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A review by leasttorque
Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
2.0
So, were The Passenger and Stella Maris meant to be a quantum literary double-slit experiment? Who knows. Schrodinger‘s cat? Who’s alive and who’s dead? Both! Neither!
Well, unlike The Passenger where some good writing made the derivative-feeling hodgepodge trip worthwhile in spite of frequent boredom, I was mostly bored out of my gourd with this all-dialog companion piece. I’d give this one star if not for quite a bit of personal resonance (including out of body experience) and a couple of well-done descriptions of what it’s like to actually do the mathematics. True, I left math in the dust for computer science almost 40 years ago, but I got pretty darned far in and this reads like a shallow pastiche of math history and mathematician biography that focuses heavily on the mind-twisting nature of foundations smashed into philosophy and iced with gossip about the lives of the various names dropped. Every time real depth is called for the subject changes.
Oh, and most mathematicians are stone cold party animals and Worcester doesn’t rhyme with rooster but those are nits. And kittens scream bloody murder. And Alicia reminded me of a verbally domineer and pontificating neighbor who could be fun to debate with as he held forth and spewed occasional total crap (e.g., crying babies) but in this book the pontificator has free rein to tedious effect.
PS: I went on to read The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson and it contained this:
‘Over dinner the talk veered wildly, with what Colville described as “a lot of flippant conversation about metaphysics, solipsists and higher mathematics.”’
Hah! As all rampant readers know, weird links frequently occur between very different books.
Well, unlike The Passenger where some good writing made the derivative-feeling hodgepodge trip worthwhile in spite of frequent boredom, I was mostly bored out of my gourd with this all-dialog companion piece. I’d give this one star if not for quite a bit of personal resonance (including out of body experience) and a couple of well-done descriptions of what it’s like to actually do the mathematics. True, I left math in the dust for computer science almost 40 years ago, but I got pretty darned far in and this reads like a shallow pastiche of math history and mathematician biography that focuses heavily on the mind-twisting nature of foundations smashed into philosophy and iced with gossip about the lives of the various names dropped. Every time real depth is called for the subject changes.
Oh, and most mathematicians are stone cold party animals and Worcester doesn’t rhyme with rooster but those are nits. And kittens scream bloody murder. And Alicia reminded me of a verbally domineer and pontificating neighbor who could be fun to debate with as he held forth and spewed occasional total crap (e.g., crying babies) but in this book the pontificator has free rein to tedious effect.
PS: I went on to read The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson and it contained this:
‘Over dinner the talk veered wildly, with what Colville described as “a lot of flippant conversation about metaphysics, solipsists and higher mathematics.”’
Hah! As all rampant readers know, weird links frequently occur between very different books.