Stella Maris
powerful literary fiction from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author
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4.4 • 7 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A profound exploration of the nature of reality and the human mind, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road and No Country for Old Men.
'A drought-busting, brain-vexing double act’ – Guardian
Alicia Western is the following: Twenty years old. A brilliant mathematician at the University of Chicago. And a paranoid schizophrenic who does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby.
Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Cormac McCarthy's Stella Maris is a moving companion to The Passenger. It is a powerful enquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and life itself.
‘Cormac McCarthy was such a virtuoso, his language was so rich and new . . . his books were terrifying and absolute. His sentences were astonishing.’ - Anne Enright
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McCarthy's underwhelming companion piece to The Passenger, set eight years earlier, in 1972, begins with a one-paragraph case file for 20-year-old PhD candidate Alicia Western. Alicia, who has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, has been dropped off at Stella Maris, a psychiatric hospital in rural Wisconsin, with over $40,000 in cash. What follows is a series of conversations between Alicia and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen, written like a play but with no exposition, stage directions, or dialogue tags. The subjects include mathematics, quantum mechanics, music theory, and obscure philosophy. Before Alicia arrived at Stella Maris, her Formula 1 driver brother, Bobby Western, had a crash during a race that put him into a coma. She's in love with Bobby, but refuses to talk about him with Cohen until the third act. There are scraps of humor ("Mathematics is ultimately a faith-based initiative. And faith is an uncertain business," Alicia tells Cohen), though not much tension, as the reader already knows how things will end (Alicia's body is discovered on the first page of The Passenger). McCarthy has swum in these waters before, and with more impressive strokes. Strangely, The Passenger offers a more successful ending to the story of Alicia and Bobby. Though this volume feels extraneous, McCarthy diehards will still flock to it.
