While awaiting a much-anticipated phone call, I watched Oprah today. She interviewed Cormac McCarthy, a well-known and respected American author who is intensely private. He has just written a book called The Road, described as a post-apocalyptic novel. My ears immediately perked up.
Walter M. Miller's acclaimed SF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz opens with the accidental excavation of a holy artifact: a creased, brittle memo scrawled by the hand of the blessed Saint Leibowitz, that reads: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma." To the Brothers of Saint Leibowitz, this sacred shopping list penned by an obscure, 20th-century engineer is a symbol of hope from the distant past, from before the Simplification, the fiery atomic holocaust that plunged the earth into darkness and ignorance. As 1984 cautioned against Stalinism, so 1959's A Canticle for Leibowitz warns of the threat and implications of nuclear annihilation. Following a cloister of monks in their Utah abbey over some six or seven hundred years, the funny but bleak Canticle tackles the sociological and religious implications of the cyclical rise and fall of civilization, questioning whether humanity can hope for more than repeating its own history. Divided into three sections--Fiat Homo (Let There Be Man), Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy Will Be Done)--Canticle is steeped in Catholicism and Latin, exploring the fascinating, seemingly capricious process of how and why a person is canonized. --Paul HughesFor whatever reason, that book has always stuck with me. It left a deep and abiding impression on me. It was dark and depressing, but I felt compelled to read it to the end. Even the ending was dark and depressing. Ohh!
Now, I'm debating on whether I want to read McCarthy's book or not. I think so.
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