Stella Maris

By: Cormac McCarthy

Narrated by: Julia Whelan, Edoardo Ballerini

Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

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

Critic reviews

“[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

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.

A new psychoanalysis

This is a strange person being
analyzed, as she appears very upbeat
as she tells really unusual stories
that would lead you to think
she is psychotic but with a very
delightful personality.

What did i just listen to?

I enjoyed that exploration but i’m not even sure what’s real in it. I guess part of that is on purpose but wow.

Brilliant

The narration gives life to the ingenious words/language and insight of Cormac McCarthy; a synergistic collaboration!

Wow

Forget understanding the math (maybe the point) Read it at least twice to understand the rest. keep a pen handy

Great Cast!!!

Perfectly casted. A truly great audio experience. Love that it really sounds like you are a fly on the walk listening into the two character’s time in therapy. These two play off each other fantastically and is a joy to listen to each session they have.

While I am not a fan of audiobooks that add in sound effects to “ better immerse you” I love that the only sound effects in the whole book is the sound of the recorder starting at the beginning of each session and stopping at the chapter concludes.
This audio experience is beautiful in it’s simplicity.

Amazing

I have been a believer that McCarthy wouldn’t translate well into audio but I couldn’t have been more wrong. This is a perfect audio book. Excellent performances, profound material. If you’ve read McCarthy’s scientific article on the Kekule problem, this book expounds on this topic and much more. I will reread this in text but it’s an excellent book. Read it.

an incredible performance of an amazing dialogue

and all my years of listening to audiobooks this is by far my favorite performance I really don't usually like the added sound effects but the way that this piece was produced was flawless I can't see anything other than thank you to the producers and the performers

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?