Stella Maris

i feel conflicted about this one. there is awe, admiration at the audacity of 190 pages of dialogue, the craft mastery. how he can develop a character so fully through the confines of that structure. then there is the tedium, the wandering attention. the sense that he is simply echoing and recycling the same themes from 'the passenger' in a different voice - mathematics, existence, reality, unrequited love. i know it's a companion piece and it gives us a specific character portrait, but i'm humbly unconvinced it needed all of that space to do it. there is some movement to the story - <spoiler> the slow momentum of what we know will be her eventual suicide </spoiler> - but it is not enough as a substitute for plot. i guess great writing and philosophical explication can only go so far for me.

Certainly not as riveting as The Passenger. It's simply a dialectic journey between a traumatized woman and her psychologist in the mental ward. There is lots of interesting scientific philosophy; specifically regarding mathematics and mathematians.

If you liked Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, then you'll like this.

I can't imagine the amount of research into mathematics and physics that McCarthy had to do in order to write both this and The Passenger.

A final note: There is significant overlap in the worldview of Alicia and No Country For Old Men's Anton Chigurh, which really has me wondering about the worldview of Cormac McCarthy...because that worldview is pretty bleak.

Literary and very cerebral and 100% dialogue. A brilliant complementary novel to The Passenger that explores genius and the big questions of life, meaning, and purpose. The real genius here is McCarthy. A story only this author could pull off.

UPDATE: I can't stop thinking about this book. I changed my review from 4.0 to 4.75. it may be a 5-star review in another month of musing. It is just so good.

Hugely enhances The Passenger. I maybe enjoyed this more. I certainly found this less frustrating. Some of this was over my head but it’ll be over nearly everyone’s head. That’s the point.

Still not my favorite Cormac at all. But definitely well made and worth a read for fans or people who like philosophy and math.