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A review by cunningba
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
4.0
Enjoyed it a lot. The 4 stars is because it is really just half a book. [b:Stella Maris|60526802|Stella Maris (The Passenger, #2)|Cormac McCarthy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1658241766l/60526802._SX50_.jpg|95478000] is the other half. The end is not the end. Lots of stuff unresolved. He just lifted his foot off the gas, pushed in the clutch, and is changing gears (books).
McCarthy's writing style poses a few problems until you get used to it: lack of quotes (occasionally confusing, but no worse than Austen or Joyce), idiosyncratic apostrophization (contractions, foreign words), shifting stream of consciousness (a little confusing during when encountering first hallucinations, but you figure out the pattern), shifting timeline, large history of science and math info dumps (I rather enjoyed these actually since I was already familiar the subjects and there were no cringe worthy errors that I find all too common with other authors).
Characters were weird but engaging. Language and view verging on poetic. There is a mystery involved, which is left hanging at the end of this volume. (Hence the "half a book" comment.) But I wonder if the mystery is not really the point, similar to the "mystery" in [b:The Brothers Karamazov|4934|The Brothers Karamazov|Fyodor Dostoevsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1427728126l/4934._SX50_.jpg|3393910].
McCarthy's writing style poses a few problems until you get used to it: lack of quotes (occasionally confusing, but no worse than Austen or Joyce), idiosyncratic apostrophization (contractions, foreign words), shifting stream of consciousness (a little confusing during when encountering first hallucinations, but you figure out the pattern), shifting timeline, large history of science and math info dumps (I rather enjoyed these actually since I was already familiar the subjects and there were no cringe worthy errors that I find all too common with other authors).
Characters were weird but engaging. Language and view verging on poetic. There is a mystery involved, which is left hanging at the end of this volume. (Hence the "half a book" comment.) But I wonder if the mystery is not really the point, similar to the "mystery" in [b:The Brothers Karamazov|4934|The Brothers Karamazov|Fyodor Dostoevsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1427728126l/4934._SX50_.jpg|3393910].