t use the whole package. We need a new political narrative.

I suppose that Paul Verhaeghe adds another piece of the puzzle by discussing how neoliberalism manifests itself on an individual level, in terms of our identity.

One of the extraordinary aspects of neoliberalism is the doctrine—which goes far beyond economics—that the natural form of human organisation is extreme competition and individualism.

This doctrine holds that individualism is not just natural but also good, and should be encouraged. Supposedly, any effort of people to organise in combination with each other to create a better world disrupts the natural functioning of what is called ‘the market’, which is a sorting system for deciding who the winners should be and who the losers should be. If you disrupt the market, then the wrong people are identified as the winners, and the wrong people become the losers.

“The state of nature (as Hobbes would have called it) for human beings is the exact opposite of what he proposes: we have to work together to survive.”

So, it’s an intensely moral doctrine, but one founded on a complete misconception of human nature. It’s a Hobbesian worldview. And when Thomas Hobbes formulated his philosophy in 1651—the notion that we’re engaged in a war of every man against every man, and that in the state of nature our lives were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short—it was understandable because he’d just witnessed the English Civil War in which a high proportion of the men in England were killed. His understanding of human evolution was limited to the book of Genesis, and he subscribed to the doctrine of Original Sin.

So, while it was understandable in 1651, it is completely unsustainable in the twenty-first century in which we see an extraordinary conjunction of neuroscience, social science, anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary biology all pointing us in the same direction which is that we are, in the words of an article in Frontiers in Psychology, ‘spectacularly unusual when compared to other animals’, in that we are fantastically altruistic and socially minded.

The state of nature (as Hobbes would have called it) for human beings is the exact opposite of what he proposes: we have to work together to survive. Here we were in the African savannahs, the slowest and weakest of all the large mammals, living in a world of horns and tusks and fangs and claws. The only way we survived was through extreme reciprocity and mutual aid. That is deeply implanted in our psyches. We have an innate tendency to help each other, and we prosper by doing so.

So, neoliberalism is founded on a complete myth. But it’s a myth that has been very successfully propounded through the media and by the government. It’s a story which we keep being told until we start telling it to ourselves, and imagining that this is how it ought to be.

But it turns out, as Verhaeghe demonstrates, that we can’t actually live like that. If we tell ourselves we are lone rangers, sole traders, self-made men and women living in complete isolation, our psyches collapse and we end up with epidemics of mental health problems. We end up simply being unable to sustain our inner lives. This leads to a whole series of social phobias, obsessive compulsive disorders, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and self-harm. We see that—as happens so often in societies—it is children that bear the brunt of social trends.

We’re now seeing in Britain, for example, what appear to be epidemics of mental health problems amongst children. When you look at the admissions of children to Accident and Emergency departments because of self-harming, the levels of eating disorders, and the complete inability to find beds for children with severe mental health problems, you see that something bad is happening. What Verhaeghe proposes is that we have internalised the neoliberal narrative and it simply does not work for us.

Verhaeghe describes meritocracy as ‘the loincloth of neoliberalism’. Thinking about children internalising neoliberal attitudes, do you think that Theresa May’s plans to revitalize grammar schools are just going to exacerbate the problem?

I think that’s right. Interestingly, by the time Hayek came to write his book The Constitution of Liberty, he had completely given up on the idea of meritocracy. He simply equated wealth with merit. It didn’t matter how you acquired that wealth—whether you inherited it, or whether you or your parents stole it. The fact of being rich was a demonstration of merit, and the rich should be unimpeded in the way they wanted to live because they would be the scouts or pioneers who would show everybody else how to live.

It’s interesting that, as the doctrines of neoliberalism evolved, their purpose became more and more transparent. Originally, neoliberals claimed that they wanted a meritocracy as a justifying rhetoric. But in fact, the last thing they wanted was a true meritocracy, as that would threaten the very rich.

There were billionaires funding the neoliberal international all over the world to huge amounts: setting up think tanks to promote it, establishing academic departments and sponsoring academics, and promoting it through their newspapers. What they wanted was an unassailable position for the very rich. They wanted the very rich to be able to detach themselves from the demands and constraints of democracy.

Similarly, the last thing Theresa May wants is a true meritocracy. Yet there are elements of the original neoliberal doctrine which still run through modern neoliberal ideology. These say that we have to create elite educational institutions in order to discover merit in people. And, of course, this sets up almost impossible expectations for a lot of children, pressure to which no child should be subject. This is a factory style of education where children, having been rescued from the looms of the cotton towns, are now forced to a similar system of absurd working hours and all the devastating complications that arise from that. And we’ve ended up creating severe mental health issues.

“If we tell ourselves we are lone rangers, sole traders, self-made men and women living in complete isolation, our psyches collapse and we end up with epidemics of mental health problems.”

One of the interesting points that Verhaeghe makes is that neoliberalism was supposed to free us from the stifling control of bureaucracy, but that it has had the opposite effect. This is because, in order to discern merit, you have to have total monitoring and surveillance.

So, in the workforce, if you want to establish who are the most productive workers, you have to keep tabs on them at all times. There has to be constant quantification and assessment, which requires constant monitoring and micromanagement. If you look in any public service, for example, you will see people being absolutely crushed by this stifling regime of micromanagement. It’s the same in much of the private sector as well. Well, so much for freeing us from bureaucracy…

Buy

You hinted that we need an alternative to neoliberal ideology. Does Kate Raworth’s Dougnut Economicsprovide such an alternative?

Doughnut Economics takes us quite a long way towards redeeming some of the economic issues that we’re talking about and, at the same time, ensuring that the better distribution of wealth and social justice does not destroy the living world on which we depend. That is, it tries to reconcile the environmental vision with the vision of widely shared prosperity.

What she has done is quite literally to redraw economics. She starts by saying that the diagrams around which we base our economic imagination are simply wrong. They do not describe the world in any of the ways in which it really works. They exclude huge sectors such as, for instance, the economics of the home and the work of women. They exclude the living world and see any damage that we do to the living world as merely an ‘externality’.

Get the weekly Five Books newsletter

Raworth rejects the old circular flow diagrams that are central to mainstream economics. She argues that we need to show that we depend on energy inputs and materials from the natural world, for example, which circular flow diagrams don’t demonstrate. And we need to show all the different spheres—state, commons, household and market—and how they interact with each other.

From there, she says we’ve got to decide what economics is for. One of the important points she makes is that economics has lost its goals. It claims to be just a description of human behaviour, yet it has got all sorts of hidden agendas, many of which are hidden from economists themselves.

Of course, even taken as a description of human behaviour, economics is generally a very bad one. Most economists have a woeful misconception of human behaviour. An extreme example is their model of people as homo economicus: self-maximising man just pursuing his own interests at the expense of everybody else. That’s simply not how human beings work.

By contrast, Raworth says economics should have an agenda and the agenda should be to create a better life for everyone, without destroying the living world on which we depend. And if creating a world in which all can thrive without exceeding natural limits is the purpose, then let’s draw that.

“What she has done is quite literally to redraw economics.”

So, she creates this doughnut diagram whose outer ring is the planetary boundaries that we shouldn’t cross if we—and our descendants—are to have a good and prosperous life and if we are to allow other species to live on earth alongside us. The outer ring is constituted by factors identified by a group of scientists, such as biodiversity loss, ocean acidification and climate change.

The inner ring of the doughnut is the social floor below which we shouldn’t fall. This inner ring is described by sustainable development goals. So, we should all have decent quality of housing, water, education, political voice, and so on. We should live within the safe and just space between the two rings.

Now, there’s a lot more work to be done to explore how this is going to be realised, but she has made a very good start.

One suggestion that Raworth makes it to replace the idea of ‘the tragedy of the commons’ with the idea of ‘the creativity of the commons’. What does that mean?

The commons is an essential sphere that is routinely overlooked by economists. It’s quite hard to define. It’s neither the state nor the market. Rather, it can be thought of as a particular set of assets, the people possessing those assets, and the rules that those people develop in order to manage those assets cooperatively.

So, the commons is not just the pasture, the coral reef or the free software that you and your group of friends and neighbours might be managing together and surviving from, but it’s also you and your group of neighbours, and the common rules that you have developed to manage those things.

“We should create new commons.”

The commons have been greatly maligned in all sorts of ways but particularly by the doctrine of ‘the tragedy of the commons’, formulated by Garrett Hardin in 1968. This doctrine proposes an entirely theoretical situation in which you have pastoralists using some pasture. Every one of them has an incentive to add another animal to their flocks because they get the full benefit of that animal, but the commons as a whole loses as a result of overgrazing.

Well, that’s not how it actually happens in the real world. Had Hardin had any experience of the real world, he would have recognised that. I saw this myself in Turkana district in northern Kenya. The commons are extremely closely regulated by the people who keep their animals on them. This directly speaks to Hardin’s example because this is a pastoralist society.

If somebody came into the commons and started grazing their animals without the permission of the elders, and without an allocated pasture right, in the first instance they’d be driven off with sticks. In the second instance, they’d be caught and tied to a tree and beaten with sticks. In the third instance, they’d be killed.

This was an extremely closely-regulated situation because on those regulations people’s survival depended. If the commons were overgrazed, everyone would die of starvation, which is what Hardin predicted. But it doesn’t happen there because of that regulation.

Elinor Ostrom has demonstrated repeatedly over many years just how false this picture was. But it was one of those convenient arguments—like those that appeal to the Kuznets curve—which was used by people who wanted to enclose the commons and grab common wealth in order to enhance their personal fortune.

How can we do justice to the creativity of the commons?

I think we have to do several things. One is to defend the commons we already have. A second is to reclaim commons which have been taken from us. That might be everything from our local forests to academic journals which have been seized by one of the most ruthless bunch of privateers in the modern world—groups like Elsevier and Springer.

Thirdly, we should create new commons. In Martin Adams’s book Land: A New Paradigm for a Thriving World there are some very good proposals for how we can gradually and peacefully—in a completely compensated way—take land back into common ownership and control. I think that’s an essential step towards building a more just and environmentally responsible society.

We haven’t discussed the idea of ‘rewilding’, which you explored in your book Feral. Could you tell us about that idea?

If we are to confront the current environmental crisis, we need a positive vision as well as visions of doom. And rewilding is one of those positive visions.

Rewilding envisages a mass restoration of ecosystems in places where we can do that without greatly impinging on human welfare and in ways which could greatly enhance human welfare.

To give one example, in Britain there are vast areas that are grazed extremely unproductively, with only one or two sheep per hectare. There are roughly four million hectares of upland sheep grazing in Britain which is roughly equivalent to the amount of land we use for all arable and all horticulture production. And yet, it produces just one per cent of our food.

This is grossly misused land. And it’s only sustained through agricultural subsidies. This is a terrible misuse of public money and I believe that that money would be much better spent paying the same people to restore that land, to bring back trees, to bring back our missing wildlife, and to make magnificent habitats once more. People would then wish to visit these habitats, and we could create a new economy around that.

Again, at sea, there is overfishing almost everywhere. We could create large marine reserves in which no fishing takes place. These could then become the breeding grounds which enhance the fishing industry, as well as creating wonderful marine ecosystems which large numbers of scuba divers, recreational anglers, and whale watchers would want to visit, again creating a new economy.

Interview by David Shackleton

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at editor@fivebooks.com

Climate Change Nature & Environment Politics & Society Capitalism

Support Five Books

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount, or by buying some of our most recommended books from Amazon. Since we are enrolled in their affiliate program, we receive a small percentage of any product you buy, at no extra cost to you.
$5
$10
$20
$50
Other

BOOKS BY GEORGE MONBIOT

Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics in an Age of Crisis
by George Monbiot

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature
by George Monbiot

Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life
by George Monbiot

Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics in an Age of Crisis
by George Monbiot

Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life
by George
Monbiot

2018/09/21

[생명 자체의 정치] 사회학자 니컬라스 로즈

마르크스를 버렸다! 푸코를 따랐다! 생명을 말하다!
[생명 자체의 정치] 사회학자 니컬라스 로즈
강양구 기자(정리)
2012.11.02 19:10:00
--------

마르크스를 버렸다! 푸코를 따랐다! 생명을 말하다!

최근 자연과학과 인문·사회과학을 꿰뚫는 열쇳말은 '생명'이다.

일찌감치 21세기를 '생명과학의 시대'로 명명하고 인간 유전체(게놈) 프로젝트 등을 통해서 '생명의 비밀'에 파헤치려는 야심을 숨기지 않는 자연과학이 생명을 되뇌는 것은 어찌 보면 당연해 보인다. 하지만 그동안 과학기술의 변화에도 꿈쩍 않던 인문·사회과학이 생명에 주목하는 일은 어떻게 봐야 할까?

이런 변화의 맨 앞에 서 있는 지식인이 바로 영국의 사회학자 니컬라스 로즈(영국 런던대학교 킹스 칼리지 교수)다. 로즈는 2000년대부터 새로운 생명과학과 그 결과로 나타난 의료의 변화가 우리의 삶을 어떻게 바꿀지를 고민해왔다. 그는 이런 지적 실험의 중간성과를 2006년 <생명 자체의 정치(The Politics of Life Itself)>로 펴내고, 분과 학문을 넘나드는 학제 간 연구를 진행 중이다.

한국에서도 곧 출간될 <생명 자체의 정치>는 현대 생명과학이 낳은 삶의 변화를 분자화(molecularization), 최적화(optimization), 주체화(subjectification), 전문성(expertise), 생명경제(bioeconomy), 이렇게 다섯 가지로 정리하고, 그것이 가지는 함의를 과학과 의료 현장의 변화를 염두에 두고서 설명한다.

니컬러스 로즈는 푸코 철학에 대한 영어권의 대표적인 해석자로 꼽힐 뿐만 아니라, 최근 국내 인문·사회과학계에서도 주목을 받는 이른바 '통치성(Governmentality)' 연구의 권위자다. 그는 6년간 편집장을 맡았던 <경제와 사회(Economy and Society)>를 통해서 푸코의 통치성 연구를 조명하고 발전시키며 영국의 이른바 '통치성 학파'를 이끌었다.

<프레시안>은 국민대학교 '생명공학의 새로운 정치와 윤리' 연구팀(책임 교수 : 김환석)이 개최한 국제 워크숍(21세기 생명 정치와 생명 윤리) 참석차 한국을 방문한 니컬라스 로즈를 만나 마르크스, 알튀세르, 푸코 그리고 생명과학으로 이어진 지적 여정을 들었다. 인터뷰는 김환석 국민대학교 교수(사회학)가 맡았다.

▲ 니컬라스 로즈 영국 런던 대학교 킹스 칼리지 교수. ⓒ프레시안(손문상)

생물학에서 심리학으로

김환석 : 한국에서 선생님은 프랑스의 철학자 미셸 푸코가 1970년대 후반에 고안한 통치성 개념을 적극적으로 수용해 발전시킨 영국 통치성 학파의 좌장으로 알려져 있습니다. 하지만 선생님의 명성에 비해서 정작 구체적인 연구 성과는 제한적으로만 소개가 되어 있는 것 같아요. 선생님 개인사는 전혀 알려져 있지 않고요. (웃음)

더구나 선생님은 2000년대 들어서는 현대 생명과학과 의료를 둘러싼 여러 가지 문제에 관심을 집중하고 있습니다. 2006년에는 이 새로운 지적 실험의 성과를 정리해 <The Politics of Life Itself(생명 자체의 정치)>를 펴내기도 했습니다. 마침 이 책은 국내에서도 조만간 번역, 출간될 예정입니다.

1980년대부터 유럽, 미국에 득세한 신자유주의를 연구하던 미셸 푸코의 계승자가 생명과학에 관심을 가지게 된 계기를 설명하려면, 아무래도 선생님의 지적 배경을 소개하는 게 순서일 듯합니다. 먼저 가족 관계부터 살펴볼까요? (웃음) 형이 저명한 과학자죠? 생물학자이자 뇌 과학자로 유명한 스티븐 로즈 영국 개방 대학 교수 말입니다.

로즈 : 맞습니다. 형이 한국에서도 유명한가요? (웃음)

김환석 : 한국에서도 1980년대부터 국가나 자본이 주도하는 현대 과학기술을 비판적으로 보려는 사회 운동이 있었습니다. 그런 사회 운동에 참여해온 이들이 참고했던 사례 중 하나가 바로 스티븐 로즈 교수가 주도한 '급진 과학 운동'이었습니다. 이들의 지향은 잡지 <Science for the People(민중을 위한 과학)>의 제호에 잘 드러나 있지요.

아, 일반 대중에게 스티븐 로즈 교수는 <우리 유전자 안에 없다>(한울 펴냄)의 저자로도 유명합니다. 이 책은 세계적인 베스트셀러 <이기적 유전자>의 리처드 도킨스와 <통섭>, <사회생물학>의 에드워드 윌슨 등을 강하게 비판한 책으로 유명하지요. 스티븐 로즈 교수는 최근에는 뇌 과학의 최전선에서 뇌 과학의 오용을 비판하는 작업도 수행하고 있더군요.

로즈 : 형(1938년생)은 저(1947년생)보다 아홉 살 많아요. 케임브리지 대학에서 공부했고 아주 젊은 나이에 영국 개방 대학의 첫 번째 생물학 교수가 되었습니다. 그리고 방금 지적했듯이 사회운동가 정체성이 아주 강했지요. 앞으로 또 얘기할 기회가 있겠지만, 저는 형과 비교하면 사회 운동에 훨씬 소극적이었습니다.

김환석 : 선생님이 대학 학부에서 생물학을 공부한 것도 형의 영향을 받았습니까?

로즈 : 아주 없지는 않았을 거예요. 어렸을 때, 형의 실험실에서 실험을 돕기도 했으니까요. 아무튼 형을 따라서 1965년에 서섹스 대학교의 생물학과를 진학했습니다. 당시 그 대학에서는 세계적으로 유명한 생물학자 존 메이너드 스미스가 가르쳤어요. 초파리의 유전학에 대한 많은 연구가 진행 중이었습니다.

서섹스 대학교는 새롭게 설립된 대학으로서 1960년대 후반 유럽의 급진적인 분위기가 감싸던 곳이었어요. '초파리 연구가 세상을 돌아가는 것을 이해하는데 무슨 도움이 되지' 이런 회의가 들더군요. 이후에 동물 행동학으로 관심을 옮겼지만 잘하지 못했어요. 그래서 관심을 바꿔서 생물학과 심리학을 복수 전공하다, 아예 심리학으로 관심을 옮겼습니다.

김환석 : 학생 운동에도 적극적으로 참여했습니까?

로즈 : 베트남 전쟁, 남아프리카공화국의 아파르트헤이트(인종 차별 정책) 반대 운동에 참여했어요. 하지만 형과 비교할 수 없습니다. (웃음)

마르크스에서 푸코로

ⓒ프레시안(손문상)
김환석 : 1970년 런던 대학교(Institute of Education)에서 심리학으로 석사 학위를 받았습니다.

로즈 : 어린이를 가르치고 싶어서 교사로 훈련을 받았어요. 어린이 교육을 바꾸는 일이 사회를 바꾸는 길의 하나로 생각했지요. 1년간 환경 부적응 아동을 위한 학교에서 일하기도 했습니다. 그런 관심 속에서 어떻게 어린이에게 '비정상 아동', '부적응 아동' 딱지를 붙이는지를 놓고 연구를 진행했고, 그 주제로 심리학 석사 학위를 받았습니다.

그러고 나서 그런 관심의 연장선상에서 아동 학대 예방 단체에서 3년간 일했지요. 그러다 런던 대학교(Institute of Education) 사회학과 박사 과정에 진학했습니다. 당시 저는 프랑스의 철학자 루이 알튀세르를 따르는 마르크스주의자였어요. 그래서 이데올로기와 또 그것을 극복하는 문화 투쟁에 관심이 많았고, 대학에서도 그 주제로 연구를 시작했습니다.

김환석 : 그 즈음에 <Ideology & Consciousness>를 창간했지요?

로즈 : 네, 작은 학술 잡지였어요. 알튀세르의 철학으로부터 영향을 받은 잡지였습니다. 그런데 이 잡지 동인들이 이런저런 이유로 알튀세르와 같은 접근에 환멸을 느끼게 되었습니다. 그 때부터 푸코의 글을 번역해서 읽기 시작했어요. '통치성'에 대한 푸코 에세이의 첫 영어 번역이 실린 것도 이 학술지입니다.

김환석 : 어떤 이유로 알튀세르와 같은 접근에 거리를 두게 된 건가요?

로즈 : 박사 학위를 시작할 때만 하더라도 관심은 알튀세르처럼 이데올로기 비판에 있었어요. 그런데 안토니오 그람시에서 알튀세르에 이르는 이데올로기 개념으로는 구체적인 상황에 대한 분석을 할 수 없었어요. 예를 들어, 학교가 어떻게 작동하는가, 심리학이 어떻게 작동하는가, 감옥이 어떻게 작동하는가, 이런 질문에 이데올로기는 답을 주지 못했습니다.

왜냐고요? 이데올로기는 항상 진실(truth)에 대비되는 거짓(false) 혹은 오류(error)에 집중합니다. 그러니까 사람들이 어떻게 진실 대신 거짓을 믿는가? 그런 오류에 기반을 둔 그런 허위의식이 어떻게 확산되는가? 환영 밑의 진실을 어떻게 이해할 것인가? 이런 질문을 끊임없이 던집니다.

하지만 푸코를 읽으면서 이런 진실/거짓의 구분이 과연 타당한지 의문을 품게 되었습니다. 사실 진짜 중요한 질문은 이런 것이었습니다. 왜 이것을 진실이라고 믿게 되었나? 무엇이 이것을 진실로 만들었나? 이것을 진실이라고 말하는 권력은 무엇인가? 이것을 진실이라고 말했을 때 그 효과는 무엇인가?

'오류의 문제'에서 '진실의 문제'로 관심이 바뀐 거예요. 그리고 이런 관심의 이동은 1984년 박사 학위 논문으로 결실을 맺게 됩니다. 이 논문은 영국에서 심리학이 어떻게 탄생했는지 추적한 것입니다. 이듬해에 <The Psychological Complex>(1985년)로 출간됩니다. 이 책에 관심을 보인 이들은 거의 없었지만요. (웃음)

당시만 하더라도 푸코의 이론이나 방법을 이론적으로 검토하거나 철학적으로 논의하는 연구는 있었지만, 그것을 실제로 활용한 연구는 영어권에서는 전무했어요. 이 책은 그것을 시도한 영국 최초의 연구라고 할 수 있어요. 이 책을 시작으로 푸코의 이론과 방법을 적용한 여러 경험 연구를 본격적으로 진행합니다.

김환석 : 박사 학위 논문의 내용을 좀 더 소개하면요?

로즈 : 방금 '진실의 문제'가 중요하다고 얘기했잖아요? 영국과 같은 자유주의 사회에서 권위(authority)의 획득은 국가에 의해서 주어지지 않아요. 사람들이 진실이라고 믿는 것을 얘기할 때 권위를 획득할 수 있습니다. 제가 보기에는 심리학이 그 하나의 예였어요. 심리학자는 인간에 대한 진실을 얘기한다고 믿어짐으로써 막강한 권위를 지니게 됩니다.

(알튀세르의 이데올로기 비판이 그렇듯이) 이들에게 '권력의 하수인'이나 혹은 '자본의 하수인'이라는 딱지를 붙이고, 이들이 권력이나 자본의 이해관계를 위해서 거짓 주장을 꾸며내고 있다는 식으로 비판하는 접근은 한계가 있어요. 왜냐하면, 이들은 바보도 아니고 꾸미지도 않아요. 이들은 자신이 하는 일이 진실이며 고결하고 과학이라고 진심으로 믿습니다.

그렇다면, 이렇게 심리학자들이 자신이 하는 일을 진실이라고 믿게끔 하는 전제가 무엇인지 따져 묻는 게 필요합니다. 박사 학위 논문이 영국 심리학의 탄생에 관심을 가지게 된 것도 바로 이런 문제의식 때문이었습니다. 1980년대는 계속해서 심리학에 대한 연구에 집중했고 <Inventing Ourselves>, <Governing the Soul> 등의 책들을 냈어요.

ⓒ프레시안(손문상)
김환석 : 그러니까 1970년대 후반에 마르크스에서 푸코로 문제의식이 바뀌고 나서 계속 그걸 심화해 온 셈이군요.

로즈 : 맞아요. 마르크스에서 푸코로의 관심 변화가 현실에의 개입 의지가 약해졌다는 식으로 해석해서는 곤란합니다. 1970년대나 1980년대나 저나 같은 문제의식을 가진 동료들은 여전히 기존 사회 권력을 비판하고 더 나은 사회를 만드는데 아주 강한 관심을 가지고 있었습니다. 다만 비판의 도구로서 마르크스나 알튀세르가 더 이상 유효하지 않다고 판단했을 뿐이에요.

이점을 강조하고 싶군요. 지금도 가르치는 학생들에게 마르크스나 엥겔스의 글을 읽어볼 것을 권합니다. 하지만 그들의 글은 지금과는 전혀 다른 시대(19세기)를 염두에 둔 것이라는 걸 꼭 기억해야 합니다. 그들은 '진실의 저장고'가 아니에요. 그들이 자신의 시대를 제대로 이해하려고 얼마나 고군분투했는지 확인하고, 우리의 시대를 새로운 방식으로 이해하려고 노력해야지요.

푸코 역시 마찬가지입니다. 개인적으로는 푸코의 이론이나 방법이 당대의 자유주의 사회를 이해하는데 도움이 되리라고 생각해 적극적으로 수용했습니다. 하지만 푸코를 그대로 되뇌는 게 아니라 그것을 얼마나 창조적으로 활용할지가 중요합니다. 물론 당분간 사람들은 저를 '푸코디언(Foucauldian)'이라고 부를 테지만요. (웃음)

김환석 : 마르크스에서 푸코로의 이동은 '거대 이론'에 대한 회의 탓도 있지 않나요?

로즈 : 맞아요. 거대 이론은 세상을 이해하는데 도움이 되지 않아요. 거대 이론은 종종 어떤 일이 일어나고 있는가를 자신의 틀에 맞춰서 설명하고 심지어 예측까지 합니다. 그런데 도대체 그런 설명과 예측에서 우리가 무슨 통찰을 얻을 수 있을지 의문이에요. 예를 들어, 지구화를 둘러싼 거대 이론이 유행한 적이 있습니다.

그런데 이들에게 이렇게 물어봅시다. "도대체 지금 무슨 일이 일어나고 있나요?" "지구화요!" "그럼, 이런 일들이 왜 일어났나요?" "지구화요!" 다른 경우도 마찬가지입니다. "도대체 지금 무슨 일이 일어나고 있나요?" "신자유주의요!" "그럼, 이런 일들이 왜 일어났나요?" "당연히 신자유주의 때문이지요!" 이런 동어반복이 도대체 세상을 이해하는데 어떤 유의미한 통찰을 줄지 저는 의문이에요.

이제 어떤 사건이 '왜' 일어났는지가 아니라 '어떻게' 일어났는지에 더 초점을 맞춰야 한다고 생각합니다. 이렇게 어떤 사건이 '어떻게' 일어났는지를 따져 묻다 보면 작은 사건들이 다른 사건과 어떻게 연결되고 결합되며, 그 연결과 결합이 더 큰 규모의 변동을 어떻게 가능하게 했는지 살펴볼 수 있습니다.

앤서니 기든스, 울리히 벡과 같은 동료의 연구가 흥미롭다는 걸 부정하지는 않아요. 하지만 그들의 작업이 과연 세상을 이해하는 적절한 설명을 제공할지에 대해서는 회의적입니다. 예를 들어, 1980년대 미국과 영국의 신자유주의적 통치가 유럽을 넘어서 어떻게 그렇게 빨리 전 세계 곳곳으로 확산될 수 있었을까요? "지구화!" 이렇게 답하고 나면 더 이상 할 얘기가 없습니다.

하지만 신자유주의적 통치가 어떤 특징을 가지고 있는지, 그 구성 요소를 살피면 이 질문에 훨씬 더 설득력 있는 대답을 내놓을 수 있습니다. 더구나 이 구성 요소는 훨씬 더 구체적으로 삶과 밀착된 것이기 때문에 현실 개입의 가능성도 커집니다. 마르크스주의와 같은 거대 이론의 설명 방식보다 푸코에 주목하게 된 것은 바로 이런 사정과도 무관하지 않아요.

김환석 : 마르크스주의와 같은 거대 이론을 여전히 따르는 입장에서 보면, 선생님의 입장은 피상적이라는 비판을 면키 어려워 보입니다. (웃음)

로즈 : 맞아요. 저는 피상적인 사상가입니다. (웃음) 이것은 앞에서 이데올로기 비판을 회의하게 된 것과도 맞닿아 있지요. 마르크스주의는 표면에서 일어나는 일들을 이해하려면 그 심층에 존재하는 근원적인 원인을 찾아야 한다고 주장합니다. '숨겨진' 법칙이 표면의 사건을 가능하게 한다는 발상이지요.

반면에 푸코는 표면에서 일어나는 일들 자체에 주목하자고 강조합니다. 심층에 근원적인 원인이 있다고 가정하지 말고, 표면에서 일어나는 일들이 어떻게 연결되어서 새로운 변화를 야기하는지를 보는 게 세상을 이해하는 좀 더 나은 방법이라는 생각이었죠. 저 역시 그런 푸코의 입장에 전적으로 동의합니다.

ⓒ프레시안(손문상)

통치성에서 생명과학으로

김환석 : 푸코를 수용해서 기존의 사회과학을 혁신하려는 시도가 바로 통치성 연구입니다. 선생님은 1989년에 'History of the Present(현재의 역사)'라는 공부 모임을 만들었습니다.

로즈 : 당시 저와 동료를 사로잡고 있었던 문제는 당시 영국과 같은 자본주의 복지 국가에서 정치권력이 어떻게 자기를 정당화하면서 스스로를 유지하는지 보여주는 일이었습니다. 특히 당시는 전통적인 복지 국가와는 또 다른 새로운 형태의 정치권력(신자유주의)이 등장하고 있었기 때문에 이 과제는 시급한 일이었어요.

'현재의 역사'는 바로 이런 질문에 답해보려는 연구자들의 공부 모임이었습니다. 푸코의 이론이나 철학에 대한 논평이 아니라 (푸코의 접근을 취해서) 구체적인 경험 연구를 진행하던 영국 곳곳의 연구자들이 한 달에 한 번씩 런던에 모였습니다. 나중에는 외국 연구자도 참여해서 모임이 좀 더 국제적이 되었어요. 그 때부터 'History of the Present network'라고 불렀지요.

"현재의 역사"는 푸코가 <감시와 처벌>에서 사용한 표현입니다. 푸코는 역사에 관심을 갖는 이유가 과거에 대한 관심 때문이 아니라 바로 '현재'와 이를 가능하게 하는 조건에 대한 관심 때문이라면서 이 표현을 사용했지요. 우리도 똑같은 문제의식에서 이 표현을 사용한 것입니다.

김환석 : 통치성 연구를 통해서 선생님이 강조하고 싶었던 건 무엇이었습니까?

로즈 : 한 사회의 권력관계가 유지되는 방식이 바로 푸코가 얘기한 통치성입니다. 저는 1980년대 이후에 나타난 새로운 정치권력의 통치성에 '자유'가 핵심적인 요소임을 포착했습니다. 흔히 자유는 자동적으로 '해방'과 연결됩니다. 특히 1980년대 후반~1990년대 초반은 동구권 사회주의가 몰락하면서 모두 자유에 열광하던 시절이었어요.

하지만 영국과 같은 자유주의 복지 사회에서 자유는 정치권력이 통치를 유지하는 가장 효과적인 수단입니다. 그 사회 구성원이 자유의 이름으로 관리되고 지배받고 있으니까요. 여기서 저는 푸코가 던졌던 방식과 비슷한 질문을 자유를 상대로 던져야 한다고 주장했어요. 예를 들자면 이런 질문들입니다.

우리는 무엇을 자유라고 부르는가? 그런 자유는 어떻게 만들어졌는가? 사람들은 자신을 어떻게 자유롭다고 여기고 살아가는가? 우리가 자유롭기 위해서 치러야 할 대가는 없는가? 그렇게 사람들이 자신을 자유롭다고 믿게끔 하는 근거는 무엇인가? 그렇게 사람들이 자신을 자유롭다고 믿게끔 하는 과정에서 지식 특히 전문가의 역할은 무엇인가? 등.

마치 앞에서 '거짓의 문제'나 '오류의 문제'가 아니라 '진실의 문제'로 관심을 전환했던 것처럼, 이제는 '지배의 문제'나 '통제의 문제'가 아니라 '자유의 문제'로 관심을 전환할 필요가 있었고, 그것을 해명하는 과정에서 통치성 개념을 활용했습니다. 그런데 이런 문제의식에 당시만 하더라도 반감을 가진 이들이 많았어요. (웃음)

즉각 이런 반문이 따랐죠. "그럼 너는 영국에 사는 우리가 충분히 자유롭지 못하다는 말이냐?" 이런 반응은 제 문제의식을 제대로 이해하지 못한 반응이었습니다. 오히려 제가 던지고 싶은 질문은 "그런 당신은 왜 그렇게 자유에 집착하는가?" 혹은 "당신이 그렇게 충분히 자유롭다고 믿는 근거는 무엇인가?" 이런 것이었지요.

(로즈는 1980년대 이후 영국의 대처 정부와 같은 정치권력이 득세한 시대를 흔히 통용되는 '신자유주의' 대신 '선진 자유주의(advanced liberal)'라고 부른다. 이런 선진 자유주의, 즉 신자유주의 통치성의 중요한 특징은 바로 스스로의 삶을 관리하는 '자유로운 개인'의 등장이다. 1997년 외환 위기 이후 한국의 상황을 염두에 두고 로즈의 문제의식을 적용해 보자.

한국 사회에서 개인은 자신의 '몸값'을 높이기 위해서 끊임없이 자신을 관리한다. 자기 계발에 나서고, 경쟁에서 뒤처지면 자신이 몸값을 높이지 못하거나 '혁신'에 성공하지 못한 탓이라면 스스로를 탓한다. 이 과정에서 정부나 기업(자본)은 강제하지 않는다. 왜냐하면, 자유가 역설적으로 가장 효과적인 통치 수단이기 때문이다.

이런 로즈의 문제의식과 공명하는 책으로는 서동진의 <자유의 의지 자기 계발의 의지>(돌베개 펴냄), 한병철의 <피로 사회>(김태환 옮김, 문학과지성사 펴냄)가 있다.) (☞관련 기사 : 노무현 이명박 낳은 괴물은 어떻게 탄생했나?, 아프면 청춘, 견디면 직딩, '피로 사회'의 맨얼굴은?)

김환석 : '현재의 역사' 네트워크는 여전합니까?

로즈 : 통치성 연구의 역사를 간략히 언급할 필요가 있겠군요. 1980년대 후반부터 1990년대 후반까지 10여 년간 통치성 연구에 몰두했습니다. 특히 런던정경대학(LSE) 교수 피터 밀러와 공동 작업을 진행했어요. 푸코의 통치성 개념을 활용해 정치권력 일반에 대해서 분석을 시도한 논문('Political Power beyond the State')은 널리 알려졌어요.

통치성 개념은 구체적 상황을 분석할 수 있는 강력하고 유용한 개념임에는 틀림없습니다. 특히 이제 막 연구를 시작한 젊은 연구자에게는 더욱더 그렇지요. 이런 이유 때문인지, '현재의 역사'의 멤버 혹은 다른 연구자에 의해서 통치성에 대한 수많은 논문이 생산되었고 그것이 제가 편집장으로 있었던 <Economy and Society>에 발표되었어요.

하지만 1990년대 후반에 이르면 저나 밀러 모두 통치성 연구에 상당히 지치게 됩니다. 우리가 보기에 통치성 연구가 점차 반복적이고 창의성을 잃어가기 시작했어요. 통치성 개념은 이것에 대한 통치, 저것에 대한 통치 이런 식으로 무엇이든 유사하게 분석하는 도구가 되어 버렸습니다.

결국 1990년대 후반에는 통치성에 대해서 새로운 얘기를 할 수 있는 것이 없다는 판단이 들었습니다. 그래서 저는 <Powers of Freedom>(1999년)을 출간한 이후에는 더 이상 통치성 연구를 진행하기 않기로 결심했어요. 그리고 '현재의 역사' 네트워크에서도 더 이상 역할을 하지 않고 있고요. 현재로서는 '현재의 역사' 네트워크는 해체된 것이나 다름이 없어요.

ⓒ프레시안(손문상)

'죽음의 생명 정치'에서 '삶의 생명 정치'로

김환석 : 선생님께서 새롭게 선택한 분야가 바로 생명과학과 그것에 기반을 둔 생의료(biomedicine)입니다. 2006년에는 <The Politics of Life Itself(생명 자체의 정치)>를 펴냈고요. 이번에 한국을 방문한 것도 국민대학교 '생명공학의 새로운 정치와 윤리' 연구팀에서 주최한 워크숍 때문이고요.

로즈 : 화제를 바꾸기 전에 통치성 연구를 놓고서 한 가지만 덧붙일게요. 저는 많은 학자들이 한 사회의 정체를 파악하는 과정에서 '국가'에만 치중하는 게 불만이었습니다. 국가는 정치권력의 유일한 장소가 아니에요. 오히려 국가는 한 사회를 구성하는 여러 가지 권력의 효과로서 파악해야 합니다.

즉 국가를 제대로 이해하기 위해서라도 사회 곳곳에 존재하는 여러 권력의 양상에 주목해야 합니다. 제가 인간에 대한 진실을 말한다고 여겨져 온 심리학에 대한 연구에서부터 시작해 정치권력의 성격을 해명하는 데까지 이르게 된 것은 한 가지 예입니다. 그런데 여전히 국가를 정치권력의 유일한 혹은 최종적인 장소라고 보는 견해가 대세입니다.

아무튼 이런 불만 속에서 저는 새로운 연구 영역을 개척했습니다. 이런 관심의 변화는 극적으로 보이지만, 사실 저로서는 자연스러운 관심 변화입니다. 통치성 연구에 지칠 무렵, 다시 아주 구체적인 경험 연구로 돌아가고 싶었습니다. 다시 사회 곳곳에 구체적으로 존재하는 권력에 관심을 가지고 싶었던 거지요.

그런데 저는 석사 학위 논문을 준비하면서부터 계속해서 정신 의학 분야에 관심을 가지고 있었어요. 대학에서 심리학을 전공하던 당시에는 정신 병원(타비스톡 연구소)에서 일을 하기도 했었고, 친구 중에 심각한 정신 질환을 앓는 친구도 있었습니다. 푸코를 접할 무렵 읽은 논문 '광기와 문명'도 인상적이었고요.

그런 관심의 연장선상에서 정신 의학을 들여다보기 시작했어요. 그런데 20세기 후반부터 정신 의학에 큰 변화가 일어나고 있더군요. 생물학적 정신 의학, 유전학적 정신 의학, 뇌 과학 등이 전면에 등장하게 된 것입니다. 이런 생물학적 사유 방식의 대두는 정신 의학뿐만 아니라 심리학, 범죄학 등에도 영향을 주고 있었어요. '야, 이것이야말로 새로운 주제구나' 하는 생각이 들었습니다.

이런 새로운 생물학적 사유 방식을 이해하려면 생명과학 분야에서 무슨 일이 진행 중인지 살펴볼 필요가 있다는 생각이 들었어요. 당시 저는 런던 대학교 골드스미스 칼리지에 재직 중이었는데, '현재의 역사'와 비슷한 연구자 네트워크인 BIOS(The Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society)를 만들었어요.

ⓒ프레시안(손문상)
김환석 : 이 새로운 연구에서 중요한 개념이 바로 '생명 정치(biopolitics)'입니다. 이 개념 역시 푸코가 1970년대 후반에 고안했습니다. 사실 이 푸코의 생명 정치는 조르조 아감벤 등과 같은 이탈리아 철학자들이 거의 비슷한 시기에 주목했지요. 아감벤의 <호모 사케르> 같은 책은 한국에서도 유명합니다.

로즈 : 현대 생명과학과 의료에 관심을 가지게 되면서 자연스럽게 푸코의 생명 정치 개념에 주목하게 되었어요. 그런데 (아감벤을 비롯해서) 이 개념에 주목한 이들은 19세기에서 20세기에 이르는 시기에 존재했던 생명 정치에만 관심을 기울였어요. "추방" "절멸" "배제" "강제" "우생학" "수용소" 같은 단언들을 특징으로 하는 '죽음의 생명 정치'라고 할 수 있어요.

하지만 지금 21세기를 살아가는 우리가 마주치는 생명 정치는 그런 것이 아닙니다. 오히려 '삶의 생명 정치'입니다. 가장 큰 변화는 내가 "모든 사람을 위한 건강"이라고 부르는 것이죠. 의학이 담당하는 영역은 이제 질병 치료에서 건강관리로 바뀌었어요. 개인들은 건강을 관리하고, 생명을 연장하려고 합니다. 이런 욕망은 새로운 생명과학, 의료 기술 그리고 경제 활동을 자극하고 있지요.

이뿐만이 아닙니다. 이런 욕망은 새로운 주체화의 과정을 의미하기도 합니다. 예를 들어서, 우리는 여러 질환의 환자들이 결집해 정부, 기업, 과학자 공동체, 사회를 향해서 자신의 목소리를 높이는 일을 경험합니다. 이들은 자신의 질환에 대한 투자, 자원, 연구, 치료법을 요구하지요. 저는 이런 새로운 주체화 과정을 (능동적인) '생물학적 시민권'이라고 부릅니다.

앞으로 이런 생명/삶을 둘러싼 여러 관계가 비약적인 변화를 겪을 가능성이 큽니다. 그리고 그런 생명/삶을 둘러싼 권력 관계의 효과야말로 21세기를 살아가는 우리의 삶에 큰 영향을 줄 거예요. 그런 점에서 더 많은 이들이 이런 삶의 생명 정치에 관심을 기울여야 합니다. 푸코가 말했듯이, 이제는 생명 그 자체가 정치의 주제가 될 테니까요.

김환석 : 그런 문제의식에는 적극적으로 공감을 합니다. 하지만 선생님과 같은 입장은 자칫하면 현대 생명과학과 의료의 변화를 은연중에 긍정하는 효과를 낳을 수도 있지 않을까요?

로즈 : 기존의 인문·사회과학은 생명과학과 사회를 연결하려는 방식에 대단히 비판적이었습니다. 방금 지적한 대로 생명과학과 의료의 변화를 '비판적으로' 보지 않으면 그것을 '무비판적으로' 인정하는 것은 아닌가, 이런 생각이었죠. 그래서인지 많은 인문·사회과학자는 생명과학과 의료의 변화를 놓고서 습관적으로 부정적인 면을 부각하곤 했습니다.

눈부신 속도로 발전하는 생명과학과 그것의 결과로 나타난 의료의 변화에 인문·사회과학자들이 우려를 표하는 것은 당연합니다. 하지만 저는 그런 우려가 과연 현실의 구체적인 내용에 기반을 두고 있는지에 대해서는 굉장히 회의적이에요. 혹시 20세기 초반 나치 독일이 우생학을 내세우면서 벌어졌던 참극의 기억을 현대 생명과학에 그대로 덧씌우고 있는 건 아닌가, 이런 의심을 하는 겁니다.

저는 이런 식의 대응이야말로 지금 진행 중인 변화를 그냥 방치하는 태도라고 생각합니다. 생명과학과 그것을 이용한 의료 기술에 긍정적이든 부정적이든, 그것이 우리의 삶을 어떻게 변화시키는지 또 그런 변화가 어떤 의미가 있는지를 진지하게 숙고하는 것이 선행되어야 하지 않을까요? 그 후에야 비로소 그것의 의미를 놓고서 진지하고 생산적인 토론이 가능할 겁니다.

김환석 : 마지막 질문입니다. 아까 잠깐 능동적인 생물학적 시민권을 언급했습니다. 혹시 선생님은 21세기를 살아가는 시민들의 이상적인 모습을 바로 그런 부분에서 포착한 건가요?

로즈 : 사실 자신의 건강 상태 하나하나에 전전긍긍하면서 전문가의 처분에 모든 것을 맡기는 그런 개인만 모여 사는 미래는 얼마나 불행합니까? 그런데 자칫하면 그런 미래가 도래할지도 모릅니다. 그런 점에서 개인들이 연대해서 공통의 목소리를 내고 더 나아가 자신의 삶을 둘러싼 권력 관계를 바꾸는 일이야말로 멋진 일 아닐까요? 이것이야말로 제가 지향하는 새로운 삶의 생명 정치입니다.

ⓒ프레시안(손문상)

Moon and Kim Stage an Exuberant Summit in Pyongyang

Moon and Kim Stage an Exuberant Summit in Pyongyang

Moon and Kim Stage an Exuberant Summit in Pyongyang
Bold proposals on demilitarization break the logjam with Washington.

By Tim Shorrock Twitter
TODAY 2:36 PM

South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un wave to the crowd during a parade in Pyongyang, North Korea, on September 18, 2018. (Kyodo via AP Photo)
-------------------

Seoul

Over three days of diplomacy and pageantry in Pyongyang this week, the leaders of North and South Korea put on a stunning display of national unity and purpose that sent an unmistakable message that the two Koreas have moved into a new phase of reconciliation and are ready to overcome the barriers that have kept them divided since 1945.

“We have lived together for 5,000 years and been separated for 70 years,” South Korean President Moon Jae-in told some 150,000 people who had gathered in Pyongyang’s May Day Stadium to celebrate the summit in a climactic moment on Wednesday night. “We must live together as one people.”

The summit, the third between Moon and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un, was designed to tell the world—and skeptics in Washington—that North and South are determined to end, once and for all, the danger of war and nuclear conflict on their divided peninsula and resolve years of tension over North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program.

Minutes after returning from Pyongyang on Thursday night, Moon summarized his conversations with the North Korean leader to hundreds of Korean and foreign reporters covering the summit at the Seoul Press Center. “Chairman Kim expressed his wish to finish complete denuclearization at an early date and focus on economic development,” he said.

If the North makes good on its promises, “the US side, as well as our side too, need to take steps that would eradicate our hostile relations with the North,” he added. On Wednesday, following their first day of meetings, the two leaders laid out their goals.

“Today we adopted a military agreement to make a nuclear-free Korean peninsula,” Kim declared. Moon, standing next to him, added: “A Korean Peninsula free of war has begun to take shape. The South and North agreed today to eliminate all risks that could lead to war from all parts of the Korean Peninsula.”

It was the first visit to Pyongyang by a South Korean leader since 2007.

The summit was “peacemaking at its finest,” said Christine Ahn, the founder of Women Cross DMZ, an international coalition of women seeking to transform the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War into a permanent peace treaty. “This is history being made; there’s no turning back.”

On the nuclear front, North Korea offered to “permanently dismantle” two key facilities of its ICBM program that is so threatening to the United States, including a missile-engine test facility and a missile launchpad, and to allow outside experts into the country to observe the process. It also said it would permanently shut its nuclear facility at Yongbyon if certain conditions were met.

In addition to these gestures, President Moon said Thursday, Kim said he wants Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s “North Korea visit and a second summit with President Trump to happen at the earliest convenience in order to speed up the denuclearization process.”

Moon Chung-in, a special adviser to President Moon who accompanied him to Pyongyang, said in a press briefingWednesday that the situation has fundamentally changed.

North and South Korea now “share a common starting point: prevent random conflicts on the Korean Peninsula, which, in turn, could lead to preventing nuclear conflicts,” he said. “Through this process, the two Koreas should be able to achieve complete denuclearization on the peninsula.”

Highlights of the summit included a detailed agreement to defuse military tensions along the military demarcation line dividing the two countries, a decision by Kim to make an unprecedented visit to Seoul later this year, and a joint proposal to host the Olympic Games in 2032. Moon was accompanied on his trip by dozens of corporate executives, sports stars, artists, and leaders of civic organizations.

In Pyongyang, the two leaders issued a sweeping joint declaration they hope will knit their countries together economically and socially. It includes agreements to quickly link their road and rail connections, promote binational cooperation on environmental protections and public health, and open a permanent facility so divided families can visit each otheron a regular basis. Most of the agreements completed proposals first made at their initial summit in Panmunjomlast April.

Moon and Kim also agreed to reopen the Gaesong Industrial Complex just north of the DMZ, one of the most enduring symbols of previous eras of détente,, which was closed in 2016 during a period of severe tension. But the joint projects, which will also include tourism projects and a west-coast special economic zone, can only happen “as conditions rip[en],” Moon and Kim said. This was a reference to the US and UN economic sanctions on the North.
RELATED ARTICLE

AN AUDACIOUS PROPOSAL FOR A US–NORTH KOREAN ALLIANCE

Tim Shorrock

“There’s good potential for economic cooperation, but to really obtain these benefits, they have to get out of the sanctions,” Daniel Pinkston, a professor at Troy University in Seoul and an expert on North Korean politics, told The Nation in an interview outside the press center. Pinkston has been highly skeptical that the North will ever give up its weapons, but said the military agreements hold serious promise.

“The two sides agreed to refrain from any action to infiltrate, attack or occupy each other’s area of jurisdiction by any means or method,” the agreement states.

Among other steps, according to an analysis by the Associated Press, the two Koreas agreed to establish “buffer zones” on land and at sea and a “no-fly zone” in the air over the border to prevent the possibility of accidental confrontations.

“There appears to be real movement in confidence-building measures,” said Pinkston. “But can the agreement address issues of weapons of mass destruction? A lot of work remains there.” He noted that Yongbyon—a reactor complex where North Korea extracts plutonium from spent fuel and produces highly enriched uranium for weapons—“is only a piece of the nuclear program. Just closing it is not abandoning that program. Are they willing to trade it off in pieces? I’m not convinced.”

Moon Chung-in, the presidential adviser, seemed to address that concern in his press briefing during the summit. This was “the first time, ever, for Pyongyang to announce its willingness to permanently give up its plutonium- and highly-enriched uranium-producing facilities, which are the foundation of its nuclear weapons,” he said.

The US and UN sanctions, which increased in 2017 as the North tested one nuclear weapon and over a dozen ICBMs, have prevented the two countries from moving forward on new transportation and economic proposals. They also sparked a dispute between Seoul and Washington last month over the two Koreas’ opening of a permanent liaison office in Gaesong.

Seoul and Pyongyang opened it anyway. That was the right move and should not be seen as problematic by the US government, James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, told The Nation while traveling from Washington to Seoul on a Korean Air flight last Sunday. “The two Koreas have every right to move ahead like they are, even if people here [in Washington] don’t like it,” he said.

The proposals by the North to close the two missile facilities were designed to get movement on the sanctions, which the United States has insisted must remain in place until the North completely and permanently eliminates its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs.

So was the offer on Yongbyon, which Kim, in the joint declaration, said he would permanently dismantle if “the United States takes corresponding measures in accordance with the spirit of the June 12 US-DPRK Joint Statement.”

That term—“corresponding measures”—was a reference to promises made by President Trump to Kim in Singapore last June to create a new US–North Korean relationship and “build a lasting and stable peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula. North Korea has insisted that Trump follow up on his pledge before it takes further steps on disarmament.

Even though the Koreans left the ball in the US court, the proposals from Moon and Kim were met with immediate approval from President Trump, who tweeted his thanks moments after their joint news conference in Pyongyang. He will meet with Moon on September 25 in New York to discuss the developments and the possibility of a future summit with Kim. In his press conference Thursday, Moon said he would discuss with Trump the idea of declaring an end to the Korean War by the year’s end.

But even as the usual gang of Washington hard-liners, missile-technology experts, and skeptics of the Korean peace process were criticizing the Moon-Kim promises as too little, too late, Pompeo, who has been the North’s chief interlocutor in this year’s negotiations, welcomed the gestures. “On the basis of these important commitments, the United States is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations,” Pompeo said in a statement issued by the State Department (the DPRK, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is North Korea’s formal name).

Pompeo said he had invited his counterpart in the North, Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho, to meet in New York at next week’s UN General Assembly, and added that he had invited the North to meet the new US special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna.

“This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations through the process of rapid denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021, as committed by Chairman Kim, and to construct a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula,” Pompeo said.

The use of the term “transform” was clearly designed to respond to the North Korean concerns that Pompeo and Trump had not fulfilled their pledge in Singapore. “It was not having the peace declaration to offer that led Pompeo to tell Trump to call off the last visit,” Leon Sigal, the author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea, reminded The Nation in an e-mail.

On the summit’s final day, Moon and Kim climbed Mount Paektu, the highest mountain on the Korean Peninsula and a symbol to both Koreas of the mythical founding of their 5,000-year-old nation.

This fulfilled a lifetime dream for President Moon, an avid hiker whose family fled North Korea in the early days of the Korean War in 1950. But to many Koreans, the climb up Mount Paektu—a live volcano where Korean guerrillas fighting Japanese colonialism during the 1930s and ’40s often hid out—was also a reminder of their historical struggle for independence from foreign powers.

--------------

Tim Shorrock TWITTERTim Shorrock is a Washington, DC–based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.

[사설] 남북 정상회담 주변의 이상한 풍경들 - 조선닷컴 - 오피니언 > 사설

[사설] 남북 정상회담 주변의 이상한 풍경들 - 조선닷컴 -

[사설] 남북 정상회담 주변의 이상한 풍경들
조선일보

입력 2018.09.21 03:18

문재인 대통령은 19일 밤 '빛나는 조국' 대집단체조를 관람한 뒤 경기장에 모인 15만 평양 시민에게 인사말을 하면서 "(평양에서) 어려운 시절에도 민족의 자존심을 지키고 끝끝내 스스로 일어나고자 하는 불굴의 용기를 보았다"고 했다. 북이 어려운 시절을 겪은 것은 김씨 왕조의 폐쇄 경제에 핵 개발로 대북 제재를 자초했기 때문이다. 그 때문에 수십만 이상의 주민이 굶어 죽었다. 북핵의 최대 피해자인 한국 대통령이 이것을 "민족의 자존심을 지키고…불굴의 용기"라고 한다면 한국 국민과 죽은 북한 주민은 뭐가 되나. 문 대통령은 스스로를 '남쪽 대통령'이라고 했는데 대한민국은 이렇게 국호 아닌 '방향'으로 불려야 할 나라가 아니다. 김정은을 협상 상대자로 예우할 수는 있지만 수많은 반인도적 잔학 행위를 저지른 그에게 찬사까지 보내야 하나.

이해찬 민주당 대표는 북측 사람들에게 "우리가 정권을 뺏기는 바람에 남북 관계가 단절됐다"고 했다. 남북 관계가 경색된 것은 북이 민족을 공멸시킬 핵실험을 하고 우리 관광객을 총으로 쏘아 죽이고 천안함을 폭침시켜 우리 군인들을 떼죽음시켰기 때문이다. 오히려 이명박 대통령은 취임 첫해인 2008년 "남북 간 전면적인 대화를 재개하자"는 제의를 했다. 그런데 바로 그날 금강산 관광객이 북한군의 총에 맞아 사망한 것이다. 이 대표 말은 본말을 뒤집은 것이다.

송영무 국방장관은 남북 정상과 함께 백두산에 오른 자리에서 김정은의 답방 때 "우리 해병대 1개 연대를 시켜서 한라산 정상에 헬기 패드를 만들겠다"고 했다. 아무리 덕담이라도 이게 국방장관 입에서 나올 말인가. 해병대는 북의 연평도 포격으로 전우를 잃었다. 왜 해병대 장병들을 모욕하나.

사소한 일로 거짓 발표까지 해야 하는지도 의문이다. 청와대는 마지막 날 일정이 어떻게 될지 모르겠다고 했는데 알고 보니 백두산에 올라가 이벤트를 벌일 한라산 물까지 준비해 놓고 있었다. 그냥 발표해도 충분한데 굳이 깜짝 이벤트로 만들려고 한다. 대기업 총수들의 방북이 북 요청 때문이라는 보도에 대해 청와대는 "북의 요청은 없었다"고 부인했었다. 그런데 북측 관계자가 이재용 삼성 부회장에게 "우리가 오시라고 요청한 분"이라고 말했다. 청와대는 "북의 요청은 없었다"고 또 부인했다.

웬만한 나라의 국가원수도 삼성, SK, LG 같은 글로벌 기업 총수들을 쉽게 만나기 힘들다. 그런데 세계에서 가장 가난한 북한 경제부총리가 이들 총수를 일렬로 세워 놓고 훈시 같은 것을 했다. 이들 총수가 방문한 산업 현장은 묘목 재배장이었다. 코미디가 따로 없다.

남북 정상회담 첫날 저녁 대전의 동물원에서 퓨마가 우리 밖으로 나왔다. 그런데 청와대 국가안전보장회의(NSC) 위기관리센터가 개입해 사실상 작전을 지휘했다고 한다. 퓨마 사살 지시를 청와대가 내렸다는 일부 증언도 나왔다. 이게 NSC가 할 일인가. 퓨마보다 결코 덜 위험하지 않은 야생 멧돼지가 도심에 출몰할 때는 왜 NSC가 열리지 않았나. 이런 나라가 어디 있나. 그러자 인터넷에는 '남북 정상회담이 희석될까봐 청와대가 퓨마 사살 결정을 내린 것 아니냐"는 말이 떠돌았다. 실제 인터넷에선 '남북 정상회담'보다 '퓨마'가 5배 넘게 검색되는 등 큰 관심을 끌었다. 청와대의 상식 밖 과잉 행동이 이런 추측까지 낳은 것이다.

출처 : http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2018/09/20/2018092004453.html

--------------

김대호

55 mins

2018년 추석 즈음의 웃픈 자화상이다. 먼 훗날 치매를 심하게 앓는 나라의 갈짓자 행보를 증언하는 기념비적 글이 아닐까한다.

개그 프로그램 보다 더 우습다. 이 또한 지나갈 것이고 민족을 팔아 야만을 산 놈들은 필히 죄값을 치르겠지만, 그래도 전세계가 상식과 이성의 향도를 받아 열심히 뛰어가는 마당에 베네주엘라에 이어 대한민국도 열심히 역주행하는 것 같아서.......웃프다 우리나라 대한민국!

----------

<서평> 과학기술로 북한을 읽으면 보이는 것들 : 네이버 블로그

<서평> 과학기술로 북한을 읽으면 보이는 것들 : 네이버 블로그

<서평> 과학기술로 북한을 읽으면 보이는 것들

통일경제포럼

2017. 4. 19. 2:20
이웃추가
본문 기타 기능

- ‘과학기술로 북한읽기1’을 읽고

김수현 통일경제포럼 청년학생위원회 교육국장

“북한에게서 배울점을 배우자” 이렇게 주장한다면 대다수 사람들은 헛소리로 치부할 것이다. 진짜 종북이 나타났다고 소리칠지도 모른다. 경제규모가 우리의 50분의 1정도에 불과하고 몇십년 전까지도 수많은 사람들이 굶어죽은 나라에게서 배울점이 있다고 하니 그러한 반응이 어쩌면 당연할 수도 있다. 하지만 물리학과를 나와 북한의 과학기술 정책을 연구한 강호제박사의 ‘과학기술로 북한읽기’에는 우리가 잘 몰랐던 북한의 모습들이 자세히 소개되어 있고, 이를 통해 한국사회에 다양한 시사점도 얻을 수 있다. 4차산업혁명이 세계적인 이슈가 되면서 과학기술과 그에 대한 국가정책의 중요성이 높아지고 있다. 책에 소개된 내용들을 바탕으로 과학기술과 정책에 관련하여 2가지의 시사점을 살펴보려 한다.

첫째. 과학기술을 중시하는 정책이다.
북한과 과학기술은 어쩐지 어울리지 않는 단어이다. 정치와 사상을 중요시하고 과학기술은 천대할 것 같은 이미지도 있고, 낙후한 북한의 모습이 익숙하기 때문이다. 하지만 북한은 김일성 시대부터 지금까지 일관적으로 과학기술을 중요시해왔다고 한다. 1940년대에는 자체적인 교육여건이 어려웠기 때문에 다른 사회주의 나라들에 유학을 보냈는데, 과학기술보다 사회과학을 선호했던 학생들에게 김일성은

‘과학기술을 배워야 합니다. 그것이 진짜 정치를 배우는 것입니다. 기술을 아는 공산주의자라야 정치를 더 잘 할 수 있습니다’

라고 조언했다고 한다. (p13) 이공계기피현상을 해소하기 위해 과학기술자를 우대하는 다양한 정책들도 펼쳤다.

/ 평양의 미래과학자거리 전경.

또한 고급 과학기술자들을 북으로 유치하는 사업에 공을 많이 들였는데, 북한의 과학기술자들이 김일성의 위임장을 가지고 다니면서 남한의 과학기술자들을 설득했다고 한다. 게다가 당시 남한에서는 미군정에 반대하는 교수들이 대거 자리에서 밀려나고 과학기술은 홀대받는 상황이었다. 그 결과 해방 후 물리학과를 정상화하는데 앞장섰던 도상록, 서울대학에서 응용화학과를 세우고 합성섬유 연구에 앞장섰던 리승기 등이 자신의 동료,제자들과 함께 월북하였다. (p20) 이들은 모두 북한에서 자신들의 능력을 십분 발휘했고 5~60년대 북한의 경제성장과 기술발전의 밑거름이 되었다. 이처럼 북한의 과학기술 중시는 단순히 선언에 그친 것이 아니라 다양한 실천으로 나타났다. 최근에는 평양에 미래과학자거리와 과학기술전당을 완공하고 과학기술자들의 생활과 연구환경 조성에 힘을 쏟고 있다.

/ 평양의 과학기술전당. 원자구조를 본딴 모습이라고 한다.

둘째. 실패를 대하는 태도이다.
이정동 서울대 공대 교수와 정재승 카이스트 교수는 한겨레와의 인터뷰에서 실패의 중요성을 강조했다. (http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/science/science_general/779819.html, 한국은 왜 4차 산업혁명이 안 보일까) 이정동 교수는 창의와 도전이 중요하지만 ‘빨리빨리’ ‘실수없이’ ‘메뉴얼대로’를 바탕으로 성장해온 한국사회는 여전히

실수없이 빠르게 창의적이 되라

고 요구하는 모순에 빠져있다고 지적했다. 정재승 교수도 실패 책임을 묻고 누군가 희생양을 찾아온 기성 조직문화와 결별해야 한다며 실패로부터 회복탄력성을 도울 수 있도록 사회안전망을 강조했다. 새로운 분야에 도전은 항상 실패의 위험을 수반한다. 과학기술 분야는 시행착오가 더욱 많을 수밖에 없다.

그러나 우리는 실패에 관대하지 못하다. ‘나로호’ 개발 과정에서도 첫 시험 발사에 실패하면 여론의 몰매를 맞고 예산과 인력이 삭감될 것이라는 우려 때문에 1단 로켓 완제품을 러시아에서 구입하는 안전한 방법을 선택했다고 한다. 이런 점에서 과학기술자들이 책임 추궁에 대한 걱정 없이 연구개발에 몰두할 수 있는 풍토를 만들어주는 북한의 태도는 우리와 크게 대비된다. 책에서는 이와 관련한 여러 에피소드들을 소개하고 있는데 특히 1955년 새로운 제철공법에 대한 연구 도중 발생한 실패에 대한 태도가 인상적이다. “과학자들이 비록 큰 실수를 해서 국가적으로 손해를 일으키긴 했지만 이는 어디까지나 제철공업의 자립화라는 당의 노선을 충실히 따르다가 생긴 일입니다. 새로운 기술을 개발하다보면 실수를 하기 마련입니다. 실수할 때마다 책임을 추궁하고 제재를 가한다면 누가 새로운 기술을 개발하겠다고 덤비겠습니까. 우리 과학자들은 잘하고 있습니다. 그들이 연구를 더 잘하도록 우리는 믿어주고 밀어주어야 합니다.” (p168) 이러한 응원에 힘입어 당시 연구 책임자였던 주종명은 결국 1958년에 무연탄을 이용하는 제철법을 완성하여 생산성 향상에 기여했다. 한반도미래포럼의 천영우 이사장도 칼럼에서 시행착오를 거듭하면서도 과학기술자들이 책임 추궁을 당할 걱정 없이 연구개발에 몰두할 풍토를 만들어주는 것이 북한의 가장 큰 힘이라고 주장했다. (http://news.d onga.com/List/3/0806/20160707/79060788/1, 북한 과학기술의 힘 어디서 나오나)

/ 북한의 과학기술전당을 방문한 김정은 위원장 모습.

과학기술을 중요시하고 실패를 과정으로 여기는 북한의 모습은 우리가 평소에 생각하던 것과는 많이 다른 것이었다. 북한 축구팀이 경기에 지면 북한에 돌아가서 처벌을 받을것이라 걱정하는 것이 우리사회의 일반적 여론이다. 하지만 축구경기도 아니고 연구 실패로 경제적 피해를 야기한 과학자를 믿어주고 밀어주는 북한의 모습은 매우 신선하게 다가온다. 한국사회가 의도적으로 왜곡했건, 제한된 정보로 잘 몰랐건 북한은 과학기술을 통한 경제발전을 주창하며 인공위성과 핵 기술의 능력을 발전시키고 미래과학자거리를 건설하는 등 자신의 길을 가고 있다. 북한의 변화를 따라잡지 못하고 북에 대한 정보가 거의 10년간 업데이트되지 못하고 있다는 저자의 지적처럼 북한에 대한 우리의 인식수준을 돌아볼 때가 되었다. 특히 대선국면을 맞이하여 많은 이들이 안보와 통일을 이야기하는데 상대방에 대한 이해 없이는 대화도, 안보도 불가능하다. ‘과학기술로 북한읽기’는 북한을 새롭게 이해하고, 그로부터 좋은점은 배우고, 나쁜점은 타산지석으로 삼을 수 있는 두가지 소중한 기회를 제공할 것이다.

김수현
통일경제포럼 청년학생위원회 교육국장
kimtoad21@gmail.com

NVC training Shari - Hi Sejin, Im smiling as I remember the sweetness of...

(1) Sejin Pak - Hi Sejin, Im smiling as I remember the sweetness of...

Sejin Pak

21 September 2016 · Campbelltown ·

Hi Sejin,

Im smiling as I remember the sweetness of our connection at the NVC training - and wondering how you are going with connecting with your son in a new way?

You asked about NVC being used in the world in creating social change and peace, and I said I would come back to you. I see this as a really important question as Im constantly asking, "how can I contribute to creating a world where there is care for all beings through our systems and structures" . Of course, the contributions NVC has had often are not captured on video or recorded in an article, but are part of a dialogue… frequently unrecognised within a worldwide community… but still potent and having affect. So here are a few of the examples of what is happening world wide in recent times (with people other than marshall) that I AM aware of.

1. There is for me such an inspirational documentary which was created in Nepal which was part of the reconciliation from the civil war. There is a bigger program which has now flowed on from this documentary. The link to that is… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqA2OydkXgg&feature=youtu.be

2. This is an outline of what happened to bring a group of decision makers together to reform Minnesota’s child custody legislation. Everyone believed reform had no possibility of happening to this legislation as there was such diverse perspectives and because people had become so hostile with each other. This change affects thousands and thousands of families to create more peaceful families - the basic structure of society. Miki Kashtan who headed this reform dialogue is an NVC certified trainer who developed systems based on using NVC as the basis of everything she does. http://baynvc.org/minnesota-dialogues/

3. Dominic Barter has been engaged in Rio at a grass roots level, working in the favelas and directly with the police force there. Here is an excerpt from an email he recently sent. The work he has done there using NVC has reduced killings by large numbers by affecting systemic systems through creating understanding and engagement. Sadly, government policy has now changed and much of the work is undone but still there were 100’s if not 1000’s of lives saved in the time it was working. Here is his email…

In the next few days and weeks many of you will see news reports from Rio, and maybe wonder how this experience relates to the NVC work we do here.

This article, published yesterday in the UK's Guardian newspaper, gives a good summary of the situation as it relates to the police. The article describes the very significant changes brought about by the controversial, significantly flawed but nonetheless transformative programme of Police Pacification Units in the city's favelas. From 2011 to 2014 I was 'orientor' of the mediation programme for the police in these units. This involved basic introductions to NVC for hundreds of police, but mostly it involved intensive accompaniment of them in their daily work as they patrolled communities and worked in their makeshift bases. It also involved supporting them in building different community relationships and creating what I call 'spaces safe for dialogue', with the systemic conditions necessary for offering mediation and conducting Restorative Circles.

The article also describes how the significant drops in death rates and the improvements in community relations were lost in the years since. I hope knowing of both the changes and their recent loss can help you in your work of illustrating the conditions that violence requires to grow and to diminish, and in exemplifying to those you teach how NVC is being used around the world.

http://www.theguardian.com/…/rio-police-violent-killing-oly…

Today and tomorrow you may see images from the official opening of the Olympic Games. You're unlikely to see the thousands who occupied Rio's most iconic music venue last night, or the many more who'll be demonstrating for a more humane response to unmet social needs throughout the day. Please keep such 'invisible' actions in your thoughts.

Sejin, This is a small smattering of what I know and what I can quickly connect with to send you. But without understanding and moving beyond our enemy images, I cannot see how any shift in peace can occur - and our inherited language won’t help us.

I will call you separately to explore attending the ENCT in October. To check it out, http://embodyingnvc.com/.

Blessings Sejin

Shari