Stella Maris

De: Cormac McCarthy

Narrado por: Julia Whelan, Edoardo Ballerini

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.

©2022 Cormac McCarthy (P)2022 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“[Stella Maris] is a Tom Stoppardesque bull session. Does it work? Uh-huh. Does it work more fully if you’ve already read The Passenger? Absolutely…Stella Maris is…[an] elegiac novel. It’s best read while you are still buzzing from the previous book. Its themes are dark ones, and yet it brings you home, like the piano coda at the end of “Layla.” No one in the real world talks the way Alicia does — she’s seeing with her third eye, flexing her middle finger at the world, rocking her family’s thundersome legacy — but they might if they could. She lays down…cataclysmic one-liners…All this is cut with humor…The most moving moments in Stella Maris braid [Alicia’s] feelings for her brother, which go through her like a spear, with a sense of intellectual futility. Reading Stella Maris after The Passenger is like trying to hang onto a dream you’ve been having. It’s an uncanny, unsettling dream, tuned into the static of the universe.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"In the new pair of novels...a fresh space is made to enable the exchange of ideas, and the rhetorical consequences are felt in the very textures of the fiction....[McCarthy's] ear for dialogue has always been impeccable; in these novels...people think and speak rationally, mundanely, intelligently, crazily, as they do in real life...And along with the excellent dialogue there are scores of lovely noticings, often of the natural world....Authoritatively eloquent."—James Wood, The New Yorker

"Cormac McCarthy has never been better…The booming, omnipotent narrative voice, which first appeared in McCarthy’s Western novels of the 1980s...has ebbed almost entirely in these books…What remain are human voices, which is to say characters, contending with one another and with their own fears and regrets, as they face the prospect of the godless void that awaits them. The result is…pleasurable, and together the books are the richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career…McCarthy’s latest…novels represent a return to human concerns, but ones—love, death, guilt, illusion—experienced and scrutinized on the highest existential plane…As a pair, The Passenger and Stella Maris are an achievement greater than Blood Meridian…or…The Road…In the new novels, McCarthy again sets bravery and ingenuity loose amid inhumanity….The results are not weakly flickering. They are incandescent with life."—Graeme Wood, The Atlantic

Haunting

This wonderful story is almost as confusing as it is haunting. It's enough to make you question your own sanity and that of the entire world.

Genius The Passenger; Stella Maris

Brilliant, transcendent language extolling the depth of human quest for meaning and answers to life’s unknowable mysteries. Not for the very young. I would guess. If you love literature, philosophy, science and are
Okay with peaking into the void, you will not find two more life affirming novels. Cormac asks us to hold his hand. Is not that what one does at the end?

Amazing narrations!

I liked this part better than the passenger. Made me think a LOT. I have a science background so was able to follow the science history and loved the philosophical and psychological aspects.

Having 2 AMAZING narrators really made it feel like I was “watching” a movie. EB is my favorite!!! I’m so glad he’s everywhere

My Brain Hurts

Not for the faint of heart or feeble of mind. It’s clear why it took 20 years to write. It certainly isn’t uplifting but an unrivaled plunge into the deep end of the extraordinary minds. Makes me glad I’m a simpleton and has me deep diving into the history of violins.

engaging and thought provoking

incredible companion to The Passenger. will leave your brain turning over. paints a great picture of a troubled mind that is mostly troubled by how expansive and sensitive that mind is

Necessary

This is essential to unlocking some of the doors in The Passenger. Kind of makes you realize some of the hidden meaning in that book and then excavate more of the depths from it.

This makes you realize how on another level Cormac McCarthy was. He gives you one book, which is like a locked treasure chest, and then a companion book of character dialogue, that acts like the key to the chest.

Just amazing.

Literally Breathtaking and Literally Extraordinary

Breathtaking and extraordinary. The last chapter especially. I’m left … inadequately able to describe whatever this is. Feeling wordless. I was compelled to rewind over this … journey (a word too linear for the experience) ... to stop and think and realize that “thinking” kept me in the shallows and I needed to go deeper - to FEEL and SENSE - but kept butting up against my capacity to dive where I wanted to go. This … story … leads and lures you to seek extending your Self into an existential timespace. As a lover of Mathematics who has little talent for it, at least I can empathize with those who literally lose their minds in its revealed constructs and abstractions, and worse/better, in the truth that it holds forever-to-be-hidden-from-the -most-brilliant-of-humans mysteries.

Highly recommend listening vs reading but when I did both at once I could reach further in. 10 stars on a 5 star scale.)

Cormac McCarthy is the best author in American history

As usual, he never fails to absolutely glue you to every single word providing endless hours of contemplative thought. Nobody can write characters like him.

Chilling, Haunting, Sad, Sadder, Saddest.

I’ve now read both ‘The Passenger’ and its brutal & unique companion novel ‘Stella Maris’ twice. First time early this year and secondly right before early next year, so exactly one year apart. It feels ALMOST like being on the same odyssey taken by the story’s tortured siblings Alicia and Bobby, separated by years and removed by a gulf both have attempted to quantify for their entire lives.

If a studied author is to leave one legacy before dying (as Cormac McCarthy has done by exiting the Earth mere months after publication of these two novels), it would be to move the readers (essentially students at this point) to study THEMSELVES. To move a book’s readers to study their own mark on this world. And perhaps more importantly, what we, as readers/students/humans, actually believe the point to it all is?

How much grief can we take before we can see its worth? And will we know the answer when we reach it? Have we already passed the point of understanding and not even realized we have the answers we need already?

Philosophy and mathematics in fiction storytelling has never hit quite this brazen a musical note.

Five (hundred) stars.

Remarkable Performance of a Remarkable Book

Bravo Julia Whelan!! I don’t know which I enjoyed more, Whelan’s performance or McCarthy’s engaging, page-turning dialogue. As a companion novel to The Passenger, some answers are provided while others are left open for the reader to ponder and mull over. Yet, the story is complete. It’s a thought provoking puzzle of the mind. After completing the two books and shifting pieces here and there, from one board to the other, I am left in awe of the resulting work of art.