Stella Maris

ByCormac McCarthy

Release Date: 2022-12-06
Genre: Literary Fiction

Score: 4

From 158 Ratings

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.

Reviews

Talk talk talk . . .
4
By Scott's take on things
Stella Maris is a mental institution in Wisconsin where Alicia Western has committed herself. The book is all dialogue between Alicia and her doctor / therapist, a person never named. Alicia discusses her obsession with mathematics, with wishing she’d never existed, and with her love of her brother. Basically, the therapist’s general questions provide the entree for Alicia to explain at length her unusual, complex views on just about everything.
Great companion to the Passenger
5
By CraigDash
Not sure what book some of these negative reviewers read, but this is a great companion to the Passenger, and both are stunning, sad, poetic, and brilliant books. Read them and see for yourself.
Disappointed
1
By Craig10lc
Don’t bother reading this unless you’re a lover of math and long, esoteric conversations about the subject. Offer’s no follow up info for the Passenger, just fills in some details of Alicia’s life at the institute before her suicide.
Still in his prime
5
By chrisallenmax
Cormac McCarthy is still in his prime; and this was a beautiful companion to ‘The Passenger’