Cormac McCarthy – OneReadingNurse.com

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy (is over my head and that’s ok)

Let’s review the bookish quick facts and synopsis really quick and then I’ll share my thoughts:

Bookish Quick Facts:

Title: Stella Maris
Series: The Passenger #2
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher & Release: Knopf, 2022
Length: 208 pages
Rate & Recommend: ⭐⭐⭐ not for me, I don’t know. For someone with different interests

Here’s the synopsis VIA Am*ZON

The second volume of The Passenger series: Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.

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.

My thoughts:

Here we go: unfortunately as much as I anticipated and waited and wanted to love these books, they went over my head and that’s fine. I’m not here for deep literary analysis at this point in my life, or at least not like this. I have no knowledge of math history or abstract physics and that’s ok too. To me, this added nothing to book one except that Alicia truly needed to be committed and Bobby was equally nuts.

I couldn’t stay awake reading the text. The audiobook only put me to sleep 4-5 times so I did eventually get through it, despite the length these books are A CHORE. I would stick to reading them in publication order though and if you really want to know more, McCarthy’s The Kekule Problem is an essay that could be additional reading between the two books.

Like any niche topic discussed in any book ever, the long talks about math and it’s history, physics, abstract psychology… who without any knowledge of the fact wants to read these discourses? McCarthy can study all the math he wants in his life but I can’t imagine he’s going to sell any new readers on his older books this way, it’s absolutely tedious for someone like me to read.

My mind doesn’t get that abstract. I don’t know anything about Platonism. I can’t wrap my mind around half of Alicia’s ideas, and I’m willing to let it all slide over my head and not be ashamed.

That said, why did we need two books for this story? I don’t feel like Alicia’s utter lack of humanity added anything to Bobby’s story. She’s absolutely bonkers and he comes across as even crazier for loving her back. Most of the “plot points” in Stella Maris were already hit in The Passenger. There was no further look at the characters mentioned in the asylum either which might have been interesting.

These books are full of the things that interested McCarthy throughout his life and old age. Maybe he wanted to deep dive into an abstract philosophical debate with himself. At least it was more palatable in audio form with the male and female narrators leaving no doubt who was speaking at any time. Ah yes, the text continues with the dialogue/no punctuation theme so while it flows, it’s an eye full.

And at the end of the day, Alicia can be whatever she wants from a literary standpoint but someone *that* smart should do exactly what the therapist said and realize that disappointment occurs, normal people get on with their lives. No you can’t have your brother’s kid, get over it. She should have been committed by age 12 and there’s no amount of brilliance related to math and physics that negates that fact.

Long story short I don’t feel much for Bobby in The Passenger or Alicia here in Stella Maris. Even on the basest level it was infuriating to read this discourse with Alicia when every other third sentence out of her mouth was a lie or her trying to bully/manipulate the interviewer. I deal with too much psych as is at the hospital and that’s enough for me without trying to make sense of this woman’s mind games too.

The whole project of these books is just a no for me. I liked many of his earlier works but this went far over my head and I’m ok with it staying there. I don’t regret putting out the cash for the hardcovers but I’ll pass them on and hope the next reader enjoys them more

Thanks for checking out my book review and thoughts on Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy. I purchased the hardcovers with my own money and all thoughts are as always, my own. I briefly listened to the audiobook as well which I obtained through my local library via Libby. Edoardo Ballerini and Julia Whelan are phenomenal narrators in their own right and did help the book but, I’m reviewing my main reading effort (the book)

The Passenger by [Cormac McCarthy has lost his mind] (Book Thoughts)

Well. Well well well. You guys know I had this box set preordered as soon as it was announced and this was my most anticipated read of 2023. I’m completely and utterly dumbfounded by this stupid book.

It’s brilliant, it’s complete nonsense, it’s the stark raving mad ranting of an 89 year old that no editor dared to raise a red pen to. It’s a bait and switch. It’s aggravating. And I can’t stop thinking about it. (See Bookish Quick Facts & Synopsis at the end)

The thing about The Passenger is that it ties together almost everything else McCarthy ever wrote. He calls out a lot of his prior works. He sets up a great and interesting mystery that he never follows through on, simply drops the plot line as soon as it gets good.

Is the government after the missing passenger from the fallen airplane, are they after hidden Oppenheimer papers, do they think his son has something? See, in the book, the main character is Oppenheimer’s son, and that angle didn’t work for me because I can’t take a real man with a real documented history and insert him into a fictional situation. He didn’t die in Mexico, his kids weren’t schizophrenic as far as I can tell (although he was wrongly diagnosed) and it’s just a very bizarre conflagration of real and unreal, although the themes of generational guilt are real.

The schizophrenic circus, the thalidomide kid (really, really? So many old people are having flashbacks of that disaster right now 🤦‍♀️) it was one way to give us a background of the sisters life and psyche but frankly it was just weird. I think these characters make more sense if you read The Kekule Problem but I would say to read it between The Passenger and Stella Maris. This isn’t the first story where McCarthy wrote incestuous siblings and he actually gave Alicia more of a personality than most of his female characters. That said, I think it was fu€ked up but they weren’t, like, physically involved.

So we start with a mystery and end up travelling a circus of bizarre characters, with some prophetic insights on life and more than a healthy amount of ranting about the Kennedys. Throw your plot out the window, no one will even notice, right?

McCarthy isn’t known for punctuation and normal presentation (he would get along with Davidson, real well), and this book falls into that category too so maybe stay away if that style bugs you. I would recommend the audiobook, I did listen to parts of it to see if it sat in my mind better but honestly… Idk, I can’t retain any specifics. The narration was good.

I think if you really want the most from McCarthy, you need to go back and read his prominent works and end with this big old finale. Personally… Idk I’m pretty sure that McCarthy is an old perv who has gone and lost his darn mind, and he’s laughing at everyone trying to make prophecy out of his convoluted ramblings about life, psychology, physics, grief, family ties, the deep dark depths of the ocean, etc etc etc.

I’ll write more after a Kekule reread and then getting through Stella Maris. I hate it but I’m too oddly fascinated not to keep going, plus SM is much shorter so there’s that.

Bookish quick facts:

Title: The Passenger
Series: The Passenger, #1
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher & Release: Knopf, 2022
Length: 400 pages
Rate & Recommend: ⭐⭐⭐ for fans. I don’t know if I think he’ll make new fans with this

Here’s the synopsis from **Am*zon**

The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.

1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.

Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.