Brilliant ! ( )

I didn't know what to think after The Passenger, but Stella Maris is beautiful. If you've read McCarthy's screenplay, "The Sunset Limited," it is reminiscent of that. The entire book is dialogue between two characters, and it clarifies so much of The Passenger. It offers deep inquiry into where our existence ends, the nature of reality, and if there is something beyond the material world, and McCarthy does so without pretending to know the answers to any of those questions. It's beautiful. ( )

Stella Maris er en dialog mellom behandler og pasient der sistnevnte er en ung og svært begavet matematiker som har hoppet av sin akademiske karriere nesten før den har begynt og hvis kjærlighet til broren Bobby nesten river henne i stykker. Hun omtaler matematikk og bevisføringen der ved historiene til enkelte matematikere som har forlatt faget fordi de kom lenger enn faget var, dvs de vandret videre. Nettopp i psykiaterens uvitenhet om matematikk ligger avbildningen av så lite vi vet om hverandre og slik verden. Og hva vet den som i boken er benevnt pasient om seg selv?

BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN - 1972 Twenty-year-old Alicia Western checks herself into the hospital with $40,000 in a plastic bag. Alicia is a paranoid schizophrenia patient who is a doctorate candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago. She does not want to talk about her brother Bobby because of her illness. Instead, she ponders the nature of madness and how people insist on having a single experience of the world. She also remembers a time when, at the age of seven, her own grandmother was worried about her. She also examines the nexus of physics and philosophy and introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, and the hallucinations that only she can see. She continues to be sad for Bobby, who isn't quite dead and isn't quite hers.

Stella Maris is a conceptual novel that is told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia's psychiatric sessions. It examines subjects such as the nature of consciousness, gnosticism, literary allusions, and the eschaton while remaining utterly grounded in reality. It is likely to make you question whether your life is being written by fate. It is a probing, meticulous, and intellectually demanding conclusion to The Passenger, a philosophical investigation that challenges our beliefs about God, reality, and existence.

If you are a reader like me you will want to immediately reread these two novels after finishing Stella Maris. The combination of these two novels provide a fitting postlude to the literary life of Cormac McCarthy. ( )

The second volume provided no real resolution, so for me the whole thing came off as a monument to nihilism. ( )