3.5
Stella Maris
ByPublisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The second volume of The Passenger series, from The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road • An intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.
"The richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career…An achievement greater than Blood Meridian…or…The Road.” —The Atlantic
1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.
"The richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career…An achievement greater than Blood Meridian…or…The Road.” —The Atlantic
1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesStella Maris Reviews
3.5
“Maybe the worst beach read of all time”
“Had to strike whilst the iron was hot (tepid) after reading The Passenger because I knew I would never read this otherwise, and I really wish I hadn’t bothered because it was as equally unenjoyable, but with even more convoluted and unnecessarily long and ridiculously profound segments about mathematics.
I am only rating this .25 higher purely because it was half the length and I didn’t feel like I wasted quite as much time on it as I did with The Passenger.”
“Not sure how to process this book but it was very captivating and I enjoyed it very much. The dialogue between the main character and her therapist made my head spin at times, but it was so interesting. Due to his punctuation style though, I switched to the audiobook and I’m so glad I did.”
About Cormac McCarthy
The novels of the American writer, Cormac McCarthy, have received a number of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country for Old Men—the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture. He died in 2023.
Other books by Cormac McCarthy
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