ROAD, THE (EXP)(路)
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基本信息·出版社：Vintage, New York
·页码：287 页
·出版日期：2007年
·ISBN：0307386457
·条形码：9780307386458
·包装版本：2007-06-01
·装帧：平装
·开本：32开
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内容简介灰色的雪寂然落在荒芜、寒冷、黑暗的冬日，一对父子穿越地狱般的废墟，往南方海岸走去，寻找温暖、适人的可能地方。那是恶霸横行、甚至吃人维生的恐怖世界，男孩的母亲选择自杀，她不愿生命将以被强暴或谋杀告终。选择生存真的是最好的吗？人性在地狱里还剩下多少？还有什么值得活下去的理由？这是一条没有终点的路，所有事物逐渐凋零、死亡，父子俩唯一拥有的，只有对彼此的爱。McCarthy营造了垂死的冷酷现实，一个没有“然后呢？”的故事。
“《路》揭开了隐藏在悲伤和恐惧之下的黑色河床，灾难从未如此真实过，麦卡锡仿佛是这个即将消失于世界的最后幸存者，他把未来发生的那个时刻提早展现给我们看。” ——《TIME》
自出版以来，不但入选美国华盛顿邮报、洛杉矶时报、时代杂志等十数家媒体推荐为年度好书，入围国家书评人奖，更摘下普立兹奖桂冠。
某日的夜半一点十七分，核子大战让整个世界由国家建立的秩序毁于一旦，人们仰赖的国家与组织瞬间湮灭，不仅如此，自然在核弹爆炸后的末日，灰蒙蒙的天空无法滋养任何的植物，也无法供养任何幸存的人类。在这场末日浩劫中，一对父子活了下来，他们仅剩了一只手枪与仅有的一发子弹，父亲告诫儿子不能轻易使用子弹，如果遇到了危险就用仅存的一发子弹自杀，当时他们的母亲却利用这最后一发子弹自尽。他们带着火种希望能从新开始生活，他们面对着未知的生计与人性的邪恶面，却抱持着光明乐观的态度，直到他们遇到了一个被遗弃的婴儿，生命开始有了延续。作者Cormac McCarthy甫以此书获得今年年度普立兹奖最佳小说奖，评审认为这本小说是他最平易近人也最优秀的作品。得奖之前这本书才获得「欧普拉读书俱乐部」青睐获得选书，让该书作者Cormac McCarthy登上了生涯创作的最高峰。
McCarthy自一九六○年代创作迄今，共发表十部长篇小说；在台湾最具知名度的作品，或属曾改编成电影《爱在奔驰》的《All the Pretty Horses》。获奖的○六年最新创作《The Road 》，讲一场超级浩劫后，文明崩毁，人类生活几乎退回弱肉强食、互为仇敌的原始状态。一对父子带着购物推车在美国徒步行走，希望到南方避冬；作父亲的在生命最困顿的时刻，依然不放弃教导孩子关乎美与善的信念…
这位七十三岁的文坛前辈在 《The Road》一书中，以一对父子为故事主轴，徐徐开展一路延续，将细腻的写作技巧展露无遗，漂亮地戴上桂冠。此描绘天灾、人祸共同酿造的末世景观作为「后911」的时代寓言。
Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER
National Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year
The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington Post
The searing, postapocalyptic 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 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.
Amazon.com
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
More about the Author
Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He attended the University of Tennessee in the early 1950s, and joined the U.S. Air Force, serving four years, two of them stationed in Alaska. McCarthy then returned to the university, where he published in the student literary magazine and won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. McCarthy next went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel,The Orchard Keeper.
The Orchard Keeperwas published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy's editor there was Albert Erskine, William Faulkner's long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of his next novel, Outer Dark.
In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press.
In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985.
After the retirement of Albert Erskine, McCarthy moved from Random House to Alfred A. Knopf. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon thereafter, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing; the third volume, Cities of the Plain, was published in 1998.
McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago and published in paperback by Vintage Books. McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was also published by Knopf in 2006.
Book Dimension
length: (cm)17.6 width:(cm)10.4
作者简介Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He attended the University of Tennessee in the early 1950s, and joined the U.S. Air Force, serving four years, two of them stationed in Alaska. McCarthy then returned to the university, where he published in the student literary magazine and won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. McCarthy next went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel,The Orchard Keeper.
媒体推荐书评：
末日之后怎么活？
如果你读《纽约时报》或《华盛顿邮报》等美国“左派”大报，你决不会猜到，美国历史上曾经有过一个单枪匹马闯西部的传统。任何社会问题，卡特里娜飓风灾害后新奥尔良市的缓慢复苏；脏乱的城市贫民区;质量普遍低劣的公立中学等等，根子永远是政府拨款太少。这些报纸倾向的解决方案，永远是政府给钱、给钱、再给大钱。
不过，一个民族的传统，即使已被住在大城市的学院左派和媒体精英遗忘，却必然顽强地生存在民间草根中，而且常常会在文学艺术中反映出来。刚在星期一（4月16日）得了今年普利策小说奖的《路》（The Road），就是这样一部作品。
美国老作家科马克·麦卡锡（Cormac McCarthy）在《路》中描绘的是末日景象。
某年某月某日，半夜1点17分，核子大战。政府灰飞烟灭；任何组织都没有了；就连专职在苦难中安慰民众的宗教团体也没有了。你活不活？
这是核大战之后的核冬天。废尘笼罩全球。没有太阳,没有月亮,没有星星。夜间伸手不见五指；白天灰蒙蒙一片。永远不停的风，风中无数黑灰。河流是黑的。海是灰的。最干净的是阴沟里的水。即使在南方，气温也常常降到零度以下。没有政府发放帐篷、毯子和面包，你活不活？
公路上是排成长龙的汽车残骸；轮胎都熔化了，在地上结成一堆堆黑渣；烧死后缩成一团的尸体，指骨吊在方向盘上；你曾经熟悉的世界，如今只存在记忆之中。只有梦里才见得到绿色。生活中倒是还有红色——仍在燃烧的火，还有你吐的血。这样的世界，你活不活？
一位父亲，一个儿子，核大战幸存者。他们只有一支手枪，枪里只有一发子弹。父亲告诉儿子：如果碰到坏人，我把他们引开，你拿着枪躲起来，如果坏人发现了你，你就这样〔自杀〕。因为坏人会活活吃孩子的肉，父亲宁愿他自杀。就是这样的处境，你活不活？
孩子的母亲，觉得这样的生活无意义，她自杀了。消耗了一发珍贵的子弹。父亲常常觉得自己应该羡慕那些已死的人，他们解脱了，不再忍受生存的苦难。但是，他带着儿子，一步又一步走在州际公路上。在公路上是危险的。虽然绝大多数人都死了，死于核爆炸，死于寒冷，死于饥饿，死于绝望，但少数坏人靠着吃人生存下来了——吃那些绝望地走在公路上的人。但父亲和孩子仍然走在公路上。
父亲和儿子互相提醒：我们是好人，我们不抢别人的食物，我们不吃人。父亲告诉儿子：我们带着火种。
“脂穷于为薪，火传也，不知其尽也”（《庄子·养生主》）。某一堆燃料会烧光，火却总是可以在另一堆燃料上烧起来。只要人有这点精神，单枪匹马，他们也要重建文明。
小说的最后一页，儿子遇到了一个女婴。绝望的旅行终于有了结果。薪尽火传，读者看到了人类延续的一点希望。他们仍然走在公路上，他们仍然时时面临危险。但是，如果他们有面对一切毁灭而生存下去并做个好人的勇气，他们大概不是孤例。即使儿子遭遇不幸，薪尽火传，其他的好人还在路上。
这样的小说能得普利策奖，而且得奖之前已被美国最负盛名的电视女主持人奥普拉·温弗里（Oprah Winfrey）在她的读书节目上向全国推荐，出版社因此赶印了95万本平装本，这仍然说明美国人内心深处根深蒂固的个人主义传统。这也帮助我们理解，为什么在多次发生校园枪击事件之后，多数美国人仍然认为公民有持枪的自由。
政府确实可以在灾难时刻做很多事，但政府的“好意”必然侵犯私人自由。卡特里娜飓风灾害期间，政府的疏散车船容量有限，规定只运人不运宠物。但对许多美国人，狗和猫亲如儿女，宠物不走，他们也不愿走。其实留在城里未必活不下去，他们是否可以拒绝政府的“好意”？说得极端一点，如果他们宁愿与宠物死在一起——孔子曰，“自古皆有死”，这也不是什么了不起的事——他们能否有这样的选择？
Freedom is not free （自由不是免费的）。如果美国人愿意为他们的自由付出高昂代价，别人也没什么可说的。
在《路》的结尾，父亲想道，“或许只有在世界的毁灭中才能最终见到世界是如何生成的。”在毁灭中孤胆独行的人，是否会建成一个自己对自己负责的更为自由的世界？
Customer Reviews
1. The future is now...,March 28, 2007
By JLind555
"The Road" is a work of stunning, savage, heartbreaking beauty. Set in the post-apocalyptic hell of an unending nuclear winter, Cormac McCarthy writes about a nameless man and his young son, wandering through a world gone crazy; bleak, cold, dark, where the snow falls down gray; moving south toward the coast, looking somewhere, anywhere, for life and warmth. Nothing grows in this blasted world; people turn into cannibals to survive. We don't know if we're looking at the aftermath of a nuclear war, or maybe an extinction level event -- an asteroid or a comet; McCarthy deliberately doesn't tell us, and we come to realize it doesn't matter anyway. Whether man or nature threw a wild pitch, the world is just as dead.
The boy's mother is a suicide, unable to face living in a world where everything's gone gray and dead. Keep on living and you'll end up raped and murdered along with everybody else, she tells the man before she eats a bullet. The man and his son are "each the other's world entire"; they have only each other, they live for each other, and their intense love for each other will help them survive. At least for a while.
But survival in this brave new world is a dicey prospect at best; the boy and the man are subjected to sights no one should ever have to see. Every day is a scavenger hunt for food and shelter and safety from the "bad guys", the marauding gangs who enslave the weak and resort to cannibalism for lack of any other food. We are the good guys, the man assures his son. Yet in their rare encounters with other living human beings, the man resorts to primitive survivalism, refusing help to a lost child and a starving man, living only for himself and his son, who is trying to hold onto whatever humanity he has left. It's in these chance encounters with other people, even more than their interaction with each other, that we see them for who they really are. The boy is a radiantly sweet child, caring, unselfish, wanting and needing to reach out to others, even though this bleak, blasted world is the only environment he's ever known; the father, more cautious, more bitter, has let the devastation enwrap him until all he cares about is himself and his son. And to hell with everybody else.
Their journey to the coast is an unending nightmare through the depths of hell and the only thing that holds them together is their love for each other. When one is ready to give up, the other refuses to let him. I won't let you go into the darkness alone, the man reassures his son. But ultimately, as the boy finds out, everyone is on his own, and all you can do is keep on keeping on.
McCarthy has proven himself a master of minimalism; with a style as bleak as the stripped terrain the man and the boy travel through, but each sentence polished as a gem, he takes us into the harsh reality of a dying world. The past is gone, dead as the landscape all around them, and the present is the only reality. There is no later, McCarthy says. This is later. Deep down the man knows there is nothing better to hope for down the road, even though he keeps them both slogging down it, only to keep his son alive. And we keep slogging down that road with them, hoping against hope that around the next corner or five miles down the line, maybe there is something, anything, to make survival worth while.
Living in such a hell, why would anyone want to survive? The mother made her decision; she checked out long ago. We come to the end of this book totally drained, enervated, devastated, but curiously uplifted. Because as long as there is love, McCarthy tells us, maybe there is something to live for, and as the book shows us at the end, maybe there is a even little bit of hope.
Judy Lind
2. Are We Still The Good Guys,March 28, 2007
By prisrob "pris," (New EnglandUSA)
'Concurrent with keeping his son alive is the more metaphysical challenge of sustaining his son's innate goodness while forcing him to witness the corruption of all moral behavior. "Are we still the good guys?" the boy asks in moments of confusion and shock. His father insists they are. "This is what good guys do," he tells him. "They keep trying. They don't give up." Why, then, his son asks, won't he help the stragglers they run across instead of running from them or shooting at them? "We should go to him, Papa. We could get him and take him with us. . . . I'd give that little boy half of my food." How to explain the necessity of abandoning others to certain death (or worse, in one particularly terrifying scene) while maintaining that they're "the good guys," the ones "carrying the fire"? Washington Post
Cormac Mccarthy has given us a glimpse of a world none of us want to see or visit, but we are there. It is desolate, singulatory, stark, bleak; all of these words and more are needed to describe a world after a nuclear explosion. We are left to imagine the events, the place, and the time. All we have are these two souls, dad and son, no names. They are moving from one place to another to get to the coast, why, we do not know, are left to wonder. Along the way Mccarthy describes the world we never want to see. Smoldering even after a few years, everything black and stripped of any semblance. Not many people, and those they meet, they are afraid of. Looters, and murderers and eaters of flesh. These two souls, father and son, the two evidences that love can keep you going, can keep you on the right path, and can keep you "One of the good guys". There is not much to keep you going or to keep you safe. Death, no food, no shelter, no clothing, harsh and cold environment, only your wits, and then it is hard to keep them together. A harsh and cold path and if it is what we have to face, Cormac Mccarthy has given us the most beautiful prose and surreal writing.
This is a book to be read by everyone. This is a book to be remembered, to be revered and to be kept in the recesses of our brains, to come out only when necessary. This book begs to be discussed. So many nuances, so many allegories, and so many scenes that are reminiscent, but still new.
"He knew only that the child was his warrant," it says of the father and his mission. "He said: if he is not the word of God, God never spoke." The love of a father and his son, the greatest love of all.
Highly, highly recommended. prisrob 10-14-06
