Cormac McCarthy: The Passenger Oct 25, Stella Maris Dec 6

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Cormac McCarthy: The Passenger Oct 25, Stella Maris Dec 6

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

The previous Cormac thread has long been gone, but we are only a week away now from our 2022 gift of 400 + 200 pages of new McCarthy material.

The Passenger, coming October 26:

quote:

The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize�winning author of The Road returns with the first of a two-volume masterpiece: The Passenger is 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.

Look for Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series, on sale December 6th, 2022

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.

Stella Maris, coming December 6:

quote:

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.

New York Times review, which indicates these novels are stylistic and thematic departures.

Here's some more Cormac stuff you might find interesting:
A bunch of newspaper articles featuring quotes from McCarthy early in his career, that he gave to his friends before he stopped giving interviews.

The Kekul� Problem, where McCarthy ruminates on the origin of language.
Cormac McCarthy Returns to the Kekul� Problem, a follow-up from seven months later where McCarthy comments on reader feedback from the original article.

Three early short stories:
Wake for Susan (1959)
A Drowning Incident (1960)
The Dark Waters (1965)

If you have a chance, go buy The Passenger and Stella Maris at your local independent bookstore.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2022 18:33

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:16

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

PsychedelicWarlord posted:

The NYT also posted an excerpt of The Passenger the other day.

God I can't wait.

Cormac McCarthy posted:

Various of them looking for work. John gestured with his glass. Brat very nearly secured a position, he said. But of course at the last moment it all came uncottered.

I just blew it, said Brat. Something came over me. This breather kept going on about this policy and that policy. Finally he said: And another thing. Around here we dont watch the clock. And I said well I just cant tell you how happy I am to hear you say those words. I�ve had a lifelong habit of being up to an hour late for just about everything.

What did he say?

He got sort of quiet. He sat there for a minute and then he got up and left. And it was his ofﬁce. After a while the secretary came in and she said that the interview was over. I asked her if I�d gotten the job but she said she didnt think so. She looked kind of nervous.

Cormac McCarthy posted:

It was pretty much fun, said Brat. When the bailiff raised his hand to swear her in she reached up and slapped him a big high-ﬁve. I dont think they�d seen that before.

Cormac McCarthy posted:

I had a dream about you, Squire.

A dream you say.

Yes. I dreamt you were wandering in your weighted shoes over the ocean ﬂoor. Seeking God knows what in the darkness of those bathypelagic deeps. When you reached the edge of the Nazca Plate there were ﬂames licking up from the abyss. The sea boiling. In my dream it seemed to me you�d stumbled upon the mouth of hell and I thought that you would lower a rope to those of your friends who�d gone before. You didnt.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2022 03:51

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

I forsook the box so that I wouldn't have to wait the six weeks. Drove down to the local indie bookstore during my lunch break to pick up my pre-order:

Now to try and figure out if I'm going to ration the pages or just go hog wild, knowing that we might be waiting another 16 years for the next one.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2022 18:19

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

I have that interview bookmarked to watch soon, still working on The Passenger.

I did realize that I never remembered to look for The Gardener's Son but it is available on archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/the-gardeners-son_202202

Screenplay by Cormac McCarthy, starring Ned Beatty, Kevin Conroy, Brad Dourif, Penelope Allen, and Jerry Hardin, from the PBS anthology series Visions in 1977.

One thing I wanted to note mid-Passenger is last night I read a scene where Bobby Western is talking to a PI and McCarthy included the line "Like most people he liked being consulted." It stuck out to me as being unusually descriptive for Cormac, especially about the personality of a character. Does anyone else feel this way?

# ¿ Nov 4, 2022 03:03

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

Finished it up. Loved that opening part that they excerpted in the NYT, and the last chapter was great. But so much of the middle didn't grab me, and I also did not like any of the parts with The Kid. To the point that I'm worried there's a chance I won't like Stella Maris at all. Though I think in the description it was said that SM is, like, transcriptions of her talking to the doctors, so maybe we won't have to put up with the speaking voice of The Kid? I don't know, my opinion is that The Passenger is pretty medium and at best I can say that it leaves a lot of room for it to grow on me.

For all the hype about how scientific it was going to be, it really felt like that was a non-essential 10 pages or so out of 383.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2022 17:33

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

escape artist posted:

I finally decided to read Blood Meridian. Is it okay to discuss in this thread or should I go elsewhere? I'm baffled by his decision to put spoilers at the beginning of every chapter.

Absolutely, this thread is for all Cormac McCarthy, and Blood Meridian gets the most discussion out of all of them a lot of the time.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2022 19:56

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

Carly Gay Dead Son posted:

I don't know, I just enjoyed reading it. Western's incoherence felt relatable to me. The whole thing was incoherent in a "lots of ideas McCarthy had over the decades knit together as a sort of farewell to the world" and I'm just grateful it exists.

I really loved Cormac spends 5 pages letting you know how convinced he is about a JFK assassination conspiracy.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2022 14:31

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

I think that's a good read.

When he lost Alicia, he lost the driving force in his life, and became a passenger. He had he means to go down all these exciting roads and none of them succeeded in making him alive like he was when she was alive.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2022 00:57

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

Proust Malone posted:

Do y�all think that he is the missing passenger from the plane wreck?

I'm still waiting for people smarter than me to write articles about that part of the book so I can understand it better. Maybe?

# ¿ Nov 19, 2022 03:56

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

Stella Maris is out on Tuesday, here's the New York Times review by Dwight Garner. Warning that he uses the phrase "total banger" to describe a Cormac McCarthy novel.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/28/books/cormac-mccarthy-stella-maris.html

EDIT: Here's an excerpt on the NPR site
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/22/1129879339/first-reads-exclusive-excerpt-from-cormac-mccarthys-forthcoming-stella-maris

Boco_T fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Dec 1, 2022

# ¿ Dec 1, 2022 16:16

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

Please do. Thanks for the recommendation for the podcast, definitely going to check out their Passenger episode at least.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2022 17:20

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

Thanks for linking that book, I have several McCarthy analysis books that I haven't gotten around to reading but I still want that one too.

I picked up Stella Maris on the 6th but I didn't crack it yet because I haven't quite been in the mood. Luckily it's short enough that if I start it any time before Christmas I should be able to easily finish it before the end of the year like I planned.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2022 19:44

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

By the way, Blood Meridian is only $2 on Kindle today if you want a digital copy of it that you can read on your phone
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Meridian-Evening-Redness-International-ebook/dp/B003XT60E0/

# ¿ Apr 28, 2023 20:15

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

Notes on Blood Meridian is $3 today on Kindle
https://www.amazon.com/Notes-Blood-Meridian-Southwestern-Collection-ebook/dp/B00CMEE6CA/

# ¿ Jul 17, 2023 16:37

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

The Passenger is $2 on Kindle today https://www.amazon.com/Passenger-Cormac-McCarthy-ebook/dp/B09T9D8QY7

# ¿ Mar 5, 2024 17:44

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 16:16

Boco_T: Mar 12, 2003; la calaca tilica y flaca

Jewmanji posted:

If anything I feel like All The Pretty Horses is due for another attempt. That seems like a slam dunk but what do I know?

They don't even have to do any work. Just release the Billy Bob cut with the original music.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 13:51

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Cormac McCarthy: The Passenger Oct 25, Stella Maris Dec 6