The best selling novel, set in post Spanish Civil War Barcelona, concerns a young boy, Daniel. Just after the war, Daniel's father takes him to the secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a huge library of
old, forgotten titles lovingly preserved by a select few initiates. According to tradition, everyone initiated to this secret place is allowed to take one book from it, and must protect it for life. Daniel selects a book called The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax.That night he takes the book home and reads it, completely engrossed. Daniel then attempts to look for other books by this unknown author, but can find none. Daniel learns that he should treasure this book because a mysterious figure has been searching for all of Carax's books, and subsequently burning them. After reading the book Daniel becomes obsessed with its elusive author. What he doesn't realize is that there's more to the story than he could ever dream.
** OK, I know this is a real long shot but I thought I would just throw it out there anyway. I think we could have a fantastic discussion about this book and all the meaning behind it. I will say that it is a hard read -- but we have read "hard" things before like A Thousand Splendid Suns right?
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 them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
“McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war . . . 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 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, Amazon.com
