Stella Maris

De: Cormac McCarthy

Narrado por: Julia Whelan, Edoardo Ballerini

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The second volume of The Passenger series, from The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road • An intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.

"The richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career…An achievement greater than Blood Meridian…or…The Road.” —The Atlantic

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.

Remarkable Performance of a Remarkable Book

Bravo Julia Whelan!! I don’t know which I enjoyed more, Whelan’s performance or McCarthy’s engaging, page-turning dialogue. As a companion novel to The Passenger, some answers are provided while others are left open for the reader to ponder and mull over. Yet, the story is complete. It’s a thought provoking puzzle of the mind. After completing the two books and shifting pieces here and there, from one board to the other, I am left in awe of the resulting work of art.

A new psychoanalysis

This is a strange person being
analyzed, as she appears very upbeat
as she tells really unusual stories
that would lead you to think
she is psychotic but with a very
delightful personality.

What did i just listen to?

I enjoyed that exploration but i’m not even sure what’s real in it. I guess part of that is on purpose but wow.

Brilliant

The narration gives life to the ingenious words/language and insight of Cormac McCarthy; a synergistic collaboration!

an incredible performance of an amazing dialogue

and all my years of listening to audiobooks this is by far my favorite performance I really don't usually like the added sound effects but the way that this piece was produced was flawless I can't see anything other than thank you to the producers and the performers