Under 200 Pages! discussion

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A little about the Book
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road returns with the second volume of The Passenger Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.

1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.

Pages: 190(depending on the edition)

Looking forward to everyone’s active participation and fun discussion.

HAPPY READING!📚📚

I have read this book. I read both Cormac's books in succession, last year - first The Passenger then Stella Maris.

♥ Sandi ❣ wrote: "I have read this book. I read both Cormac's books in succession, last year - first The Passenger then Stella Maris."

Hey Sandi,

As this book is part of a series, can it be read as a standalone or do I need to read The Passenger first? Asking as you have read both the book.

Actually Caroline, neither book makes any sense. I was hoping to find the answers I needed from The Passenger in this book, Stella Maris , since it was book 2 of the series and nope! Nothing! After reading both books I just had more questions, some from book one and some from book two. McCarthy is an eclectic writer, as his writing seems to be unrelated and unspecialized, and you really need to be a hard core Cormac fan to even begin to understand his books. Especially the ones he wrote later in life. Some people seem to think that he knew this would be his last books and he refused to answer the questions he brought up in these books, just for his own amusement. So all in all, I think you can probably read this as a stand alone - it will probably cut the questions in half, over having read both books. If you understand this book, please let me know.

♥ Sandi ❣ wrote: "Actually Caroline, neither book makes any sense. I was hoping to find the answers I needed from The Passenger in this book, Stella Maris , since it was book 2 of the series and nope! Nothing! After..."

I did start the book and m finding the conversation between the main characters and the psychiatrist in the first chapter very confusing. Though, will try reading it again! Hoping to understand it better.🫤

Caroline wrote: "♥ Sandi ❣ wrote: "Actually Caroline, neither book makes any sense. I was hoping to find the answers I needed from The Passenger in this book, Stella Maris , since it was book 2 of the series and n..."

I haven’t started the book yet, but flipped through the pages, and it does seem it will get confusing very quickly.

I’ve read his book The Road, and I loved that.

I too loved The Road and also All the Pretty Horses. Those books made sense...lol!

I wanted to love this. I made some notes as I went along because I didn’t understand a fair few words and concepts. But that soon stopped because it was taking so much time and I wasn’t that interested in famous mathematicians and their impenetrable ideas. Why did the Dr Cohen not ask for more explanations about what Alicia was talking about? I ask myself why!
Is the companion book The passenger as hard work ?

Passenger is just as hard in my opinion and I really don't think that reading them backwards - meaning book 2 before book 1 - will help you better understand either one of them. I have read a lot of McCarthy books, but these two books are completely on their own. Nothing quite like them. No rhyme or reason to either book. But like I mentioned above - Cormac knew this would be his last books - so he wrote more stream of consciousness - something with a lot of questions that he knew would never be answered, even by his quantum buddies. I have now seen critics that agree that there are no answers for these books.