The Passenger

De: Cormac McCarthy

Narrado por: MacLeod Andrews, Julia Whelan

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The first of a two-volume masterpiece, The Passenger series, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road • The story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

"Blends the rowdy humor of some of McCarthy’s early novels with the parched tone of his more apocalyptic later work." —The New York Times

Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series, is available now.

1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.

Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.

©2022 Cormac McCarthy (P)2022 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NEW YORK TIMES • GOODREADS • KIRKUS

CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE NOMINEE

“A total banger…[The Passenger] blends the rowdy humor of some of McCarthy’s early novels with the parched tone of his more apocalyptic later work. It’s the first novel I’ve read in years that I feel I need to read three more times to fully understand, and that I want to read three more times simply to savor. It’s so packed with funny, strange, haunted sentences that other writers will be stealing lines from it for epigraphs, as if it were Ecclesiastes, for the next 150 years….The whole thing reads like a cosmic, bleakly funny John D. MacDonald thriller…The Passenger is a great New Orleans novel. It’s a great food novel…For anyone who cares, it’s also a great Knoxville novel—Knoxville being where McCarthy spent most of his childhood. It’s filled with references to his earlier work...A sprawling book of ideas."–Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“A brilliant book… A stunning accomplishment…McCarthy turns his substantial writerly gifts upon two distinct forces: the mechanical and the theoretical. He attends to the exquisite detail of Bobby’s physical world—the sounds and feel of an oil rig in a storm, the touch and clunk of a cigarette machine in a bar, the step-by-step process of removing a bathroom cabinet or digging up and carting off buried treasure…It’s Cormac McCarthy writing as only Cormac McCarthy can.”–Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

“McCarthy has assembled all the chilling ingredients of a locked-room mystery. But he leaps outside the boundaries of that antique form, just as he reworked the apocalypse in The Road… Western knows he’s suspected of something, but he’s not told what. The two men who repeatedly question him never drop their formal politeness—never flash a bolt gun like Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men—but Western knows that his life is in danger and that he must run… The style—a mingling of profound contemplation and rapid-fire dialogue, always without quotation marks and often without attribution—is pure McCarthy.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Remarkable

As with previous McCarthy novels, The Passenger purports themes that are as unsettling as they are compelling. In his most dialogue-driven novel. McCarthy deals with matters of life and death…but mostly death. This book will help you understand that life is suffering. It will satisfy the curious mind. This book can make you reread Cant, explore physics and give you a different opinion on the Kennedy assassination.

It is a masterpiece.

The good ones just get a pass sometimes

I guess if you’re Cormac McCarthy, or any other famous writer, you sometimes get carte blanche acceptance of your work, no matter what it is that you turn out. This book is a reflection of that proposition. it’s called the passenger but we never do find out who the passenger is that is unaccounted for in a downed airplane accident in the Gulf of Mexico. But trust me when I tell you that before it is over you will hear everything else that happened to be on the author‘s mind for over 13 hours. let’s just call it the random musings of an otherwise notable author. the main character Robert Western is as good a protagonist as you’ll find anywhere. the kind that no matter what happens he is going to live to tell about it.. From what I can gather, his father worked on the Manhattan project, and he had kind of a lunatic sister, who the book bounces back and forth with between Westerns, real world, and the sisters imagined world.. We meet a kaleidoscope of colorfull characters who will hold your attention and occasionally make you laugh until you cry with their wit and wisdom, and sometimes just their living conditions. All this while you try to make heads or tails of where the story is headed, thinking that surely we are going to get back on track and find out who the mysterious passenger really is. Alas sports fans that never happens. along the way, though there is some very witty dialogue, memorable clichés, whether from his own imagination or borrowed from others and it’s not an all together. bad story. The narration which has been panned in other reviews I found to be pretty good. I thought it fit the laconic ideals of character and demeanor of the main character to a T.

Joe Lilley

A Work of Art

A very deep and beautiful story. A story that could only be written by a mature soul who has lived life as an artist and spiritual seeker and an American . I loved this book. It was very meaningful to me on so many levels. As so many of his books are wonderful, this one was my favorite.

Truly a masterpiece

I fear these two books are the last we will hear from Cormac McCarthy. But if so, it is a perfect swan song. Truly a masterpiece.

unbelievable

A slow walk through a story that is more about the philosophy of life than the story itself. Kinda like the wrapping paper, ribbon, and bow is far more expensive than the present inside.

I didn't get it

I didn't get it...twice. Couldn't put it together. What did I miss? Will not do sequel.

Classic MacCarthy

I chose this rating because McCarthy came again with his unique stylistic touches that I have always loved.

The story itself was unnerving at times, and I wouldn’t expect anything less from McCarthy. Lots of thing still seem untold and I can’t wait to start the second half of this book to learn more about Bobby Western, who the passenger is, the corruption of sin and morality!

Even darker than his usual.

As always, McCarthy writes beautifully, but the darkness in this one is unrelenting. I think if I personally believed in his (Bobby's? McCarthy's?) view of life it would very hard to keep going.

No Story, Many Stories, All Disturbing

The Road was such a good book, I hoped for another and was excited this one was longer but soon I regretted starting it. The characters are unbelievable, the plot doesn't develop, and the absurd and crass can't distract from the absence of substance.

Beguiling

McCarthy expresses the tragic sense of life beautifully. His wordplay becomes almost a sensuous foreplay.