Cormac McCarthy
La Strada

“When we're all gone from here, only death will remain, and even it will have its days numbered. It will wander the street with nothing to do and no one to do it to. It will say: Where did everyone go? That's how it will be”.

A man and a boy. Without a name (what meaning do names have anymore? What meaning do words have here, now?) A man, a boy, and the road to travel, made of ash like everything else, sometimes of scorched earth, or of tar boiled by the sun and then dried again into inhuman and twisted shapes (like the corpses, which can pop up anywhere and at any moment). A man, a boy, and the sea: a destination to reach, without even knowing exactly why. It doesn't matter how much time it will take (here and now time means nothing anymore). The distance matters instead: because the survivors walk cautiously and fearfully along the edge of a street where death walks upright in the center. The man doesn't exactly know how much further to the coast. And the boy even less so: he can only follow the man, sleep with him, eat the little edible bits they find around. A man and a boy. A father and his son.

“The Road” is a ruthless and painful book, yet splendid. A prose stripped to the bone, like the world left after the apocalypse. Of which McCarthy does not explain the reason (what importance could it have, by now? Civilization is behind and thus erased). A harrowing story of despair and survival instinct, of the abyss (the glimpses into cannibalism are pure horror for being so barely sketched... or perhaps precisely for that reason). Everything calibrated according to an awareness of a great author: there is no better place to make a glimmer of humanity visible than an endless desert (of ash and soul). A glimmer of humanity: that of a man driven by the ancient instinct to protect his son as long as he can, that of a boy who proves to be the sole holder of the ancient compassion that humankind was capable of before all this happened.

“The boy looked away. The man hugged him. Listen to me, he said. What. When you dream of a world that never existed or one that will never exist and in which you are happy again, it will mean that you have given up. Understand? And you cannot give up. I will not let you.”

“The Road” is a masterpiece. One can bet it was already in the author's mind before it was even written. And as it happens with masterpieces, it is difficult to categorize it into a genre. It could be a science fiction book for those who are convinced that everything it speaks of will never happen. But only for those who are convinced of it.