Stella Maris

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Call Number: Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / McCarthy, Cormac, Fiction / McCarthy, Cormac
On Shelf At: Pittsfield Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / McCarthy, Cormac	4-week checkout	Reshelving
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / McCarthy, Cormac	4-week checkout	Due 05-24-2024
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / McCarthy, Cormac	4-week checkout	Due 05-24-2024
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / McCarthy, Cormac	4-week checkout	Due 05-16-2024

The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road returns with the second volume of The Passenger series: 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, WISCONSIN: 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.-- Amazon.com

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An Inessential Sequel to "The Passenger" submitted by cdunlop on June 19, 2023, 3:55pm Published as a companion piece to The Passenger, Stella Maris features Alicia Western, a 20 year-old mathematics prodigy and brother of Bobby, who was the protagonist in the other volume. This novel consists of seven chapters, each a transcript of a session with her psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Cohen, at Stella Maris ("...a non-denominational facility and hospice for the care of psychiatric medical patients").

Alicia, a self-admitted patient is in Stella Maris for the third time. She has just come from Italy, where doctors unsuccessfully encouraged her to end life support for her brother, who is in a coma resulting from a Formula Two racing accident. At Stella Maris she's diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with hallucinatory tendencies, and her sessions with Dr. Cohen are rendered quite convincingly. Alicia is anything but subservient; she often chides her doctor for asking questions in the simplistic manner of ELIZA (Joseph Weizenbaum's computer simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist, devised in the mid-sixties), and she's acquainted herself with enough psychiatric literature to affect the drift of some therapeutic conversations. Her main topic, however, is mathematics, and Dr. Cohen valiantly but vainly attempts to grasp some of her points, which deal with rather esoteric matters such as the nature of mathematical entities, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, and Wittgenstein's enigmatic pronouncements in the Tractatus.

Besides mathematics, Alicia also shows concern about the meaninglessness of human existence in a world that neither knows nor cares about us. This novel is set about eight years before The Passenger, from which we know that she eventually committed suicide, although she doesn't seem to be on the brink of that in her psychiatric sessions (Stella Maris shows graphically why her death won't be by drowning). So, what is this book about? Nothing really, but maybe everything; like the other novel, it's essentially a character study and a display of Cormac McCarthy's verbal prowess. It's worth reading because it reveals two very bright minds at work: the author's and his subject's.