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Old 02-10-2010   #38
masomenos
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kmp77 View Post
The Road 10/10

I don't think I've ever bee this moved by a book before.
McCarthy is a brilliant writer, very powerful. The last paragraph of the novel has stuck in my head, since the first time I read it.

Possible spoiler - last lines of the book to follow, doesn't give anything away in regards to the story

Quote:
"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. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery".
It reminds me of the scene in The Wrestler, where Randy screws up one too many times and he's on the floor with his daughter and she tells him that sometimes things that are broken just can't be fixed. That's a pretty powerful concept, the idea that our lives have certain event horizons or tipping points, from which there's no coming back. Sometimes an action really does have permanent, meaningful consequences.

McCarthy's other stuff is all top notch as well, I especially enjoyed Blood Meridian.
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