Stella Maris: Cormac McCarthy (Bobby Western, 2) Paperback – 28 Sept. 2023

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.

I would recommend reading his book The Passenger before this one both very enjoyable.

While it was satisfying to see Alicia fleshed out in a bit more detail & hearing her side of the story, the maths & physics subject matter (which accounts for the majority of the book) was tedious in the extreme to wade through & I can’t imagine being of much interest to anyone other than a mathematician or a physicist, despite the gossipy revelations concerning famous scientists. There was never a question of not finishing the book, although I may possibly return to The Passenger one day, in order to spot clues I missed the first time. But I will be reaching for Suttree again soon, which deals with similarly hopeless and unresolvable internal conflict far more humanely in my view. I don’t feel strong enough for a return journey through his masterpiece The Border Trilogy yet, as it is still too viscerally etched into my soul. Farewell Mr McCarthy; you have set the standard for uncovering the extremes of human expression. Just not this time.

Cormac is probably my all time favourite author but this book was very hard work for me. So much mathematical reference which was over my head however, some challenging postulation. I'm going to re-read Blood Meridian.

Obviously written to please the author himself rather than the reader.

Great writer. Probably the best of his generation. Here he does what he did in the Crossing trilogy, places the wisdom of a much older person on the shoulders of the very young. This character is the most implausible in serious modern fiction, a vehicle for the musings of a highly-reflective master of language coming towards the end of his life. She channels the author throughout and doesn't exist as a character independent of her author. This is a literary error.Otherwise much of the dialogue is engaging and many of the points McCarthy communicates through this paper-thin main character are worth hearing.For McCarthy fans it's a must and there's much to be happy with. But the main character is irritatingly empowered with the life-long reflections of her author and the literary trick presented to us doesn't work.

It’s 1972 and 20 year old Alicia Western checks herself into Stella Maris, a mental hospital, where she suspects schizophrenia has taken hold of her as she has begun hallucinating visitations from an imaginary dwarfish figure called the Thalidomide Kid. The book follows a series of sessions between her and her doctor Michael Cohen.So this is the second and final book in the story that began, and ostensibly ended, in The Passenger, because Stella Maris is a completely unnecessary addition to what should have only been a standalone novel.I expected it to contribute at least something to the previous book - unearth a layer of understanding or enlighten us on as aspect of the story - but, no, Stella Maris literally adds nothing to The Passenger, unless you wanted more pointless dialogue on maths, physics and the prominent figures in those fields.The book is 100% dialogue between Alicia and the doc, following McCarthy’s style of no punctuation, quotation marks or “he/she said”, though, given that it’s just the two characters, you can easily follow who’s speaking without those cues (Alicia is by far the chattier of the two).All the novel does is cover the same ground that was sufficiently covered in The Passenger: Alicia being a crazy genius in love with her older brother Bobby, Bobby’s European escapades and finding their gran’s secret treasure, their dad’s involvement in the Manhattan Project, and that Alicia’s completely batty but also thoroughly learned in maths and physics.Somebody reading this without realising it’s the second half of a larger story would probably get the same out of someone who read the series in order: that is, wondering what the hell the point of all this waffling nonsense is!I found the short discussions on maths and physics in The Passenger quite tedious - to read nearly 200 pages of the same but in greater detail was completely boring. McCarthy writes dialogue well but nothing about this book is worth reading in the slightest. If you’ve read The Passenger, reading Stella Maris is entirely superfluous - for completists only, and even then it likely won’t be an enjoyable experience.

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.

It was a worthwhile experience reading the master’s work. I was moved, and removed from the familiar. At times I was confused, felt fear, anxiety, relief and sorrow.