Sixteen years after his last novel, the post-apocalyptic, also very successful in film adaptation The Road (2006), American author Cormac McCarthy (1933) presents new work. And with two novels: The Passenger appears on October 25, Stella Maris on Nov. 22.
Reportedly, both books will be quite different from what we’re used to from McCarthy. The writer established his name with novels like suttree (1970), Blood Meridian (1985), The Border Trilogy (1992-1998), No Country for Old Men (2005) and the said The Road† In these books he always conveyed an extremely gloomy world view.
Murder and manslaughter, indiscriminate bloodshed, cruelty and moral nihilism were standard ingredients. The universe according to Cormac McCarthy left no room for optimism. Not that that universe of God was forsaken. It was worse: God was there, but he could do nothing for his creation. Perhaps he didn’t care at all about the blood and the misery.
According to McCarthy’s American publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, his new books will have a more cerebral character, delving into the history of mathematics and physics, human consciousness, whether science and religion can coexist, and the relationship between madness and genius. .
The Passenger and Stella Maris are intertwined novels that tell the doomed love story of a brother and sister: Bobby and Alicia Western. Both are weighed down by the legacy of their father, a physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb, as well as their love and obsession with each other.
The approximately four hundred pages thick The Passenger plays in 1980 in New Orleans and the Mexican Gulf Coast. Rescue diver Bobby Western is assigned to investigate the wreckage of a plane that crashed into the sea and discovers that the black box, the flight bag of the pilot and one of the passengers are missing.
Stella Maris tells the story of Alicia in about two hundred pages, making it the first novel in which McCarthy chooses a woman as the main character. Written entirely in dialogue form, the novel is set in 1972 Wisconsin. 20-year-old Alicia, who is working on her dissertation in mathematics, is told she suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.
It has been reported that McCarthy had been toying with the idea of a female lead character for fifty years, but doubted his own ability, “although you have to try it in the end.” The Dutch translations of the two novels, published by De Arbeiderspers, will appear at the same time as the American editions.