Stella Maris

I read The Passenger by Cormac Mc Carthy last month and couldn't wait to read Stella Maris - a masterful coda to The Passenger 😍 And my mind was blown away when I read it!In The Passenger, we got to know about Bobby Western, a former race car enthusiast, diver, and physics expert. We also got to know that he was grieving for his sister who took her own life. In Stella Maris, we get to know about his sister, Alicia Western, who was a doctoral student in Mathematics at the University of Chicago at the mere age of 20. Told entirely through the transcripts of psychiatric sessions, we get to know about her hallucinations, her troubled childhood, her brother who she grieved after he went into a coma due to a car accident, and her mental illness for which she enrolled herself. Alicia who was diagnosed with Schizophrenia discussed with her therapist, Dr. Cohen, her views and philosophy on the meaning of life. It was interesting and at times terrifying to read her thoughts on life, science, and her brother. While Stella Maris answers some of the questions that I had in The Passenger, like the alternate use of the names, Alice and Alicia, by her brother Bobby, some questions still remain. I reread The Passenger after reading Stella Maris, and it felt like I was reading a different book.🙈 These books together form one big puzzle and I must say that I absolutely enjoyed reading them! There is so much going on in them. They are brilliant and I have never read anything like this before! 😍😍

To be read together with The Passenger. The two novels are very different in form (Stella Maris entirely in dialogue), but the main characters and plots are the same, from different perspectives. No less than the meaning of life and death on every page.

First off, Stella Maris will be the last novel by Cormac McCarthy we will ever have. He's almost 90 and hasn't been very well for the last few years. It's remarkable that he was still able to persevere and finish his final two novels, this one and "The Passenger," its companion work.Second, it sounds like quite a few readers just didn't "get" this work or its larger companion. One reviewer here wrote that he was confused by who died first - Alicia or Bobby. The Passenger made it quite clear Alicia committed suicide because she believed her beloved brother had been left brain dead in a racing car accident and the doctors who wanted to "pull the plug" on him had done so, but that Bobby emerged from his coma some time after her death and was later informed of it. It's part of the paralyzing freight of guilt her brother carries, a recapitulation, in a sense, of the guilt Suttree carried because his umbilical cord had strangled his unborn twin in their mother's womb.Third, Alicia is not McCarthy's first "female lead," as another reviewer writes. Pride of place for that title went to Rinthy Holme in McCarthy's early Appalachian period novel, "Outer Dark" - another woman in an incestuous relationship with her brother. It's a theme which has clearly interested McCarthy for most of his career.But Alicia and her group of schizoid hallucinations, her "horts" (short for cohorts) as she calls them, are also fascinating subjects in this work. I've never seen the metaphysics, if you will, of hallucinations and reality laid so bare and so precisely contrasted as they are in this remarkable work. If you've read the passenger you will already have identified the horts as a combination of Arturo Binewski's carnival freaks from Katherine Dunn's masterful novel "Geek Love" and the characters from Alice in Wonderland, with Alicia standing in for Alice and the Kid, obsessively checking his watch, for the Mad Hatter. On the eve of her death Alicia refuses to deny her imaginary companions the dignity of their own tenuous being; her discussions with her psychiatrist (who finally gets the answers she has been so resistant to disclosing) about the natures of love and suicide are unsettling, unsparing and as arresting as they are troubling.It also seems some readers didn't discern the shape of the narrative, but it definitely has one - Alicia's progression, through therapy she ducks, dodges and resists, to finally coming to terms with her incestuous desire for her brother and to his death which hasn't actually happened. I found this novel a stunning accomplishment, and Cormac McCarthy has surely earned his retirement.

Il libro è una passeggiata sull'orlo dell'abisso. McCarthy è un genio.

Cormac McCarthy's narrative pays tribute to directed dialogue in prose. A psychiatrist and his patient form a rich exchange highly revealing of the complexities of mental health and mental capacity. Between Stella Maris and The Passenger, McCarthy shows himself a master of real-life dialogue; he creates a near perfect house for his characters which yields a higher vision of human nature. The attention to it is phenomenally well worded. McCarthy's novels reawaken the question of our own consciousness even in the simplest of relations.

I think it’s incredible; a unique meditation on existence, love, reality and perception; to name a few. I think you have to have a relationship you really want to develop with the character from The Passenger. If you don’t, you’re likely to struggle. The book doesn’t compromise either in terms of the conversational devices and themes it uses but it would have been impossible to write the character and get into the areas it ventures if he’d dumbed down. I cried instantly at the end.