The novels of the American writer, Cormac McCarthy, have received a number of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country for Old Men—the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture. He died in 2023.
“[Stella Maris] is a Tom Stoppardesque bull session. Does it work?
Uh-huh. Does it work more fully if you’ve already read The
Passenger? Absolutely…Stella Maris is…[an] elegiac novel. It’s best
read while you are still buzzing from the previous book. Its themes
are dark ones, and yet it brings you home, like the piano coda at
the end of “Layla.” No one in the real world talks the way Alicia
does — she’s seeing with her third eye, flexing her middle finger
at the world, rocking her family’s thundersome legacy — but they
might if they could. She lays down…cataclysmic one-liners…All this
is cut with humor…The most moving moments in Stella Maris braid
[Alicia’s] feelings for her brother, which go through her like a
spear, with a sense of intellectual futility. Reading Stella Maris
after The Passenger is like trying to hang onto a dream you’ve been
having. It’s an uncanny, unsettling dream, tuned into the static of
the universe.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"In the new pair of novels...a fresh space is made to enable the
exchange of ideas, and the rhetorical consequences are felt in the
very textures of the fiction....[McCarthy's] ear for dialogue has
always been impeccable; in these novels...people think and speak
rationally, mundanely, intelligently, crazily, as they do in real
life...And along with the excellent dialogue there are scores of
lovely noticings, often of the natural world....Authoritatively
eloquent."
—James Wood, The New Yorker
"Cormac McCarthy has never been better…The booming, omnipotent
narrative voice, which first appeared in McCarthy’s Western novels
of the 1980s...has ebbed almost entirely in these books…What remain
are human voices, which is to say characters, contending with one
another and with their own fears and regrets, as they face the
prospect of the godless void that awaits them. The result
is…pleasurable, and together the books are the richest and
strongest work of McCarthy’s career…McCarthy’s latest…novels
represent a return to human concerns, but ones—love, death, guilt,
illusion—experienced and scrutinized on the highest existential
plane…As a pair, The Passenger and Stella Maris are an achievement
greater than Blood Meridian…or…The Road…In the new novels, McCarthy
again sets bravery and ingenuity loose amid inhumanity….The results
are not weakly flickering. They are incandescent with life.
—Graeme Wood, The Atlantic
"If [Stella Maris and The Passenger] end up being
McCarthy’s epitaph, we can say he went out with a majestic shudder
in keeping with his best work. They echo not just his own greatest
hits but a pantheon of American literature: the baroque language
and sentence structure of Faulkner; the terse, laconic dialogue of
Hemingway; even the paranoid poetry of DeLillo....McCarthy’s world
remains no country for resolution, except for the inevitable one
that concludes six feet under. In the meantime, the horizon is
obscured by the darkening rim of the world."
—Chris Vognar, The Boston Globe
"A deep dive into psychological dysfunction and a further inquiry
into the mechanics of existence —inasmuch as that can be
understood....Thrilling."
—David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times
"[Stella Maris and The Passenger] illuminate each other, and
yet the relation between them is no easier to define than one
between actual breathing people....Stella Maris is...rigorously
structured...Electrifying...McCarthy’s language has all the
richness of the King James Bible, its cadences slow and forever
beautiful and forever at odds with the world it describes....I felt
like crying myself as I approached the end of Stella Maris, the end
of this dark enthralling pair."
—Michael Gorra, The New York Review of Books
“With the publication of The Passenger and its companion novel
Stella Maris, McCarthy seems to be done mining the myth of
America. Instead, he ponders what it means to exist, and what our
history tells us about our future… He digs into the big ideas of
the universe, like human existence and what it means, as well as
what our history and memory mean. He’s searching for something
different… Where other writers venture into the mind and soul,
McCarthy has leapt past that to ask what a soul is—and if it even
exists…McCarthy is no longer searching in the dirt trail across the
West and saying, ‘This is it. This is our human nature.’ In The
Passenger and Stella Maris, he’s trying to see the God that made
the man who wrote those words.”
—Kevin Koczwara, Esquire
"[Stella Maris and The Passenger are] as bold and
intellectually keen as anything the author’s ever written....
[Stella Maris] really shines....Alicia is a singular creation, an
incomparable genius who actually reads like one on the
page....Readers looking for answers to the questions raised by The
Passenger won’t find them here—only more questions, more pieces of
an unsolvable equation McCarthy is posing about the universe and
our place in it."
—Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today
“Sometimes I think the reason literary criticism got obsessed with
evaluating prose as ‘sentences’ over the past few decades is simply
that McCarthy’s are so good. They rattle out at you like little
bullets, mean and punchy and precise… Taken together, [The
Passenger and Stella Maris] offer an intellectual experience that’s
not quite like anything else out there, laced with the eerie beauty
that only Cormac McCarthy can offer.”
—Constance Grady, Vox
"[A] masterpiece...The new books are ambitious, impressively
different from [McCarthy's] previous work. They are structured with
great elegance and originality, funny, at times surprisingly (and
terrifyingly) light—and layered with enough puzzles and resonances
to occupy a reader indefinitely. This work may be McCarthy’s
greatest. It is the product of a writer at the peak of his powers
taking his most explicit approach to his lifelong themes...The
chronological loop between the two books is beautiful in itself,
and the cockeyed structure is like nothing I have encountered in
literature."
—Valerie Stivers, Compact
"As a window into a great writer’s intellectual preoccupations,
Stella Maris is invaluable... Stella Maris is... a neat mirror of
The Passenger: It fills in gaps in Bobby’s story and shows us the
siblings’ shared history from Alicia’s point of view. In The
Passenger, Alicia is a cipher—all the more intriguing for being
inaccessible to the reader. In Stella Maris, McCarthy lifts the
veil on his mysterious creation."
—Maggie Doherty, The New Republic
“[McCarthy] reigns as a titan of American lit—an undisputed heir to
Melville and Faulkner, the subject of infinite grad-school theses,
and a hard-nosed dispenser of what Saul Bellow called ‘life-giving
and death-dealing’ sentences... It's the humid, fevered,
magniloquent, Bible-cadenced, comma-starved, word-drunk prose of
what some fans consider his masterwork, Suttree... There's a lot
here. It might make your head spin... What it all adds up
to—perhaps surprisingly—is a doomed and unsettling love story, a
Platonic tragedy.... Electric and thunderous… An astonishing pair
of novels… Taken together, The Passenger and Stella Maris are an
intellectually breathtaking achievement.”
–Jonathan Miles, Garden & Gun
“At 89, [McCarthy is] still riffing, like a jazz virtuoso, on the
American Nightmare, Faulkner’s mythmaking, and the cadences of
Joyce. McCarthy’s flame burns bright and clear in two new works…The
Passenger, wondrous in its architecture, and a companion piece,
Stella Maris, a minimalist, edgy novella…McCarthy toggles between
books and across decades, sketching the contours of a love that
dare not say its name. McCarthy’s art is transcendent even as it
takes no prisoners, an achievement akin only to the oeuvres of his
greatest peers, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth. He will endure.”
—Oprah Daily
“Like [Bob] Dylan, McCarthy fashions the country as a cast-iron,
biblical land where grand themes play out in vast landscapes around
lonely, small people. You can practically hear the rusty gate
swaying in the wind, everything made of leather, mud, or simmering
flesh. Most of us imagine life as a high-wire act with oneself as
the acrobat, but McCarthy acknowledges it as a bridge, an ordinary
path of extraordinary consequence with a beginning, an end, and an
edge most men don’t ever tempt…The language in The Passenger and
Stella Maris is compelling and soulful, even when the voice sounds
sharp. Amid…talk of mathematics and wickedness and hideous
ruination, there is poetry and the rhythm of song. Sheddan’s lines
alone are worth the price of admission, such as when he says humans
are ‘ten percent biology and ninety percent nightrumor,’ and that
‘every remedy for loneliness only postpones it.’”
—Nathan King, Air Mail
"A deeply prodding and inwardly focused novel about a young woman
who admits herself to a psychiatric hospital in 1972. Whereas The
Passenger echoes some of the raw adrenaline-spiking aspects of
McCarthy’s past works, Stella Maris is a largely philosophical
endeavor written entirely in dialogue. The result is a
more-than-welcome addition to this prolific author’s
bibliography."
—Chicago Review of Books
“The Passenger and Stella Maris tackle dazzlingly fresh
ground…McCarthy’s daring has not dimmed since The Road,
and The Passenger and Stella Maris pull no
punches as they explore the craggiest regions of human
consciousness through two of McCarthy’s most vividly drawn
characters… McCarthy’s writing retains the tangible gristle of a
field guide, full of the organic solidity and exacting diction that
have helped solidify his reputation… Read together, The Passenger
and Stella Maris are a fascinating diptych, bringing light and
depth to each other. The mysteries and coincidences are legion, and
mirrored moments are plentiful...McCarthy’s writing pursues a
sublime and majestic undercurrent weaving through the dark waves of
chaos...he results are staggering.”
—Seth L. Riley, The Millions
“A…beautifully rendered meditation on humanity’s relationship to
nature… McCarthy, perhaps the most lyrical poet of slaughter since
Homer, is at his most biblical and elegiac describing the horrors
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki… The Passenger and Stella Maris together
form a profound addition to the legacy of a true literary
savant.”
—Ed Tarkington, Chapter 16
“[McCarthy] rockets readers into the black hole at the hub of his
galactic imagination, an event horizon so rich and dense we can
only marvel as we fall through its warped fabric….Like Moses,
McCarthy seeks a land of milk and honey beyond the rim of the
universe but spies only oblivion (and perhaps the ghostly glow of
math)… Despite the darkness ahead, The Passenger and Stella Maris
crown a magnificent career that will guide us forward, for as long
as the lights stay on.”
—Hamilton Cain, Star Tribune
"The relationship between [Stella Maris and The Passenger], and
between the two siblings, is analogous to the concept of quantum
entanglement: God and physics, faith and reason are all connected,
but it’ll blow your mind if you try to understand how....McCarthy’s
superpowers [are] his perfect ear for the southern American voice,
his exceptional ability to reveal character through speech, his
masterful writing about nature. And his humor."
—Spectator World
"McCarthy delivers some of his best work in scenes that you both
expect...and don’t....The story McCarthy has told so far leaves the
reader pondering some of life’s deepest questions, and affirms that
McCarthy’s command of his writing — and our attention — is as good
as ever."
—Geoff Smith, The Berkshire Eagle
"A companion to McCarthy’s The Passenger that both supplements and
subverts it… Enigmatic… A grand puzzle, and grandly written at
that, about shattered psyches and illicit dreams."
—Kirkus Review, Starred Review
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