Cormac McCarthy's 'Stella Maris' Completes Diptych with Dialogues on Thought and Language

Lancelot Hamelin reviews Cormac McCarthy's 'Stella Maris', the second volume of his final diptych published by L'Olivier (256 p., €21.50). The novel follows Alicia Western, a mathematician and friend of Alexandre Grothendieck, during her nine final therapy sessions at the Stella Maris institution. Unlike the first volume 'The Passenger', which explored her brother's paranoid drift after her suicide, 'Stella Maris' presents a pure dialogue between Alicia and her psychiatrist, devoid of stage directions. McCarthy uses this Socratic space to examine the limits of language and the impossibility of fully understanding others or the world. The review draws parallels to 'The Road', noting a passage about a 15th-century Italian violin maker who, with his son, crafted a perfect instrument after seven years of drying maple wood. Hamelin questions whether this is McCarthy's 'last novel', given the author's long-standing apocalyptic vision. The cover features a photograph by Beowulf Sheehan.