The American writer Cormac McCarthy.EFE
Cormac McCarthy, one of the most respected and elusive authors of American literature, will do justice to his enigmatic fame next fall with the edition in the United States of two novels in the space of a month (which in Spanish will be grouped in a single volume ).
They will mean a return to the writer's literary panorama, 16 years after his last work,
La Carretera,
which earned him a Pulitzer Prize and widened his list of readers.
The books are
The Passenger
(which will be translated into Spanish as
The Passenger)
and
Stella Maris,
as confirmed by Alfred A. Knopf, McCarthy's New York publisher, who will have turned 89 when they are published.
Of the first, the author of
Blood Meridian
had already spoken in public (in 2015, when he defined it as a story about "madness and mathematics").
There was no news of the second until it was advanced on Tuesday by
The New York Times
.
Both novels are connected to each other.
And they tell the love story between two brothers, the Westerns, obsessed with their past: his father was a physicist and helped develop the atomic bomb.
According to Reagan Arthur, his editor, McCarthy “explores in them philosophical elements and some of the transcendental questions of humanity.
They are unlike anything he has published before.”
This is what, at the moment, is known about both novels:
The Passenger,
whose publication is scheduled for October 25 with an extension of 400 pages, takes place in 1980 and tells the story of the brother, Bobby, a professional diver who gets entangled in the investigation of a crashed plane whose remains have sunk off the coast of Mississippi.
Stella Maris,
for her part, focuses on her figure, Alicia.
It is an entirely dialogued novel that takes the form of a 200-page transcript of a session between the protagonist and a psychiatrist at an insane asylum in Wisconsin in 1972, after she, a 20-year-old doctoral student in mathematics at the University of Chicago, is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia disorder.
In Spanish, both will be grouped into a single volume, which will hit bookstores on November 10, by Random House Literature, the publisher that has the rest of its catalog.
The rights have already been sold to 48 countries.
According to the arguments, they will represent a change in the characteristic themes and style of his work, as well as a reflection of his abstruse scientific concerns.
Until now absent from his production (a fascinating variation on the theme of violence), he develops those interests as patron of the Santa Fe Institute, a center that works, according to its website, to "understand and unify the underlying patterns in the physical worlds , biological, social, cultural, technological and even in the hypothetical complex astrobiological universes”.
The writer has lived near that institution since the 1990s, away from the world, in Tesuque, north of the capital of New Mexico.
He is legendarily allergic to interviews and sharing opinions or details about his life in the public sphere.
McCarthy has entertained these 16 years — his longest fallow season since he began in 1965, with
The Guardian of the Garden,
to be published — writing a screenplay,
The Counselor
(2013), a drug movie by Ridley Scott that stayed far from his literary achievements, and in an essay on the origin of language published in a scientific journal called
Nautilus.
The writer's relationship with cinema has also borne fruit over the years, with
The Highway
(John Hillcoat, 2009) and
No Country for Old Men
(by Joel and Ethan Cohen, which in 2008 earned Javier Bardem an Oscar for best supporting actor).
The members of the Cormac McCarthy Society, a society for the appreciation of his work, which is understandably revolutionized this week, have been talking about
The Passenger
for a long time .
In a forum dedicated to the hypotheses surrounding the book, it is discussed, for example, how long, as much as four decades, the author may have embarked on this project.
In 2015, in one of his very few public appearances, the writer spoke in Santa Fe about the existence of the novel, and some passages were even read.
According to
The New York Times,
Knopf had the drafts of both titles for eight years, during which time a guild like the publisher, which lives by telling stories, has been able to keep the secret.