Stella Maris
Ratings51
Average rating3.9
Literary and very cerebral and 100% dialogue. A brilliant complement to The Passenger that explores genius and the big questions of life, meaning, and purpose. The real genius here is McCarthy. This story could only have been pulled off by this author.
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.
Quote from this Nation article...
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/cormac-mccarthy-late-style/
Billed at once as the culminating pinnacle of McCarthy's career and an unexpected departure from his earlier work, The Passenger and Stella Maris are sibling novels about incest, mourning, mathematics, salvage diving, schizophrenia, New Orleans, theoretical physics, Knoxville, the invention of nuclear weapons, car racing, suicide, vaudeville theater, the weight of history, the sins of the father, psychiatry, the crisis of the European sciences, and the moral decline of the West. At once intricate and beautiful, challenging and moving [...]
Shocking how this is man is not a Nobel laureate.
“How to write dialogue”, elite class of 2022.
I consider myself to be a rather intelligent person. I am an engineer by trade and have taken multiple mathematics and physics courses. For the life of me, I couldn't follow any of the mathematics information presented for around half of this book. Unless the vast majority of readers of this book are some kind of advanced mathematical experts, I don't understand why you would give this book glowing 5-star reviews. How can you be so high on something when you literally can't understand the majority of the information being presented? I get it's Cormac Mccarthy and he's supposed to be some type of literary God, but this, along with The Passenger, comes off as some grand mathematics vanity novels. I don't care how “beautiful the prose is” or whatever. If you can't follow what's being discussed, how do you find it entertaining?