Cormac McCarthy
Stella Maris

As I expected, this latest book by Cormac McCarthy, (rip) written in 2022, did not disappoint me at all. It was published posthumously in Italy in the fall of this year, following the previous “The Passenger,” of which it seems to be part of a duology. It's not a book for everyone (paraphrasing a very beautiful title of his from which the Coen brothers also made an equally beautiful film, but that's another story, as you know...), and perhaps it wasn't even for me. However, since the author has always fascinated me both with his stories and especially with the way he tells them, I grabbed it like all the others he's written and read it in one go over three afternoons.

Inside there's everything, from mathematics to physics, through philosophy, without neglecting psychology and psychiatry. There’s God and there’s the devil, there’s the fear of death and the desire to commit suicide, there’s the thirst for life and the thirst for love, there are Jews, there are race car drivers, there’s a violin, one of the most expensive and ancient auctioned, an “Amati” from many centuries ago, bought by a twenty-year-old a looooong time before eventually ending up by her choice in a psychiatric hospital, there’s her father, a colleague of the physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer, who leaves the family to go die in Mexico. There’s a good therapist who intends to help that girl, and he does so with the only possible tool, not drugs but words, there’s a brother in a coma, there’s a desire for an incestuous relationship with Bobby Western at all costs to the point of planning a marriage. There’s something more and elusive that only Mc can describe, all set in the States of '72, and nothing, or rather, the only thing I copied this time was the name of the physicist who worked on the infamous and inevitable (given the race there was to achieve it) “atomic bomb.”

The novel is quite claustrophobic and takes place in a small room inside a clinic for patients with mental disorders, the “Stella Maris” precisely, but through the memories of Alicia Western, oceans and continents are crossed, sometimes breathing the atmosphere of those years and even of the past both in America and in Europe etc. etc.

Answers are not found, and as is also said within the novel, what matters are the questions one asks, clearly, everyone has their measure, and no one is better than another, not even the “mad”, if not perhaps, ahem, the mathematicians...