A review by monkeelino
Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

4.0

"We can see the footprints of algebras whose entire domain is immune to commutation. Matrices whose hatchings cast a shadow upon the floor of their origins and leave than an imprint to which they no longer conform."

It's my understanding that McCarthy has been rubbing shoulders with some fairly heady company in his later years (philosophers, scientists, etc.) and it more than shows in this second book from his most recent two-book release where he tackles everything from incredibly advanced mathematics to the meaning (or potential meaninglessness) of existence and what constitutes sanity. Unlike the first book, which has a partial plot used as scaffolding and peppered with numerous characters, here things are paired down incredibly: two characters and nothing but dialogue between them. Western's sister and lifelong love, Alicia takes center stage as the reader is privy to a series of sessions she has with a doctor at the Stella Maris psych ward

Spoiler

(presumably, shortly before she commits suicide)

.

Funny, insightful, heartbreaking... This book continues the incredibly witty, fast-paced dialogue, but feels more exploratory---a kind of vehicle for probing existence and what we know about it from both the individual viewpoint and the social one. Alicia's status as both a patient with mental illness and a young female (albeit, likely a certifiable genius) felt like an intricate dance between prodigy and unreliable narrator, a tango between defying and bumping up against gender norms (McCarthy, in my opinion, is not well known for his female characters who often feel either absent or secondarily functional, so it was interesting to see him give center stage to Alicia).

McCarthy's fictional worlds continue to be brutal, unforgiving realities, but here we have a tinge of... hope? Romanticism? Maybe just the acknowledgment that the touch of another human can be a firewall against the yawning oblivion.
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The Verbal/Referential Shrapnel I'm Still Trying To Identify
topology/topos theory | Grothendieck | gedanken | noumenal | Quine | Frege | The Grundlagen | Langlands Project | hebephrenic | dybbuk | affine | Deligne | Oscar Zariski | atavistic | Archatron | demonium | Ogdoad | eidolon | Lysenko | cohomology | Cantor’s discontinuum | homological algebra | Velikovsky
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Tell me I'm not the only reader who wanted to see Alicia in a speed-dating scenario for the sheer comedy potential.