When we started WestportREADS in 2001 with The Giver by Lois Lowry, some readers objected to what they regarded as a children's book. Yet, The Giver painted a bleak metaphorical picture of the future and gave us food for much serious thought and discussion. I recently read (most of) The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I confess that the unremitting bleakness wore me down and I cheated by skipping some of the last quarter of the book. A young boy and his father wander through the desolate landscape of post-apocalyptic America; their only encounters are with dangerous wanderers searching, as they are, for food and shelter and hope. McCarthy is a powerful writer; Janet Maslin of the New York Times calls this "pure poetic brimstone" and it was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.
Is a tiny glimmer of hope enough to outweigh the gloom? For more on McCarthy.
Another talented writer has produced a frightening and unrelenting version of apocalypse. In Blindness by Jose Saramago, an epidemic of blindness leaves people at the mercy of evil, as criminals take over. In this parable of loss and disorientation is a thriller in which the reader sees the fragility of human connections with all the hidden truths revealed to those who cannot see. Winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature- one critic calls Blindness "more frightening than Stephen King."
On a slightly less somber note, Philip Roth has given us Everyman, his look at "one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality." As death summons life in the classic allegorical drama, so Roth traces the changes of his body through the years, pushing our attention to the inevitable experience we all share. Remembering loneliness, despair, regrets, love and anger, Roth tells all, mixing and moving life inexorably towards death. A short, powerful read that is poignant and both life and death affirming. For more on Roth and Everyman.
