A review by sonofatreus
Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

4.0

So, even more than The Passenger, its companion book, Stella Maris is "Kukulé problem, the book." It even gets mentioned at one point. The book is a dialogue, not in the Platonic sense, per se, but rather a conversation between a woman and her doctor without any other narrative action. Everything the reader learns about Alicia, her doctor, or the people they know comes from what these two characters tell each other. And sometimes they're very clearly hedging or hiding information, if not outright lying. In that way, it makes for a simple enough read (two characters talking) but it's also not necessarily easy (tracking "the truth" on top of some of the topics they discuss). They get into some existential ideas and also social ones but, perhaps its most Platonic aspect, some things are left unresolved.

It’s connected to The Passenger by character and theme, but could just as easily have been read alone. Reading them back to back is probably the best strategy. After reading both, it made me reassess what I thought about The Passenger, and how the two work with each other. Each stands on its own merits, even if I didn’t follow them completely as individual works, but together they form a single (still somewhat incoherent) unit. I wouldn't go so far as to say that The Passenger becomes unlocked by Stella Maris, but it did help me better appreciate some characters and events that happened in it.

Thanks again to Anders Magnus for gifting me the set. I may have enjoyed these two more than him, so I've gotten the better of this exchange.