Asal-Usul Karya: The Road

Adaptasi The Road ke layar perak pada 2009

Sudah banyak tahun saya tidak membaca apa-apa karya Cormac McCarthy. Tapi saya masih ingat keterujaan membaca The Road. Adakah ia novel horor, pasca-kiamat, fiksyen sains, atau parabel orang Kristian? Mana-mana boleh rasanya. Kita tidak tahu bagaimana hendak menanggapi dunia dalam novel ini kerana ia sangat terasing, tapi pada masa sama bahasa dan moodnya sangat Cormac McCarthy. Saya kongsi di bawah sumber inspirasi beliau untuk novel ini. 

* * *

"Well it's interesting, because usually you don't know where a book comes from. It's just there, an itch you can't quite scratch. My son John, about four years ago, he and I went to El Paso. We checked in to the old hotel there. And one night, John was asleep, and it was probably about two or three o'clock in the morning, and I went over and looked out the window at this town. There was nothing moving, but I could hear the trains coming through with that very lonesome sound, and I just had this image of what this town might look like in fifty or a hundred years. I just had this image of these fires up on the hill, everything being laid to waste, and I thought about my little boy. So I wrote those pages and that was the end of it. Then about four years later I was in Ireland and I realized that wasn't two pages of another book, it was a book, and it was about that man and that little boy."