Stella Maris

By: Cormac McCarthy

Narrated by: 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.

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?

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.)