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Originally Posted by Abecedary
I took a break from reading Infinite Jest to read The Road in time for this discussion, and the two writing styles couldn't be farther away from each other. Where Wallace can literally go for pages on end without introducing a period (and these are dense pages, mind you), McCarthy isn't afraid to have a sentence that's comprised of a single word. And because he's carefully chosen every word he's written, it works to great effect. The language is sparse, but exact. He paints a vivid picture, but doesn't get bogged down in detail. ...
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His style is great. Very elegant. There's just enough information - and he isn't talking down to the reader.
I gave my brother the book as a present some time ago, and now I'm interested in checking out the Danish translation - it can't have been an easy book to translate.
I've been taking advantage of the quick reference lookup on my new Kindle, and I noticed that most of the words I didn't recognise, were to do with landscape description. Only one I remember is 'piedmont plain'. I was wondering whether any kind of word use stands out to an native English speaker. Not that, for example, those landscape descriptors were 'special' words, but perhaps not so much part of an everyday vocabulary.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Abecedary
As for the book itself, I don't recall if he ever indicated what the exact cause of the devastation was. All we know is that it's years after some cataclysmic event. I think it's safe to say it's the result of nuclear war, but again, it's never explicitly stated.
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It's not stated explicitly, but the destruction that's described seemed to fit well with the results of a nuclear war.