The Passenger

Excellent product

"The Passenger" emerges as Cormac McCarthy's masterful finale, a novel that weaves together the vast American landscape's solitude, a hallmark of McCarthy's settings, with intricate themes of physics, mathematics, and the essence of reality. This modern-day western novel reimagines the classic cowboy archetype, trading horsebacks for the modernity of cars, oil rigs, deep-sea vessels, and the haunting echoes of mental institutions. The book's atmosphere, if likened to a musical piece, resonates with the deep, haunting tones of Johnny Cash's "Ain't No Grave," encapsulating a journey from inception to conclusion, all the while grappling with the profound task of finding meaning in the seemingly meaningless.

The Passenger begins with the scene of a young girl buried in snow on Christmas. This is Alice/Alicia’s last Christmas. Ten years have gone by since then. Her brother, Bobby Western, a salvage diver across the American South, is unable to move on from it. He was in love with his sister who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. But their love was a taboo, a laughing matter he is still reminded of by people around him after ten years of her death. And to that, Western is running away from surveillance by state authorities. There was a plane buried in the sea with passengers and pilots strapped to their seats, floating in the water which Western had gone down with his friends/colleagues to investigate….. McCarthy’s prose is engaging. It pulls the reader in, guessing, and halfway through it the reader gasps at the pages yet being swayed by the story. …’READ MY FULL REVIEW AT SCROLL INDIA (@scroll_in )

Linda história

This book is a book that engages huge questions about ontology and principles of science while nominally writing about a few larger than life characters that are powerfully drawn. While its scope is broad and the length may be daunting, the prose is accessible and seductive. There were many passages I reread because they were so lyrical. This has to be one of the most beautiful, inspirational books I have read in my life. Months later I find myself going back to the marked up sections to be reminded what powerful writing looks like.

Muy rápido y en excelentes condiciones.

As you read this book you will find yourself asking, who is this Passenger? The initial noir, thriller plot leads you to believe the passenger is a missing and mysterious passenger from a crashed private jet in the Gulf of Mexico. One that took a data box that the protagonist is suspected of harboring, causing for him to be harassed by the US Govt.But as you read through this intellectual masterpiece you realize that it is you who is a passenger. A passenger of McCarthy's expansive mind and his elaborate story telling.This book not only takes you through references to each of his works, it also takes you on a foray of unique perspectives on the meaning of life, mathematics, suffering, and, of course, love.And at the end of this you realize you were a passenger to McCarthy's personal life and writing career. It is up to us to discover what's real and what's fiction, but, at the end of the day, what's the difference? Those are some of the questions you'll ask yourself.Critically, what struck me the most, was how influential Dostoevsky was to McCarthy. He mentions him once in the book, but his grand allude was the same observation that Dostoevsky had.That, in the future, everything will be simulated and it will be this that ends what has been the root cause of death and destruction: privilege.In Dostoevsky's work Notes From Thr Underground he talks about the Crystal Palace and how everything will be calculated. And similarly Dostoevsky makes an argument that, until then, the irrational world will reign. And that any folly to adjust the world, without the tabulation/simulation, is futile, and thus speaks to the disturbing works of humankind and the disturbing literature that both Dostoevsky and McCarthy represent.The fact that this literature is what seems to be the most thought provoking, and the most entertaining, makes it hard not to believe them.However, the hopeless romantic in all of us, including McCarthy (otherwise why would he write?), wants to see a world without perpetual Warfare and without the horrifying atrocities like Hiroshima (a cornerstone in this novel) and Auschwitz. A quote from the book is "Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed the fate of the Western world." The recurrent references to the shadows left behind by nuclear bomb victims further shows how anti war McCarthy really is, contrary to what his work may lead you to believe.Another quote is "I suppose in the end what we have to offer is only what we’ve lost. It’s not that I love paradoxes. It’s just that they’ve increasingly come to seem the last factual reality. I suppose that’s hardly a novel observation."Paradox is a fundamental theme in all of McCarthy's works. Each book could really be seen as a paradoxical world with a paradoxical purpose. How can a book like Blood Meridian, a book that depicts babies being smashed together, be a book that is also beautiful and a piece that shows how evil the West was?How can Suttree be a piece of how the US Govt eats its poor, but show that the poor eat themselves.And how is it that those two books are some of the most highly regarded books of all time? How is it that McCarthy is a subject of so many theses, when he himself hasn't graduated college, doesn't follow proper grammar/semantics, and who obviously struggles with racism?It just doesn't make sense.But when you look at the world as a great big contradiction, and that you yourself are probably a contradiction to all other aspects of nature, it surprisingly lifts a burden. The burden being expectation, which is hand in hand with privilege.At the end of the book you really are grateful to have been a passenger of McCarthy's life and you'll have enough to dwell on for a long time. Because, isn't that what reading is for? To think.After going through a second reading, I leave myself thinking, 'what a piece of work.' To fully appreciate that, one must read Stella Maris and Shakespeare

No spoiler review. I used to rate McCarthy as America’s greatest living writer. Now he is dead, it’s a larger pantheon, but he stands with the best; Melville, Faulkner et al. The passenger and its companion novel, Stella Maris, were his final works and we can reasonably assume he knew well in advance they would be his final act. To be clear, this is my third reading of this work, such are the layers and complexities of its construction. A writer of his talents was always going to imbue these works with some of his life’s wisdom and reflections. Whilst dealing head on with the calamities of his sister’s paranoid schizophrenia, at times this is laugh out loud funny. The monologues of his real life friend John Sheddan (one of a number of his East Tennessee circle) are a masterclass in dry self deprecation and character assassination. It is very deep stuff; at times watching the life of a man unravel with no apparent ability to avoid the ensuing dissolution, is disturbing. In later life McCarthy was deeply interested in particle physics and the cosmological problems and contradictions of humanity’s limitations to both understand nature and be part of it at the same time. This is played out through the reflections of Bobby on his farther’s role in building the first atom bomb, his time at Trinity on the Manhattan project and some of the seminal characters, like Oppenheimer, Chew, Feynman, and later , Yukawa, and Weinberg etc. Don’t let any limitation in your physics put you off, this is not a test of your knowledge. There are serious issues in play here: What is the good life? Are values universal or merely socially created? Can we really ever understand nature? Does his sister’s love for him somehow damn him to his fate? I doubt you can get to grips with this book at one reading so be prepared to go back to it maybe two or three times. For me, it’s a thought provoking masterclass and we are privileged that he was bold enough to imbue this work with these insights. I will miss his works and I offer my thanks for the pleasure it brought me.