Stella Maris - Cormac McCarthy || Book Review
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- Опубліковано 8 гру 2022
- Here I discuss the companion book to The Passenger.
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This is such a great review. I just read these novels and I’m blown away by them. The Passenger in particular is an amazing book.
Thought it interesting that some scenarios brought up to therapist in Stella Maris were thought about by Bobby in The Passenger. Also interesting and odd that therapist cut Alicia off, when it seemed she was opening up even more about romantic feelings for Bobby and he said “maybe we should talk about something else.” The books have really affected me: especially the extremes of isolation these two felt
I think that would be the therapist being more interested in her theories and postulations (intellect) rather than the biggest core of her depression which is her lack of love and connection (emotions). I shook my head big time at that mistake he made.
Outstanding reviews of a difficult work.
Thank you!
I couldn’t help but read this as definitively his final book and condemnation of language. So, so poignant that McCarthy denounced language as a parasite that undermined and feeds off the human condition. I think it’s also worth mentioning how consistently Alicia mentions language being the modality of the stupid or at least the limited geniuses
I’ve never understood anything McCarthy has written or said to be a “condemnation of language”. On the other hand, if he has indeed “denounced language as a parasite” then I have to roll my eyes and admit that even America’s greatest living writer is capable of speaking pretentious nonsense. Just like Alicia Western.
We all have our Stella Maris, McCarthy, himself, chose the SanteFe Institute. The book, well above my pay grade, provides us a glimpse into the unknown and known… mathematics, physics, unconcious and hallucinatory input. We owe Cormac a debt of gratitude for sharing that which we consciously and religiously choose to ignore. Interesting observation above on Bobby, as the unconscious Passenger… more practically I dwelled on the question of Alicia’s suicide, followed by Bobby’s awakening.
Am impressed that you can just speak extemporaneously.
Just finished SM and was enthralled.
PS was thrilled by the wit of the interactions. The audio-book has a male and a woman playing the parts. I know people pooh-pooh audio-books but this format worked like a radio-play. I was left wit ha deep admiration for those who can withstand their own extremely high intellect without misusing it. But suicide is the only real cure to that sort of loneliness maybe? Don't know. Such a valuable pair of books.
Thank you for your thoughtful review of Stella Maris. I read it a few days ago, after hearing about it after I read The Passenger. Stella Maris is located in Black River Falls, a haunting name that I looked up to see if was a McCarthy creation. No, it's on the map. There are echoes of Romeo and Juliet in the two books, like how Juliet takes the potion that makes her appear dead, which causes Romeo to kill himself. Bobby is in this coma from which he may never recover, and like Juliet, recovers from his "sleep" only to find his lover dead. I certainly thought of the writings of J D Salinger while reading Stella Maris. Salinger's characters were often brilliant or outright geniuses like Alicia, young, half-Jewish, somewhat troubled and alienated and good at producing great dialogue. Salinger wrote all these unpublished novels, they say, and they will start coming out in the next few years, if his son and ex-wife, is it? can finish editing them. It seems a kind of crime that these novels are being kept from the public, but we do have McCarthy. I'll be re-reading both The Passenger and The Queen of the Seas, which Stella Maris translates to. It refers to Mary the virgin mother. Catholic phrase. I confess to being a Cormac fan, though he's harrowed me over and over.
Your Salinger insight is really helpful, I had thought about that, but you're absolutely right. I can certainly imagine some Franny and Zooey in there.
There are also hints at Genesis Adam and Eve where Alice wants to marry Bobby and “start over again”
The passing critique of jung seemed most relevent for me, in that the notion of a soul has almost become irrelevant, and thus her suicide in a sense became a mercy, the manic narcissism in the central character has no possibility of accessing a higher or inner power, “ it’s not that she wanted to die, it was more about her preference to not be born, and that’s such a pitiful lament and sad summary of a culture in its isn death throes.
@@AgrippaPetronius1903 Toxic narcissism and McCarthy - this is an insight I appreciate!
Great review. I read both with reserved excitement, based on mixed reactions and an expectation that the reflections on physics and mathematics would be overwhelming, but was surprised at how cohesive the story was, when so many complaints referenced its non-linear plot and time shifting. Both books are quite heady, but there are quite a few nuanced references that illuminate both characters' connection to each other as well as their loneliness: A subtle reference to each character's austerity and tendency to travel light, and in Alicia's case, as a means to unburden oneself; the word "Atavism" jumped out at me in the way it was the first description of 'The Kid', but was once again repeated in the passenger which elucidates the backwards trajectory to the simpler way of life that Bobby adopts as he's forced to assume a new identity and flee. What I haven't heard any other reviewers mention, though it almost was here, was how both conclusions to each book essentially mirror each other. Alicia fantasizes about living out her final days wrapped in a blanket in the wilderness, sitting by the dying light of a fire, before getting carried off by animals. The Passenger essentially ends with Bobby realizing this same end (without the animals), sitting by a lamp and wrapped in a blanket ruminating on the 'atavistic' connection that quality of light has with ancient people of the past and, particularly, what his death will be like. The tragedy of it is quite sad.
You have made a great connection that I missed. This is just one of those stories that either resonate with people or it doesn't. There is a lot of people getting bogged down in the surface topics, but they miss the underlying element.
OMG, Godel, Escher, Back. I lOVE your insight. I am re-listening to the All The Pretty Horses series now, as I fall asleep at night. I read all of Cormac McCarthy's books 20 years ago. Still my favorite American writer. Blood Meridian is epic, unfilmable. Stella Maris goes deep into the functional philosophy of life and its purpose for continued existence. The fundamental 1/137 alpha constant is not guaranteed in all possible outcomes.
Blood Meridian is definitely not unfilmable and that's a coward's reaction to the matter.
@@neo-filthyfrank1347 You might be right. I'd love for the Coen Brothers to try it. I wish Stanley Kubrick were still alive.
I finished the book and then, right away, started viewing the vids about Stella Maris, that I didn't want to watch before finishing it. This one I really liked. The author uses the word "entangled" on one of the last pages. I think Bobby and Alecia are Quantum "entangled"
Cheers, Mate! You're All Right.
Thank you, great food for thought and for my third read of these two books. Since my second read, i have gone back to all of his books, except the Counselor, and No Country..., Suttree may be my favorite. The Stonemason is next.
You have really started to unwrap the puzzle. I have some thoughts about the Kid and his entourage coming to her at twelve. These " hallucinated" personalities can be created to cope with having been a child victim of rape.
Thank you so much for this review. I've just finished this wonderful book and now will reread it illuminated by your insights. His writing has the same effect on me as Alicia's description of music 'But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension.'. You have helped my comprehension of this novel
Thanks for the review!
The utter loneliness of high intelligence
Absolutely
Loved the Passenger, was absolutely rocked by Stella Maris. Enjoyed your review, youre a thoughtful reader.
Thank you
Great review. It is well thought out and even if I hadn’t read it before the way the review was presented would have encouraged me to read it.
Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed the book as well.
I've finished both books, and I can't help but think that the story has much less to do with characters and much more to do with the meaning of existence. Do you think the story is in some ways autobiographical? Your tautological comment is highly relevant, I think. Much of human reasoning (and existence) is circular, or cyclical, bringing us back to where we started without actually going anywhere. I think about Bobby's and Alicia's lives, and I see general elements of everybody's life: mystery, longing, sadness, loneliness, insecurity, and trying to make sense out of it all. I don't think we can expect any clarification from McCarthy himself. Why should he try to explain the inexplicable?
I don't really know that much about Cormac McCarthy, so I'm not sure if they are autobiographical in any way. Since reading them, I have heard mention of that notion from the McCarthy scholars out there.
Oh i 100% agree. Great summary of the books
Beautiful review! I want to start both books over right now!
It really was a good conversation. So tragic knowing she's just biding her time.
I keep hearing what a wonderful writer Cormac Macathy is , then why doesn't he use prouncation ?
Stella Maris is about the pathos of incest. How it can be excused away "as love". The main theme however is the understanding of consciousness. Just what *is* it?! Right throughout the Passenger, McCarthy plays with us - tempting us to think Alicia is psychotic. All those appearances of the Kid are delusional right? Wrong. During Stella Maris we discover Alicia isn;t mad at all. Highly intelligent, perhaps spectrum disorder, misguided with her love for Bobby... sure.. but psychotic? No. How do we know this for certain? Well early on there is a clue. The kid *also* visits Bobby. It's impossible for two people to have the exact same delusion. McCarthy's genius is he probes and gets the reader to question their own bias of the world. He explains consciousness on so many levels from the superficial (Alicia’s day dreaming), to the mid level (the Kid) to the downright bizarre and unknown - the "yet to be discovered "(the sharing of consciousness between siblings), and even the stealing of it from the dead (in the plane wreck). Just who did that?? Maybe that is the next major challenge of mathematics. Alicia is onto the discovery of the meaning of consciousness, but tragically she is taken away from us by a simple mortal flaw. The sexual love of her brother is just all too much for in the end. So we never get to find out if she proves it scientifically and via mathematics. So we are left wanting and questioning. Stewing things over in our very own subconscious. Brilliant stuff as always from the master of modern day literature.
Well done -- appreciate this.
Thank you
I really enjoyed both books,but I am a big McCarthy fan
Interesting how her relationship with the kid and the therapist is quite similar. Starts with her standoffish and unimpressed by the routines then slowly transitions to comfort, openness and respect. Still the relationships were not enough to change her decision
I came to these new books only about a month after I discovered Blood Meridian-and was blown away by it. I don’t know if McCarthy’s other books follow the Blood Meridian pattern, but because of Blood Meridian I came to The Passenger and Stella Maris on high alert for cleverly hidden clues to DEVASTATING REALIZATIONS to come. I was ready to interpret characters partly as allegories. I was also looking for a momentous climax of some kind in the book’s last few pages, like in Blood Meridian.
Right now I judge the new books POSITIVELY: they tried something original and ambitious and arguably succeeded. But I can see a rational reader taking a NEGATIVE PERSPECTIVE, which might be summarized something like this: “McCarthy is just vomiting up his pet philosophical musings through the mouth of a genius character in his story; the genius character is not realistic; the love story is not compelling.” I’ll mention one other specific concrete flaw in the books below, but now let me turn to my positive interpretation of the story.
The story can be said to be “about” multiple things, but let me start with the suggestion that The Passenger is about schizophrenia, or more broadly: ways we try to attribute meaning to the events of our lives. We are reminded in the text that there is a genetic component to schizophrenia. The sister is diagnosed with some kind of (atypical) schizophrenia. Meanwhile the brother discusses various paranoid theories with people he knows. To quote Nirvana, “just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you.” When The Kid comes to visit the brother, I saw that as a dramatic confirmation that the brother has a milder case of whatever the sister has. No magical (or quantum physical) explanations are required, since he has heard her describe The Kid in detail.
Two possible, hypothetical routes to some kind of salvation for the brother or sister appear in the story. One is their LOVE. In other works of literature, love is often presented as the purpose or meaning of life; and we are told that love conquers all. The brother and sister represent a deep and pure tragic love like that between Romeo and Juliet. The other potential path to salvation in the books is MATH, PHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY-some kind of intellectual or transcendental insight or mode of being that might “make it all worthwhile.” As I read I was looking for some way the two (love and math-physics) could be married to create some kind of consummation of their love, or redemption and peace, or something.
So now the story is not just about schizophrenia, and I would say it’s not really about math, or the atomic bomb, or the Kennedy assassination either. It’s about whether there is a way to interpret life that is not…nihilistic or absurd or tragic. At least for these characters.
We start with the puzzle of the missing passenger in the submerged plane. We realize that is not where we are going to get answers. These characters are also past looking for ultimate answers from organized religion. So we (they) are left with love, or modern physics and math.
Over the course of the story we are presented with various dreams and hallucinations that might be clues to some transcendental reality in which the lovers are able to fulfill Alicia Western’s impossible dream of having a child with her brother. We have Miss Vivian, the older woman obsessed with the screaming of babies-could she be some kind of future-past Alicia? We have the possibility that the pair did have sex but lied about it or repressed the memory. Maybe there was even an abortion, and the Kid is an image of that and mechanism for “not thinking about that.” We have some characteristically McCarthian passages describing dark creatures emerging from strange primordial demonic soups. Most dramatically to me, we have the moment where the Kid brings a trunk and inside the trunk is a doll and the trunk is labeled Property of Western Union but the Kid reads it as “PROGENY OF WESTERN UNION.”
Given that the siblings are named Western, “Progeny of Western Union” was like a slap in the face. On the next page Alicia is crying and saying she’s sorry to the doll. I thought that had to be a baby. The only thing that didn’t fit is that she said “I was only six years old.” What could that mean, I thought.
Maybe the answer is in the unread letter in The Passenger. Nope. (Spoiler answer: she was six years old; the doll was just a doll. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”)
I was also carefully noting the allusions to physics and math. The main way I could see modern physics contributing to actualizing their love would be through the phenomenon of ENTANGLEMENT, whereby distant parts of a quantum system can be in instantaneous interaction no matter how far apart. Interestingly, this central concept in quantum physics was not really discussed explicitly but only hinted at for example when Alicia says she’d like to discuss BELL’S THEOREM in Stella Maris. In Stella Maris we also get references to the possibility of loops in time, and the possibility that “simulation” will be the real “afterlife.”
Will the final pages reveal that they had sex and a baby? Or that their love created a quantum baby “made purely of light” that needed to be protected in some platonic realm? Or that Bobby’s life was just a simulation his brain created in a coma? Or that they are their own parents and that somehow that’s why Bobby or Alicia or maybe their mom is the missing passenger in the plane? (That last one isn’t even coherent, I don’t think.)
No. We get a bit more about sex-talk and dreams between them, but no consummation nor any baby. I don’t think we get any far-out modern physics interpretation such as Philip K Dick might have written. No, the “boring” interpretation of the story works just fine: they had a forbidden love, they were miserable, and they died lonely and apart. They were preoccupied with things that could never solve the real problem: we’re all dead in the end.
None of the potential “reveals” I could imagine as a reader would really solve the existential problem the characters face. But if the book did end with a reveal like that, that would give us as readers a sort of satisfaction that the characters can’t access-and neither can we in real life.
So if there is an articulable point to the story, it might be a sort of warning to us newfangled atheistic types who get intoxicated by the apparent profundities of math and physics-that although they might appear to give us alternatives to traditional religion for making sense of the world, and making it appear benign or intelligent (as in the line in Stella Maris where she says the issue is whether the universe might be intelligent)-we might trick ourselves into thinking science offers an alternative optimistic worldview-but no. This book is a smack in the face to wake us out of our smug scientist-minded worldview.
So ultimately, we pass THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS LIKE ALICE AND LEWIS CARROLL, BUT END UP BACK IN THIS BLEAK WORLD WITH SCHOPENHAUER. In Schopenhauer’s view the universe does have a mind, but it’s not conscious except in us and other animals. The mind of the universe is a blind will to exist that leads to different parts of the universe eating each other not realizing they are eating themselves. So everything lives according to urges we don’t understand, suffers more or less, and disappears with no lasting trace.
Aside from the many funny parts in The Passenger (perhaps unexpected in such a dark story), the faint happy notes in the story result from human connections, such as the holding of hands at the end of Stella Maris. One other point I have not seen mentioned by others is THE RED SASH that Alicia’s body is wearing at the start of The Passenger. In Stella Maris she says she wants to be completely erased from existence and not found, but in the Passenger we are told explicitly that she wore a red sash “so that she’d be found.” So maybe she had developed her relationship with Dr. Cohen enough that she wanted to reestablish a connection with the rest of humanity-if only after her death.
In summary: the worst spoiler for this story is: there are no spoilers. What appear to be spoilers are decoys. There are no spoilers because there are no satisfying answers that can be revealed, to the problems faced by the characters-or us.
Final note regarding an apparent flaw: the author uses “dubious” multiple times when he appears to mean “doubtful.” This is not so minor because the characters are supposed to be hyper-intelligent and hyper-educated, and they make a habit of correcting others’ pronunciation and grammar. So it broke the spell for me (to some extent) when it turned out they don’t know the difference between DUBIOUS and DOUBTFUL.
But there WAS a consummation of their love, the Passenger describes their abortion...
Thanks so much for the review. My take thus far is that Stella Maris is dialog driven, technical and rather dry as the book represents the left brain hemisphere (verbal, analytical, scientific and organized).
This might seem fanciful but to me it solves a nagging question of why he would release 2 books and not just include the second as act II or part 2 of the first book? I’ve read comments that it was a money grab from an author who realized this might b his last book. But this seems highly doubtful if not laughable. My thought is that he wanted to physically represent the 2 hemispheres through 2 books. The left hemisphere symbolized through Stella Maris and the right -The Passenger (creativity, imagination, emotion and symbolism)
I also believe there is pretty good evidence to suggest that Bobby remains brain dead and does die (as Alicia believes) and that The Passenger is entirely a hallucination occurring with Bobby’s mind.
That's a great assessment. In many ways, one could read Stella Maris as simply a purgatory for Alicia - that she died (figuratively) with the loss of Bobby and she's just waiting to move on. I didn't find Stella Maris to be dry, on the contrary. There is some humor, and some really good dialogue, but it's really just tragic because we know where it leads. A bit like the movie Titanic.
So who was on the plane and what was the plane’s back story?
Yes tell us!
I had to stop, this book is nothing but the dull ramblings of a narcissistic woman. If you think listening to a psychiatric session might be interesting…it’s not. I loved the Passenger, though.
Thank you Thank you Thank you 🙏
It's almost as if many people here feel obligated to like ANYTHING McCarthy writes.
These last two novels are pathetic.