/lit/ - Literature

>>21279986
Nobody understood it. The seethe over at goodreads is glorious.

>>21279992
HAHA, I haven't bothered to read any reviews yet, I've got to check those out. Made me cry at the end. You never know where this book is going. Hilarious scenes and it gave me the creeps too.

>>21279992
Why do you torture yourself with that drivel?

>>21280032
It's funny.

>>21279986
About 3 quarters of the way thru. Generally i dont enjoy the whole postmodern “waaaah i should have been a STEM major” physics and math jargon useless to anyone outside of those fields, but it was actually not bad here and many times I found myself legitimately interested in the science he covers.I really liked the characters and the story, and some of the passages are on par with the best McCarthy has written.
I know its been a project in the making since the late 70s but its astonishing Cormac was still able to piece and edit everything into such a complex and beautifully written novel at almost 90.
>>21279992
Lmao at the liberal arts majors getting obliterated by Cormac while they wait for the next Sally Rooney to release

I felt like it was a toned down Suttree without the prose competing/sharing with the narrative. A lot of very vivid scenes and characters but not quite picturing a train on fire during a snow storm

I didn't like it. Almost everything that has been mentioned in this thread and previous ones either didn't work for me or I straight up disliked.

Still curious about the next book. Maybe going in with low expectations I'll find it more enjoyable

>>21279986
Why did the thalidomide kid kill everyone in the plane? I thought he was a good guy.

>>21280095
>some of the passages are on par with the best McCarthy has written.

Yeah, definitely at the beginning of the book I was thinking, "damn he really is not doing the usual descriptions and classic expositions" but he in the last quarter he flexes. Strange book. Not what I was expecting.

>>21280181
I'm still thinking about the plane, and the "aliens" question. Was Bobby the passenger on the plane? The whole plane bit and the oil rig scene, build up to nothing, other than to drive the lose plot of being chased by the guys in the suits. Is his sister an ET?

Started reading it on a plane trip back home yesterday, got a bit confused at what they were talking about in the scene where the thalidomide kid first appears. Is it supposed to be a hallucination or is there some sort of magical realism going on? English is not my first language so I always struggle initially with some of the vernacular in McCarthy’s novels, still my favorite novelist probably.

>>21280212
>English is not my first language
go away

>>21280212
Yes, the thalidomide kid and his friends are hallucinations, but actually I think Bobby might have some hallucinations too. The whole book deals with reality, I don't it's hard to tell sometimes, what's a dream, real and hallucinatory.

>>21280202
Bobby has schizophrenia/is mentally ill

>>21280227
I thought so right? Not just his sister, and the scene with Sheddan in the theatre in Ibiza, that's a hallucination too? He definitely hallucinates the kid on the beach.

>>21279986
Did anyone else find this book unnerving?

>>21279986
I didn't like it and thought there were gems stashed in certain chapters. If you're around I will certainly discuss.

>>21280286
What didn't you like about it?

>>21280331
The lolscience (which I do understand) and the loss of the sublimity he had at his peak. All of the nature vs. nurture, violence vs. feelgood "morality" of Suttree and Blood Meridian were blasted away. The italicized Alicia chapters were some of the most embarrassingly cringeworthy prose I've read in a decade, the kind of stuff Pynchon would have gotten away with in the 60's.

It's a shame, because McC has been incredibly influential on me. And it's clear that living in the Santa Fe institute with a bunch of Funko Pop collectors for 30 years finally poisoned him.

>>21280443
>And it's clear that living in the Santa Fe institute with a bunch of Funko Pop collectors for 30 years finally poisoned him.
fuckin lol

>>21279986
I liked it a lot. The sister and her hallucinations, the government conspiracy, and bobby's slices of life hopping around Tennessee should've felt very disparate but I thought it all nicely fit together. A great novel to end his career, better than the road.

So, what's the point of this book? the essence? What is he trying to say?

>>21280480
Most cormac readers aren't able to look deeper than muh prose so you're probably not getting many answers.

>>21280443
Seems like you didn't understand the book.

>>21280478

Nah it's not better than The Road

>>21280480
There's a lot that seems unclear to me but it seems to relate directly to that essay he wrote a while back, the many dreams and hallucinations being windows into or cryptic messages from the unconscious. Maybe the passenger is us with no control over our lives, directed by the unconscious? Or vice versa the unconscious is the mysterious passenger trapped inside us as we blunder along with our lives? I don't know.

>>21280480

It's generally about reality and who gets to define what reality is. He does it in his unique, way, quite a different feeling for him.

>>21280500

I saw someone post a while back what if schizophrenics are people where the unconscious starts using words to speak to us instead of just abstract images.

>>21280500
Interesting. I just watched an interview with him from 2017 and he mentions this exact thing when discussing how famous physicists/mathematicians get ideas from their unconscious. Language is new relative to how we communicate with the unconscious.

>>21280508
woah, still got some bugs to work out though. maybe in 200000 years.

>>21280443
malignantly stupid. your throat, slit.

i cried when bobby talked about the dream of his grandmother coming down the stairs just wanting to hear his voice

Uhh, something-something trannies and incest. With that out of the way I'd like to say that being a salvage diver sounds like a nice job. That and being an underwater welder. I read somewhere that McCarthy was researching the diving stuff as far back as 30 years ago. Doesn't really play as big of a part in the story as you'd think if that is indeed true.
Also
>you just make shit up
>but some of it is pretty cool, isn't it?

>>21280443
Why do you hate scientists so much?

>>21280265
Insanity and paranoia are always unnverving. Incest and deformities are naturally repulsive.

>>21280572
He was best friends with Roger Payne and went with him on his research on Whales, Scuba diving with them. It wouldn't surprise me if Cmac was friends with people of that sort or even delved his hands into it.

>>21280581
Diving is just the best, man.

Bum bum buma bump chum

>>21280581
He always surprise with little details, like the cars in this book for instance. You don't peg McCarthy as a car guy but then he has some great taste in this one. Also wines

>>21280443
I like it and I don't agree with you but the Alicia chapters weren't great honestly.

>>21282282
I thought the Alicia chapters were the best part. The Kid is the best character by far.

>>21282296
I don't think they were the best part, but they weren't bad at all. They're just different, and pretty funny. I love the jokes, Mickey mouse getting a divorce " So you want a divorce on the account that your wife is mentally deranged?"
"No I said she was fucking goofy"

>>21282282

In a way it's true. Is the Benji Chapter really that great in the Sound and the Fury? It and the Alicia chapters serve their purpose

I want to hug Alice

>>21282752
Correct. She's a sweetheart. Making her likeable was all the more impressive because we never see her with Bobby, so we never see her relaxed or happy. She's almost always in a defensive & sarcastic mood. But we sense her potential for warmth.

>>21280498

The Road is corny and sentimental.

The pynchoncucks on goodreads/reddit are really taking this to be McCorncob's validation of the postmodern paranoia novel. The paranoid plot, in truth, is explicitly shafted to the side as inconsequential almost immediately. The locked room mystery nature of the plot also reminds me of Kafka's The Trial.

>>21283241
I get why some people want to see Pynchon in this, but I'd say the closest thing I can think of is Salinger, not only in style, but thematically as well.

>>21283123
Grow up. The writing is great, and emotional does not equal sentimental. One of his best.

>>21279986
Is the Thalidomide kid really a hallucination? Or is he an alien? and was the kid the one escaped from the plane?

>>21283948
I think McCarthy left the door open on purpose to see him as some sort of other-wordly entity that exists in the unconscious, but he may also be just an hallucination. I feel the book plays a lot with that. The way in which the factual and the symbolic get intertwined. Factually the kid can't be an alien nor the missing passenger, but the unconscious mind of the reader can't help connecting the dots and noticing there's something going on with the kid.

>>21280202
The mystery behind the plane going unanswered is fitting. If it was a Steven King novel then Bobby would locate the last passenger and it would end up being his sister or something dumb like that, but in line with books like The Crying of Lot 49, we are left in the dark about what was really going on, just like the characters would be

>>21280572
The transgender character fitted really well in my opinion, because Debussy was exactly like the other perverted freaks that Bobby hung out with, just with a veneer of exaggerated femininity

>>21282282
The hallucinations really broke the realism that McCarty tends to depict. Obviously the Judge etc. aren’t realistic either, but at least they are somewhat grounded. The chapters would have been so much better if it showed us the efforts of Alicia to explain her hallucinations (as I assume Stella Maris will be) rather than showing us her subjective experiences

mediocre but it's corncob so the redditors will eat it up and also literature is in a desolate state so this is the best the current year could shit out

>>21284118
Stick to the other thread, tranny.

>>21284180
corncuck literally wrote a tranny character in this book lemayo

>>21284191
harrogate was a tranny

>>21280202
Bobby has a TBI from a racing accident. The plane is a red herring. Its just something weird and unexplained that Bobby's retarded/schizo brain draws a bunch of random connections from. The whole thing about his accounts getting seized by the IRS is totally unrelated. The only other person that shares in his delusion is that private investigator guy who is also slightly off his rocker, as evidenced by the JFK rant.

I think McCarthy deliberately uses the plane to trick the reader into thinking they are reading a typical thriller novel, to simulate a kind of over associative paranoia/schizophrenia in the reader.

>>21280229
I think its implied that Sheddan faked his death, probably to avoid debt or something. I can't remember who but someone says they attended the funeral "just to make sure", implying Sheddan did something like this before

>>21280265
That’s a good descriptor, and one I wouldn’t normally use for McCarthy novels. A lot of the sequences had a weird feeling of impending doom to them.
It wasn’t as outright miserable as something like The Crossing but it left me with overwhelmingly negative and uncomfortable feelings in spite of its moments of humanity.

>>21280443
>>21280478
>>21280212
>>21280224
>>21282282
>>21282554
>>21283948
>>21284002
>>21284051
The Alicia chapters are really out there man. They are also jam packed to the fucking brim. My first response was to look for possible literature that might have inspired them. Nothing specific but they seem influenced by French Surrealism. There is some similarity with Josef K.'s visitations in The trial, especially how The Horts host Alicia. Another big point of interest is Alice in Wonderland which is both hinted at and, from one angle, played out literally (Alicia in a wonder ward). Thalidomide kid has more than passing similarities with aquaboy from the circus in Katherine Dunn's Geek Love.
But the closest parallel I could find is Behemoth and Margarita. This is from 'Master and Margarita' :-
>And I really look like a hallucination. Note my silhouette in the moonlight. The cat got into the shaft of moonlight and wanted to add something else, but upon being asked to keep silent, replied: "Very well, very well, I'm prepared to be silent. I'll be a silent hallucination"
Not only is the horts' hallucinatory nature a PoI but TK and Alicia engage in the same exact conversation about his shadow and what having a shadow might imply as to the question of his nature of being.

>>21280095
What’s postmodern about it

Dont think we can really discuss the Passenger until Stella Maris is released. A key theme of the book: Point A can’t exist without Point B. (Point Alicia and Point Bobby, maybe.) So it’s supposed to feel incomplete is my guess anyway

>>21285167
This is correct. And all reviews seem to suggest that Stella Maris will give The Passenger a major shake up. I really feel like Bell's inequality is somehow at the heart of McCarthy's 600-page-cipher. One fact that the experiment is literally explained as Bob and Alice's (subjects in the thought experiment) subjective experience of reality at the most fundamental level which is the general direction the book seems to be moving towards. It is quite poetic that the Nobel prize in Physics this year was given to the proof that Bell's inequality doesn't hold and at the quantum level local realism is not maintained, indirectly vindicating McCarthy's philosophical efforts in his latest two books.

Where's the epub / mobi link?

>>21285227
z-lib it.

>>21285330
is that site still around, what's with the firekike warning

>>21284191
and yet you're a tranny making trannyposts

>>21284043
>writes a tranny character
>calls them 'the bussy'

Bravo McCarthy.

>>21279986
I have never read a McCarthy book but own No County for Old Men (never got around to it). Which should I read first?

On a side note, how do you guys read large amounts in one sitting? I’m not a big reader, and tend to only limit myself to around 20 pages at a time (or whenever the chapter ends). I find I retain the information better and reflect on it easier. Granted, I’ve only ever read Meditations, Robert Greene’s Laws//Power series, Book of Five Rings, and Way of Men, so I guess I’m looking at it from the perspective of someone going in to learn/retain something. I’m reading The Practicing Stoic now and 20 pages takes around 45-60 minutes because of the quotes and concepts I need to reflect on

>>21284002
>The way in which the factual and the symbolic get intertwined.

I agree. That's what I got with the JFK bit

>>21284024
Do you think there is no conspiracy? The agents really are just IRS guys, there was no one on the oil rig, Oiler just dies by accident, etc, and that Western just wants to see reality that way?

BTW why did he leave that guy in the tipped over truck?

>>21284051
>The chapters would have been so much better if it showed us the efforts of Alicia to explain her hallucinations

McCarthy would never explain this type of thing. The whole book is dealing with reality, so in my opinion the hallucinations are the perfect vehicle to play with that.

>>21284279
Great point.

>>21285093

I found the Alicia chapters to be a mix of Burroughs and Joyce.

>>21285167
Another great point.

>>21286100
I read it twice and still can’t decide if there was a real conspiracy. The IRS stuff, the theft of his dad’s papers, and initial visit about the plane were probably unrelated, but we also know that someone broke into Bobby’s room, once to send a message then again secretly. It was strange that he didn’t seem to realize that these were separate issues, and instead assumed it all stemmed from one thing.

>>21285981
I've never read NCOM, but I heard it was originally intended as a screenplay so it's mostly just dialogue and very similar to the film. The general consensus seems to be that McCarthy's more recent stuff (not counting The Passenger) is more accesible than his older stuff. I personally wouldn't recommend something like Blood Meridian as a starting point, especially for someone who isn't a big reader.

>On a side note, how do you guys read large amounts in one sitting?
It depends. I can read for a few hours before having to take a break, but whether or not I understand it depends on how complex it is or whether I have read it before. I think fiction is different than non-fiction. With fiction, it's more about getting immersed in the story or the prose. Even if there are plot points or themes that can be understood, you're supposed to understand them intuitively. It's like listening to music. You don't stop the song and re-listen to the same section over and over to identify all the different parts. You just listen to the whole thing and try to notice whatever you can. Chapter by chapter is probably a good rule. Although McCarthy can be pretty inconsistent with chapter length.

I am admittedly only about a quarter of the way through but it has been beautiful so far. The border trilogy was the last McCarthy I read at least six years ago, and The Passenger is a very welcome return to his writing.
>>21280095
>at almost 90
I actually had to double take when I saw this released because I could've easily been convinced he was either dead or decaying somewhere. Not sure it is relevant to the quality of the book but a big statement for the quality of McCarthy as a writer.
>"waaaah i should have been a STEM major"
I majored in mathematics and was mostly focused in "pure" maths research, with almost a double in art. I don't know I would've become this type, and I don't know the influences that create it but it has always stood out to me.

>>21280168
I also am noticing some connections to Suttree, my personal favorite of McCarthy.

>>21284279
The plane crash is an external representation to what happened to Bobby after crashing his car.

>>21285789
use tor browser.

A few points.

McCarthy clearly started writing or wrote this in the 80s, there's a bit of crossover with his unpublished screenplay Whales and Men (which you can find a .pdf of online, also written in the 80s). There's a character in it named John Western who used to race cars in Europe and is getting into diving. He is also wealthy through unknown means.

Only because this seems to be a point many smoothbrains are hung up on: McCarthy had transgender characters in Suttree, so the trans character in The Passenger isn't really anything new, although his outright sympathy and affection towards the character is.

His lone nonfiction piece "The Kekulé Problem" [https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/] I believe is key to understanding the novel. In that piece and also some other interviews he explores the unconscious (he mentions in an interview a physician who was stuck on a complicated equation who had someone approach him in a dream and tell him the solution). I believe The Passenger of the title is quite literally the unconscious. That which we cannot explain but somehow helps us through life. And I believe his exploration of Alicia's schizophrenia is expanding on this idea of the unconscious, as clearly in cases of schizophrenia it is as if someone is communicating with you, but there is no real answer as to who. As if it is the thing inside us all that generally communicates with images or feelings has learned to speak, has made itself a visual presence in some unappealing beta form.

I don't want to go too much further into it, but I think the unconscious is key. How it fuels his fears and paranoia. That presence he feels on the oil rig.
Of course it's hard to form a full view of the novel until Stella Maris is released (I have a feeling it was just a 600p novel they released in two volumes for extra $$ as the publishers probably won't expect any other writing to come from McCarthy -- I don't think it's any stretch to imagine this is the last thing we'll see published by McCarthy in his lifetime at least).

But I can say it felt more like Suttree by way of No Country for Old Men. A page-turner where not all that much happens. It lacked his beautiful prose. Some of the Alicia sections did feel odd coming from McCarthy. But at least it feels like McCarthy and yet doesn't read like just another McCarthy novel.
Also it was funny. People never seem to talk about just how funny McCarthy is, they're always caught up by the bleakness. I can still remember how much I laughed when the boy in The Road says to his father "I'm not a retard". How the fuck did he learn that phrase in a post-apocalyptic wasteland?

Anyway, I wanted more exploration into their father and the creation of the A-bomb. Hopefully Stella Maris delivers.

>>21287168
To add to this, Hamlet is also very relevant. Bobby's inaction. Mania. Seeing ghosts.

Read the first fifteen pages. Reads like all the worst traits of Pynchon dragged through McCarthy's lens. Will finish it out of respect for the old man.

Then again he gave interview to Oprah so fuck him lol

>>21287168
Great post, thanks for sharing anon.

The scene where someone rips a “villainous fart” had me pissing myself

>>21287190
>gave interview

>>21287168
>It lacked his beautiful prose.

What?
Did you read the same book?

>>21286100
Bobby died in the car crash, the whole book is an Alicia "what if" delusion.

Screenshot this for December 6th.

>>21288959
Let me rephrase that:
It lacked the quality of his previous novels in that they were usually densely packed with the most ethereal prose, even when explaining the most simple and seemingly unimportant details. He churned what would usually be filler in a lesser author's novels into the most spellbinding paragraphs and descriptions and turns of phrase.

In The Passenger it was present, but to a much lesser degree.

>>21289803
I can kind of see what you mean, one of my only complaints about The Passenger is that it shifted pretty abruptly between flowery old-school McCarthy, blunt nu-McCarthy, and dry essay-style prose.
But I'd also say that his old style became exhausting at certain points. I love Blood Meridian as much as anyone else but there's a certain point where you start to roll your eyes at him doing another full page of thesaurus-fishing to describe an abandoned wagon. The Border Trilogy and Suttree (I know it came out before BM but it's a pretty unique book in his catalogue) strike a better balance in my opinion, there's still plenty of densely descriptive prose but he knows when to dial it back.
The Passenger has been in progress for most of his career so I guess its stylistic variety is a testament to his evolution as a writer, whether that's intentional or not. At the risk of sounding like a dickrider I feel like it was; there were enough moments of fanservice to make The Passenger feel like a farewell to his fans. When he brought out a bunch of Blood Meridian-isms like "skullcolored moon" and "like some wandering mendicant" in the last chapter I couldn't help but think he knew what he was doing.

just read the chapter where the kid visits bobby.
why is bobby such an autistic retard and why didnt he just ask about his sister

>>21290728
Men don't ask for directions.

>>21279986
just finished it, I thought Bobby's parts were really good and some of McCarthy's better writing. I enjoyed the ambiguity and lack of plot device closure, it really played well with the paranoia themes and the pacing.The callbacks to his previous books were nice little easter eggs. Also, he named the tranny Bussy which was funny.

>>21279986
Bros, Stella Maris is filtering critics even harder than The Passenger.

>>21290728
Maybe he didn't want to know.

>>21291580
Give me a quick rundown. Are they filtered by Alicia being too smart or by her wanting to get dicked by Bobby?

>>21291627
Too smart, and they keep saying that The Passenger is a weird novel but Stella Maris too weird to even be a novel. Also that McCarthy goes even harder on the math and philosophy than The Passenger.

>>21291676
Stop, my dick can only get so erect and I won't have the book in my hand for weeks yet

>reading a goodreads review about Stella Maris
>Alice/Alicia is a math prodigy who worked at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques with Alexander Grothendieck. With Dr. Cohen, she talks about (and this is not a full list): Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.K. Chesterton, George Berkeley (especially An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision), Immanuel Kant, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Geoffrey Chaucer, Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung, Willard Van Orman Quine, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Kurt Gödel (especially mathematical platonism), Emmy Noether, Ernest Lawrence, Jean Piaget, Johann Sebastian Bach, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, David Hawkins, Oswald Spengler, Gregory Chaitin, T.D. Lee, David Bohm, John Dillinger, Rosemary Kennedy, Charles Chihara, etc
That's a lotta stuff to cover for a short book.

>>21279992
So about the same as /lit/?

It's borderline exegetical.
It's plotless and the main character is an allegorical stand-in for western society.
All of the characters are probably hallucination. All of them except Alicia and Bobby, and the one chick the other characters keep trying to hook Bobby up with.

Think about it. Western fell in love with this savant ideal while watching her perform a Greek myth. Western society fell in love with the idea of logical, autistic societal perfection that they perceive as coming from the Greeks.

The characters are simply there as allegories for different aspects of western society.

Again. This novel is Cormacs exegesis. He knows it is his last.

You can steal what I've said and claim it as your own now in your Goodreads review.

>>21294416
my Goodreads reviews typically cover which pages are easiest to coom to, but maybe I can squeeze this in.

There's a sort of common thread running through this that's in all of his work: determinism and fate. Western's fate with the IRS seems to be predetermined already. Like many McCarthy protagonists, he seems like he's trying to stay one step ahead of his fate, of the things coming for him, but he ultimately can't stop things,

I also feel like there's this fascination with where knowledge comes from. There's the reflections on science and mathematics, but then there's also that conversation b/w Kline and Bobby where Kline's like "when's the last time you really sat alone and reflected and developed knowledge of yourself?" McCarthy seems interested and/or concerned with where knowledge comes from and how it develops, and seems to purport that it comes from the consciousness, that we actively create knowledge as we share it with others and they put their spin on it.

>>21291898
Getting a feeling it's just pseud namedropping

>>21285875

Spit water reading this.

I think it's safe to say that the book has come and gone without leaving much impact. Sorry McCarthy bros, no Nobel for your lazy old man.

>>21295166
It is and isn't.

>>21295918
It's not your new york times bestseller that "leaves impact". All great McCarthy's were appreciated years after their release because readers didn't know how to respond to them immediately. Clearest mark of genius.

>>21296720

>>21296748
Layers of understanding. It's pseud name-dropping to you because you don't understand the point of the character.

>>21296796
I was just making a Simpsons joke, I haven't read Stella Maris yet and make no judgement.

>>21295918
huh?

>>21298159
Just some idiot, ignore him.

>>21279986
>I thought it was great.
great in what way? great as in "I like it xD" or as in actually great?

>>21295166
it is

>>21294416
Couldn't help but notice this myself. The scene with Alice playing Medea seemed allegorical. Especially got that feeling of unreality with Kline who seemed more like a patient than a therapist himself.

>>21280212
I think there’s not really a clear answer if they’re hallucinations or not. McCarthys also my favorite writer, though even as a native English speaker I struggle with some of his vocab.

King-tier prose

>>21300705
Kline might be a submerged reference to german mathematician Felix Klein of the Klein bottle fame, like Oiler was to Leonhard Euler. The name also remembers 'K-line' as used in technical analysis in clustering algorithms.

>>21301726
No, God-tier prose.

>>21301726
pretty terrible

>>21301726
Are you lying?

>>21279986
>The shape of her coat lay dusted in the snow where she'd dropped it and she wore only a white shirt and she hung among the bare gray poles with her head bowed and hands turned slightly outwards like those of certain ecumenical statues that ask that their history be considered. That the deep foundation of the world be considered where it has its being in the sorrow of her creatures.

>>21301726
I don't think Stephen King knows the word "interlocutor".

>>21303363
>and hands turned slightly outwards like those of certain ecumenical statues that ask that their history be considered.
McCarthy made a meme, crazy old coot

>>21280443
you write like a faggot so I'm assuming you like to choke on dicks. here's hoping you choke to death on one

>>21279986
Based passenger theory book. Also a possibility of passengers waging war on other passengers. Also possible that everyone that Western meets is a possible passenger pick for him but he rejects everyone. Great book, will probably re-read it.

>>21301726
>MR BOOONES, I REALLY DONT FEEL LIKE GOING ON YOUR WILD RIDE!

>>21285167
This. Stella Maris was simultaneously released in some countries like Spain, and having read it, I feel like it gives a plausible explanation about The Passengers' shortcomings. If you're interested, some of the reviews covering Stella Maris briefly touch upon it.

>>21285167
>>21285205
>>21303862
So why were they two books instead of one?

>>21303866
As far as I know, some European countries got a single-book release, while the USA seems to get two separate books/a boxset. I guess it has something to do with silly editorial rights, idk.

>>21302509
>Kline might be a submerged reference to german mathematician Felix Klein
I was thinking that but I couldn't make sense of it given his character had nothing to do with mathematics.

320 pages in, I like it much more than I thought I would. The rating on Goodreads is wildly misleading. Looking forward to getting my hands on Stella Maris, really interested in getting to know Alicia more, I wish she would've been a bigger part of The Passenger but then again there's still ~80 pages or so left for me.

>>21304049
>The rating on Goodreads is wildly misleading
>trusting normie consensus ever

>>21303369
he most certainly does, it's a classic midwit-flapping-through-his-thesaurus word

>>21304170
You know it too right?

>>21304170
It's a perfectly cromulent word.

>>21294416
I also played around with the idea of Bobby being western man laid raw and bare and flawed, but I’m not sure yet.

Things I liked:
>diving kino
>dead father (my father is dead)
>the risk and tragedy of having the main character be in love with their sister
>the Ferris wheel of character conversations
>the unknown nature of being followed (Kafka-ish)

Things I’m not sure about:
>the Alicia italicized scenes (they started off rough and got smoother over time, I felt, but maybe I was getting the hang of them)
>the ending (of course we need the other book

Things I didn’t like:
>bobby

I really just found it hard to believe this weirdo would have all these friends. Yeah he’s kind of a rennaissance man who knows a lot but I just can’t believe all these people would spend their time with this unlikeable wet noodle. I suppose the answer is referenced at some point in the book that people like to be questioned and listened to and opened like a book and he’s extremely good at that. But that’s about all he has going for him on the social front. People of today would have no patience or tolerance for his personality, so in that sense I guess it is a period quirk.

>>21304891
Lastly I’ll note that this book was very lonely. And there’s something poetic about living in this moment knowing a companion (Stellar Maris) is on the way. Especially considering the ending. Even if it was a publisher decision, it’s still deeply poetic to me.

>>21304891
>I really just found it hard to believe this weirdo would have all these friends. Yeah he’s kind of a rennaissance man who knows a lot but I just can’t believe all these people would spend their time with this unlikeable wet noodle.
I imagined that he's just very much the handsome silent type, especially since most of the women (and women(male)) in the book flirt heavily with him.

>>21305047
Never thought of him as good looking but that makes sense. Maybe a hangdog Humphrey Bogart type.

>>21285981
read Suttree as a starting point, fantastic novel

>>21304891
>this weirdo would have all these friends
Those were hallucinations.
The champagne pouring scene in the end proves it.

>>21305705
Yikes. Shit take.

Suttree is cormac at his absolute densest.

Blood Meridian or All the Pretty Horses.

If these are still too dense then try the Road. The Road is still a great book, just cormac condensed.

>>21285015
>outright miserable as something like The Crossing
Finally, someone mentions the Crossing on here. Dude that book fucked me up. It was so damn bleak, so tragic. Sometimes I had to just set it down and remind myself that it's just a book, even if it speaks true at times. I've read the Road, Suttree, Blood Meridian, Child of God, Outer Dark, No Country, and the whole Border trilogy, and I think The Crossing was for me the most dark and painful to read. That book should come with a warning like "Don't read if you're considering suicide."

>>21287168
>Also it was funny. People never seem to talk about just how funny McCarthy is
Hell yeah. Suttree is probably the funniest book I've ever read. The dialogue and some of the shit the characters get into almost made me bust a gut here and there.

>>21305764
I think “it was all a dream” is such a boring way to look at a book, but at the same time, he might be an unreliable narrator since Sheddan tells him that he was thankful Bobby never criticized him, and then later in a dream he sees Sheddan and he tells him that he was hurt with the way Bobby would criticize him all the time.

>>21306274
>plate in his head from a car crash
>Sees the kid
>might be an unreliable narrator

No shit?

>>21306295
You’re right about the plate, but the Kid to me just feels like a poetic device. But believing the book is surreal in a Lynchian sense, I never put much care into Bobby’s mental health. I just think these plot mysteries are barely relevant to the purpose of him writing this book.

>>21305765
There is a world of 'density' between Blood meridian and Atph.
Do you really find Suttree to be denser than Blood meridian?