Perfect

We are lucky to have Cormac McCarthy.
This is a beautiful masterpiece worth the wait.

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Think I'm going give it another listen.

The characters made me laugh. Enjoyed the story. Mind bending. Definitely worth a read.

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3 people found this helpful

Tremendous

I think most readers will either love or loathe this book, which is the only book I’ve ever immediately read again upon finishing. I personally found some parts simply infuriating and others, absolutely spell binding. I must have listened to the final chapter ten times. I adore this book.

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1 person found this helpful

Complex narrative

A story with complex narrative but worth the time. some of the conversations are superb

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Deep and engaging, with the very best narration

It's McCarthy - of course it's brilliant, but the two narrators are worth the price (and more) alone. A wonderful listening experience

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1 person found this helpful

Wow

One of the best books I read/listened to in ages. Well worth the 10 year wait. Sparse and haunting, poetic and clever.

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1 person found this helpful

Really struggled with this.

Thought I would try something a bit more demanding but found this really boring. Picked up a little towards the end

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Is This The, “Whole,” Story?

Beautifully read by both of the narrators, this is certainly a compelling novel. However, those listeners who are drawn into the essential thriller-cum-mystery aspects of the tale are going to be left unsatisfied. There is no (overt) resolution to the mystery which sets up the story, defines and introduces the characters and draws in the listener in the first place.
Obviously, there is the companion novel, Stella Maris, (to be published on Audible about a month from now) which holds out the potential (if not the promise) of settling the several mysteries of how it was that a private jet went down in the ocean with eight passengers who appeared to show no sign of foreknowledge of their doom? Who the strange visitors troubling the female protagonist are? Nor do we learn from this book who the missing, titular passenger was, and why the government seemed to believe that the diver who was sent to explore the downed craft (our male protagonist) either had something to do with it, or stole something from the site, or exactly why they were seizing his assets and pursuing him for most of the story?
Being a Cormac McCarthy novel, we expect some unresolved threads and unaccountable occurrences. But this has to be one of the most bizarrely unsatisfactory authorial choices I have encountered. I feel compelled to buy the other book, just to get to the ending of this one. But I‘m simultaneously filled with a foreboding sense that McCarthy might have decided to leave that hook in there without ever offering a solution to the problem.
It is beautifully written, with McCarthy’s extraordinary diction, as usual, artfully straddling the line between prose and poetry. And there are, as we should expect, some wonderfully crafted characters with mesmeric passages of dialogue. Also there are, as ever, several thought provoking concepts at play, in this case from quantum physics to the meaning of history and much besides.
But ultimately, one is left feeling that they have just finished part one of a two part story; “To Be Continued . . . Or Maybe Not?” And that feels more like a financial choice than an aesthetic one, even if the second novel takes a very different approach to the first. This ultimately cheapened the experience for me.
One obviously needs to read the second novel to discover if any of this really makes sense; if there will be an answer to any of the mysteries set up in the first place; if indeed the whole experience was worthwhile?
Despite my enjoyment of journeying with these deeply fascinating characters, right now I cannot tell you if this will turn out to be one half of an ingenious adventure, or a disappointing act of hubristic self indulgence on the part of the author?
It’s certainly twice as profitable to have readers buy two books for the price of one story. Whether it is justifiable or just a cynical cash grab remains to be seen.

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2 people found this helpful

Astonishingly beautiful

Every sentence is weighed and wonderful. Characters and bar room bluster better written than by anyone else. It’s so sad, and it gave me belly laughs. Both readers do the job brilliantly.

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Oddly enthralling, often rambling and rudderless

This book review is probably the hardest one I've written, as i did enjoy the book but it is a long and complex work that required alot of undivided attention.

I should note that this is my first taste of Cormac McCarthy's work and i think most people would agree it is an unusual place to start. As i understand it, his works are complex and not enjoyed by all and this book is not regarded as his magnum opus. I started here as it was on sale in audible and McCarthy is an author I have wanted to read for a while.

For the most part this book seems to me, to be a creative and poetic exploration of grief and loneliness. The book does this extremely well following the differing perspective of two main characters.

McCarthy's descriptions are beautiful. Large portions of the book, particularly descriptions of events, people and atmosphere almost read like one long poem, I thoroughly enjoyed the prose.

Other parts frustrated me. The book goes on frequent tangents particularly in dialogue that doesn't particularly contribute to the thin and covert overarching story. For example, there was a 30-45min segment on fairly involved physics at one point that didn't really contribute anything to the story and stopped any momentum the book was carrying dead.

One of the main character's hallucinations are often long and unrewarding cycles of dialogue that get the story nowhere and seem to accomplish little. Perhaps this is the point of it, to highlight the unimaginable frustrations of this mental illness, but it did add a great many pages to the book without driving the story forward and i often felt like i had to endure these segments to get back to the 'main story' which was quite intangible.

In spite of these frustrations, other parts of the book were fantastic. The character work is brilliant. The characters are eclectic and interesting and some dialogue was enthralling. McCarthy beautifully weaves together a group of intellectual down-and-outs and writes incredible conversations between them, which are in equal parts cynical, existentialist and philosophical.

Overall i did enjoy the book. I liked it but didn't love it. It hasn't dissuaded me from trying more of McCarthy's work, in fact it might have convinced me to try more, but maybe only the highly regarded pieces.

The narration is excellent throughout. A dodgy british accent aside, the narration was entertaining and immersive, about as good as I've heard from audiobook narrators. I appreciated having two different narrators, one for each main character perspective.

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