Remainder

by Tom McCarthy

A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident, receives an outrageous sum in legal compensation, and has no idea what to do with it.

Then, one night, an ordinary sight sets off a series of bizarre visions he can’t quite place.

How he goes about bringing his visions to life–and what happens afterward–makes for one of the most riveting, complex, and unusual novels in recent memory.

Remainder is about the secret world each of us harbors within, and what might happen if we were granted the power to make it real.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, British Literature, Book Club

308 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Tom McCarthy — “English fiction’s new laureate of disappointment” (Time Out, September 2007) — is a writer and artist. He was born in 1969 and lives in a tower-block in London. Tom grew up in Greenwich, south London, and studied English at New College, Oxford. After a couple of years in Prague in the early 1990s, he lived in Amsterdam as literary editor of the local Time Out, and later worked in British television as well as co-editing Mute magazine.

His debut novel Remainder was first published in November 2005 by Paris-based art press Metronome. After becoming a cult hit championed first by British webzines (it was 3:AM Magazine’s Book of the Year for 2005) and then by the literary press, Remainder was republished by Alma Books in the UK (2006) and Vintage in the US (2007). A French version is to be followed by editions in Japanese, Korean, Greek, Spanish and Croatian.

A work of literary criticism, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was released by Granta Books in June 2006. It also came out in France and an American edition is in the offing.

Tom’s second novel, Men in Space came out in 2007.

He has published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and Contemporary Magazine, as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press) and The Milgram Experiment (Jan van Eyck Press). His story, “Kool Thing, Or Why I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst” appeared in The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (Serpent’s Tail) in 2008.

His ongoing project the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through publications, proclamations, denunciations and live events, has been described by Untitled Magazine as ‘the most comprehensive total art work we have seen in years’ and by Art Monthly as ‘a platform for fantastically mobile thinking’. In 2003 the INS broke into the BBC website and inserted propaganda into its source-code. The following year, they set up a broadcasting unit at the ICA from which more than forty ‘agents’ generated non-stop poem-codes which were transmitted over FM radio in London and by internet to collaborating radio stations around the world.

Tom has also tutored and lectured at various institutions including the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins School of Art, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College and Southern California Institute of Architecture. He recently taught a course on ‘Catastrophe’ with Marko Daniel at the London Consortium.

Reviews

[Sean Barrs · Rating 1 out of 5]

I almost never, ever, give up on books. Even when I’m reading the ones I dislike, I make an effort to reach the end. I don’t think you can fully judge a book unless you’ve read it in its entirety. It would be like a movie reviewer walking out of the cinema half way through and writing up a review for the film nevertheless. It would be incomplete. But this one defeated me. I just couldn’t go on after hitting the half way mark. It’s only the second book during the last four years of reading that I’ve given up on. Doesn’t this say something?

This is one of the worst books I’ve read in my life- here’s why I put this piece of garbage down:

The writing is heavily descriptive. This, in itself, isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes description is wonderful, but when the author takes the time to painstakingly describe (in huge detail) the attributes of a crack in a toilet wall, I want to shoot myself. These special cracks made the protagonist decide to recreate an apartment complex (one he has half-remembered) with his compensation money. Yay. A man has been given 8.5 million after an accident and he spends it trying to create a boring memory. Excuse me why I stop reading.

He hires in a special organisation company to handle the details, and the details are all so very boringly specific. He dictates how exact the building and the people in it must be according to his memories. And I just couldn’t go on with it. The protagonist is an absolute tool. He walks away from his friends, ignores the problems of the outside world all for his vanity project. The memory is obviously important to him, but for me it was all plain monotony. I just don’t want to find out what happened. I don’t care what happened.

Life is short. I’m not going to waste my time reading the end of a very dull book.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zadie Smith praised this book and in her essay on 'realistic' versus whatever you want to call this sort of novel. I'm sure she is smarter than I am and she maybe knows more about literature, but I don't share her enthusiasm for this and I think that there are many better examples of books out there fighting the good fight against the naturalistic / realistic novel. But maybe this is the sort of novel that can serve as a gateway read into the more interesting terrain of 'difficult' literature (or post-modern, or whatever term you want to use, I'm lately fond of difficult).

It's not that I hated the book or anything. I enjoyed it, but nothing about it ever really won me over either. The writing is sort of autistic in the same way that Don Delillo tends to be sometimes and I had no problem with that. McCarthy never got the words to sing though the way that Delillo does with his overly stylized and flat prose.

My major problem was that this novel was a one-trick show and even with attempts at suspending my judgment and letting the novel play by its own rules I just couldn't get over how monumentally immature the main idea in this novel is.

The main character, the narrator, suffers a severe injury when something falls on his head. Afterwards he is awarded a very large cash settlement that he uses to fund re-enactments of events. His first reenactment is trying to capture a memory he has of an apartment building, so he goes about rebuilding this scene right down to the cracks in the walls and populates the building with a host of people who have to do small tasks over and over again, being a living loop of this particular memory of his. Behind all of this the narrator is trying to capture a more authentic experience, a hyper-reality. He continues doing this with various sorts of events. Crime scenes, getting a tired changed, among the ones he actually carries out along with future possibilities of little moments that he feels will be worth re-enacting.

As a premise I think this is interesting, but it doesn't go anywhere beyond the thrill the narrator has at 'perfecting' reality by replaying an event with actors over and over again until all the messiness of real life has been ironed out of it and the event becomes 'authentic'.

This is the sort of Orwellian 2+2=5 that certain strains of post-modernism love to play around with. But just because you say it doesn't make it true. If there were any kind of critique or judgment played out anywhere in this book I'd probably have enjoyed it more, but as the narrator falls deeper and deeper in to his 'unreal' real there is no sign given that the reader should be extrapolating anything other than a Baudrillard sort of nonsense about the nature of reality in our 'post-modern' age. Real life can be alienating and inauthentic, but it's only more alienating and even more inauthentic if you wrap up your view of the world with cutesy paradoxes and empty ramblings of dead French theorists.

Maybe I'm not giving the book enough credit though and there is some critique hiding somewhere here. Maybe a book doesn't need critique, and I agree, not every book does, but maybe I would have liked to see more movement in the main character, or have him off-set with another character. All of the other people who populate this book are enablers who go along with helping him create his view of the world. Yeah, they are basically all being paid by him, but still they are the people who create this growing unreality for him.

Maybe I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to think of his novel. Should I instead be reading this whole novel as a look at the absurdity of this guy who has been damaged by a big corporation and now is retreating from the real world to a safe place where he can just relive an event at a time without the possibility of real life dropping some potentially lethal shit on his head?

Or maybe it was just that the concept of authentic kept coming up, and this works as a code word to me for things to avoid. Generally as soon as someone starts using the word authentic I get the feeling that they are going to tell you exactly what you should do and be and any deviation will make you inauthentic.

Or maybe I'm just a little turned off by the way the novel veers towards the end, and knowing sort of where Tom McCarthy falls in his philosophical allegiances I can't help but see a Slavoj Zizek sort of figure masturbating furiously to images and thoughts of impersonal violence and salivating about how he can turn this fetishistic voyeurism into a new 'radical' theory.

But most likely I'm just annoyed at the basic ideas of the novel, and see too much of my own navel-gazing that I took for profundity and I'm holding it to the same standard that I hold my old self to, yeah, interesting idea but now do something with it. And maybe I just see too many parallels in the trajectory of some of my own thinking and see them both ending in horrific violence and I'm a bit bewildered how it can be seen as anything beautiful or authentic. Or is the reader supposed to make this sort of mental leap themselves? I don't know. Maybe I just missed a nudge or some sign that would have put this into a better context for me.

If you don't want to get hung up on the stuff that I get hung up on, this isn't a bad book at all. I don't think it's a great book, and as I said up near the top of the review I think there are better books of his sort of thing out there. But as a gateway sort of novel into the land of DFW and Gaddis and all of those sorts this could be good. It just doesn't go far enough or do much beyond it's one basic idea and if you don't have an aversion to the idea you just might enjoy this. If the word Baudrillard gives you hives though you might want to skip this.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rarely does a book manage to break down the habits and expectations that a reader builds up in a lifetime of reading.
Novels conform to schemas: there are quests, there are obstacles to be overcome, there are the universal standbys of love, hate, sex and murder: death must come violently and suddenly in order to grip the reader and to disentangle her from the nasty feeling that it might be her destiny too one day.
Of course these are broad and possibly unfair generalisations, but you get the point: the reservoir of storytelling is limited, and most authors are quite happy to wallow in the same shallows that their forebears found so reassuring. True, the 20th century saw some brave and sometimes foolhardy attempts to punt out into uncharted waters - the French nouvelle roman is perhaps the most prominent example of this - but today we are back to compendiousness, narrative and the Jonathan Franzens of this world: wise witty wordsmiths whose pat answers and worldly patter is carefully weighed against liberal Doubts and Cultured Concern as to the Future of the World.
And then along comes Tom McCarthy. A writer whose books (all right, call them novels if you must) record the bravest moments of Robbe-Grillet, but make it all look so effortless and at the same time manage to entertain to the extent that you want to slap him on the back and buy him a pint.
So what does happen in Remainder? Not very much, and when it does, it gets repeated time after time after time. Not exactly a recipe for success, you might think. But McCarthy's style is so casual, so insouciant, so offhand, that everything comes across as a paradox and a poser, as if there were a novel behind the novel, a story behind the story.
But what could be behind it though? This is the question that occupied me in the first few run-throughs: who is his model? Is it Sartre, or perhaps Kirkegaard, or is it more contemporary, perhaps Ballard? This last option comes closest to the truth: McCarthy's protagonist in Remainder is the victim of an unexplained accident; he obsesses over memories that he believes can lead to insights if re-enacted, and when these actually are re-enacted he falls into fugues and trances that are reminiscent of the catatonic states in which so many Ballard characters spend their happiest hours.
In this way the book is tinged with the atmosphere of both Vermilion Sands and Crash. The private, psychological, obsessive nature of the book all speak for a Ballardian inheritance, as does the book's later phase in which the scene moves to an abandoned airport hangar near Heathrow, a Ballardian location if ever there was one.
What speaks against it though is the language, the attitude. Unlike Ballard, McCarthy writes in a modern, idiomatic, demotic style. For anyone who has lived in - or even spent time in - London, the tone and overall slant of the protagonists blank, hacked-off impassivity will be familiar, if not welcome. (A brief aside: this is a London novel with a London attitude that is so far removed from the flavourless word-strudel of The Finkler Question, that I feel inclined to suggest that Howard Jacobson should take the time to read his younger contemporary's effort - and learn.)
The city pervades and invades every aspect of the book: places are always described with the utmost accuracy, whether Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, a bank in Chiswick or a lawyer's office in Islington. But more than geography, it's about texture: the brick dust, chewing gum, tarry oil and generic filth that defines the urban environment: a world of tawdry minutiae in which the protagonist loses himself and temporarily escapes the apparent meaninglessness of his existence.
It seems that the more I write the more there is to say with this book. Because I haven't even started describing the actual story, if that's a meaningful label for what happens here.
What does happen is a curious set of events that begins with something unexplained falling from the sky. This object injures the novels protagonist so severely that he spends several months in hospital: initially comatose, then without the use of his limbs, and eventually in the hands of a physiotherapist who re-teaches him basic movements, from holding objects to eating and finally walking. This is related in flashback on the day when "the settlement", a payment of eight million pounds from whoever let the unknown object fall on our hero, arrives.
After overcoming the initial shock of receiving such a massive payout, he wonders what to do with the money and rejects his friend Dave's hedonism - sniff cocaine of the back of the best-looking prostitute you can find until the money runs out - and his not-quite girlfriend Caroline's altruistic suggestion that he donate the money to a charity in Africa. In fact he has very little idea of what to do until he goes to a party and discovers a crack in the bathroom wall that triggers a set of previously concealed memories. In these memories he lives at the top of a block in a flat that also has a bathroom with a similar crack in the wall, sick but living plants in the hallway and a rear window view of a courtyard where black cats stalk languidly over red rooftops while in the flat below an elderly woman fries liver and in the flat below hers a melancholy pianist practices all day long. Other details also emerge: a motorbike freak who spends hours in the yard tinkering with his machine and a concierge who is present but quite static.
In the midst of this memory is another: the memory of moving through the flat completely at ease in the world: he remembers gliding through the rooms like a dancer, without even thinking about his movements, opening the fridge in a fluid, lyrical movement and not having to think about what he was doing.
Of course this plays with the reader's expectations on several levels: is this a psychological problem, a philosophical problem or rather something in the aesthetic realm? All three ideas are handsomely treated, though none is finally excused. We are kept in suspense between the various possibilities, with connotations, cultural cross-references and symbolically loaded reverberations whizzing around the echo-chamber of Mr. McCarthy's wonderful machine.
I could go on now, but I haven't got the time. It's a wonderful book. More later...

[Szplug · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a light that is fierce and strong one can see the world dissolve.
–Franz Kafka

In his first (published) novel, I am convinced that Tom McCarthy realized his beguilingly strange fictive vision within a degree of perfection. In a skillfully wrought authorial mirroring, every element begets that which renders it contingent—the everyman narrative voice, the unadorned prose, the detached inflection and intonation, the hum of the banal and drone of the workaday, the subdued sexuality, the repetitive nature and clerkish attention to detail, the threadbare characterization, unexplored potentialities, the tangential asides upon minutiae, the rational explorations of the irrational—each and all are of a structure that is necessitated by its component parts whilst simultaneously constraining those parts to fit its formative strictures. Thus, it is the case that, in my opinion, the properties of the novel which have produced an array of negative critiques would be difficult to address without substantively diminishing the level of perfection they have attained towards the full expression of the authorial vision; that those readerly complaints, while reasonably conceived and justifiably construed, would likely prove unanswerable without Remainder becoming something entirely different at its very core—for this is a Möbius strip of a novel, enacting the internal and external theaters of existence without ever traversing the environ of the one for the other. McCarthy is herein operating at the margins espied by all whose have experienced the transcendent shivers of a cognition in sensual embrace with the material world, the pneuma made aware that its sundering from original unity is neither eternal nor punitive, but of a harmonious cosmic mystery.

The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.
–Simone Weil

And a mystery Remainder, well, remains—one all the more remarkable in that its fictional essence works on several different levels with seemingly equal plausibility and aplomb. It begs to be reread, that one might either polish the sheen of previous perception, or perhaps opt to explore the possibilities of a differing avenue of interpretation altogether. While it did not blow me away, leave me astounded by the prose or the concept, it still left me highly impressed with how McCarthy so masterfully achieved the effects that he seemed to have set out to achieve. It's a remarkable achievement: in the annals of literature, it stands unique—a strange but precise unveiling of one man's obsession.

The nameless narrator, a stand-in for the modern English everyman who is whittling away his days within the nebulous-but-ubiquitous commercial environs of market research, having been incapacitated in hospital for several months after something struck him at the terminal point of free-fall, receives an eight-and-a-half million pound settlement from the undisclosed corporation held responsible, thanks, in no small part, to the persistent wiles of his solicitor. At a loss for what to do with this windfall, and suffering a perduring sensation of incompleteness, of inauthenticity, since awakening from his coma, a chance encounter at an acquaintance's housewarming party invokes a potent and paralyzing inner vision: of a previous physical environment, within a tenement block, in which a sequence of active and inactive interactions between the narrator and a select portion of his neighbours are recalled as having been complete and purifying in their orderly, natural flow. Though it cannot be determined, with any precision, whether the vision was deja-vu or jamais-vu, it imprints itself with overwhelming and mnemonically replete force within the narrator's mind, and provides him with an end for his newly acquired financial means: the reconstruction, down the most minute of details, of this tenement, complete with live-in actors to portray the neighbours, and in operation twenty-four/seven based upon the whims of the head conductor. Immensely satisfied with the transcendent results he obtains from these re-enactions, the narrator opts to explore the potentiality within further recreations based upon happenstance that transpires within his new life: that of the repair of a flattened tire and the subsequent flooding of a faulty windshield wiper fluid container; the drive-by execution of a black gang member on the streets of Brixton; and a re-enactment of the re-enactment. As with any addiction, that of the narrator's drive to satisfy his compulsion for precisely contextual unfolding seeks an outlet in ever more complex and variegated dosages, until, in a conceptual masterstroke, he conceives the potential for merging recreation with creation, a blending of actual and fantasy that brings his entire operation unto the precipice.

There are different ways the novel's events can be understood: an ironic look at how the whims of the wealthy are designed to be catered to in our modern societies, the respect accorded their power to buy people, even as beings whose actions are scripted to the utmost detail, and the questionable morality underwriting a power with such subtle immanency for abuse. A satire upon our burgeoning need to feel a connexion with the world, to establish our identities in ways that soothe the alienation imposed by our democratic capitalist system, by means of turning that alienation on its head by observing history and then reworking it until all of the kinks have been ironed out. Yet I believe that McCarthy is aiming for higher ground herein: there is an appreciable level of respect held towards the narrator for the fact that he is sparing no object—effort, time, money—in order to realize a private vision that the others, though obtaining none of the same shivery but serene metaphysical bliss from the results, still manage to attain a considerable satisfaction from, whatever their connexion to a particular facet of the re-enactment; this applies especially to Naz, the logistics wunderkind whose organizational prowess proves instrumental in bringing these complex visions to fruition. There is a taste of the pleasures of the Demiurge mingled with that of his creations; it is worth noting that, throughout the span of the re-enactment projects, not a single employee—behind the scenes or live in the unfolding—quits from frustration, boredom, or anxiety. The narrator, while succoring his own soul, appears to be providing a measure of that solace to the spirits of his vastly expanding crew. By reducing the pace of the recollected flow, temporal progress is brought almost to the condition of canvases parading past—regular modern existence endowed with the sublime and moving characteristics of a painting from a past master; the sterility of a practical and bustling twentieth-century enhanced with the revelational potential of colour-wrought universal expression.

Is it better to use one's money to bring about an artistic endeavor, rather than simply finagling another way to snag a buck from the consumer? Particularly when there is no intent to recoup any of the production costs through the enactment itself? The narrator is convinced. Self-aware, believing himself clumsy and plastic in this unreal world, it is through the slowing down of scripted, anticipated routines that he manages to bring time to a standstill, merging the past, present, and future into a melange of unity; to go from being outside, forlorn and alone, to within the very core of existence, authentic, enlivened, not observing the world be but an integral component of how that being, constrained by the ticking of the clock, can take control of the process, ensuring a flow of life that sets the nerve-ends on fire with its spatial integrality, its enveloping cohesion. Seeing through one's eyes or the eyes of others brings people's lives—otherwise rushed, fleeting, absorbed in the moment—into coherence, provides the room for and establishes the importance of pausing to drink in the amassed richness of one's immediate environment, take an exquisite pleasure from the otherwise banal details of how one is positioned, what materials one is amidst, how the light can be captured in an endless variety of angled reflections and refraction. In the sensory perceptions of an ordered recreation, the otherwise depletable banks of memory are augmented, strengthened, filled to the brim and warded against the decays of aged egress. And yet, the narrator increasingly becomes aware that the introduction of random events into an established procedure, the interplay of chance with preordained regimen, heightens the glow engendered through the re-enactive process; that any element of life is inherent with the possibility of stochastic imposition upon the structuring of things, and that this element constitutes a vital part of lived experience. Hell, contra Einstein, perhaps God enjoys the roll of the dice.

It's all very strange, but wonderful; precise and cantered, but flowing and propulsive. I loved it. There are intimations throughout that things are not quite what they seem: is the narrator still in a coma, his dormant mind harvesting these visions in the effort to break the barriers of an unconscious existence? This interpretation is heightened by the unlikely acceptance of the narrator's bizarre schemes by his legion of employees, the odd patina of unreality that coats his more deeply etched material theatre. Other hints point to the fact that the narrator may, in fact, have died in the accident, in which case these enacted visions may be part of the process of shedding his spirit of its material ties through a spiraling ascendence unto the empyrean. Or has he been given some manner of gift through his traumatic experience? And such gifts bear their own thorns: an amorality to how he is using people, and a callousness in his demands and interests—he also cuts himself off from any and all people not of service in the attainment of his weird, compulsive need. Do all great artists need become, in some measure, baser humans? Does a great inner drive demand an abatement of one's humanity? McCarthy raises a bevy of tantalizing questions, whilst never offering hard or complete answers. It is merely put out there for every reader to determine on their own. And the ending, ah, the ending; for the umpteenth time, not at all what I had expected, but utterly apropos to everything that has gone before.

It's a curious thing. I have never, in my entire life, conceived an overriding passion for anything. I'm good at many things, have developed a wide variety of interests over the years, am a jack-of-many trades, in work and in life. But I lack that burning passion that declares itself in others. Anything that I can conceive of doing I can also conceive of abandoning; anything capable of being perfected can prove satisfactory for me through mere proficiency. I've never had a favorite anything. Middle of the road, easy-going, malleable; that's how I pass my days. You cannot fake being consumed by a desire, in thrall to a drive to bring something about, meet someone, attain select goals. It's either there or it isn't. So it is that books like Remainder draw me in more deeply, hold me more rapt, than it might others. Such one-way charges, torpedoes be damned, fascinate me to the utmost, and thus the narrator of this tale provided me with a trail of existential crumbs I couldn't fail to follow but with full absorption. Four-and-a-half stars, rounded down because I'm a fickle son-of-a-bitch, and this won't be the last book by McCarthy that I read.

[Oscar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novela extraña donde las haya, pero también de las que perduran en la memoria tiempo después de su lectura. Mediante una prosa sencilla, Tom McCarthy aborda temas trascendentales como la imperfección de la realidad o la búsqueda de lo auténtico.

La historia tiene como protagonista a un londinense que nos irá narrando lo que le sucedió. Acaba de recuperarse de un accidente; algo le cayó del cielo provocándole unas lesiones que le dejaron temporalmente en coma, y borrándole parte de su memoria. Tras meses de recuperación, un abogado le comunica que ha recibido una indemnización por parte de una extraña entidad: ocho millones y medio de libras. A cambio, él no podrá contarle a nadie lo que le ha pasado.

Tras haberse recuperado y haber pasado por una etapa de re-aprendizaje, el protagonista se da cuenta de que no percibe la realidad de manera natural. Se muestra apático, y la mayoría de cosas le parecen artificiales, como aprendidas. Hasta que un día, en la fiesta en casa de un conocido, tiene un déjà vu que le hace recordar ciertas escenas y personas asociadas a ellas. No sabe quiénes son, pero le parecen unos recuerdos ya vividos. A partir de aquí, el protagonista se obsesiona por los ecos de estos recuerdos, por las sensaciones que le proporcionan. Y no es que se trate de nada extraordinario, se trata de recuerdos de una realidad anodina, pero eso sí, le transmiten esa sensación de naturalidad y autenticidad que tanto desea el narrador. Así que ni corto ni perezoso, decide utilizar su dinero para re-crear estos recuerdos, comprando edificios y contratando a la gente que sea necesaria para dar vida al proyecto. Pero los recuerdos serán sólo el principio de una espeluznante obsesión: repetir la realidad, una y otra y otra vez.

Este argumento que introduce la ficción en la realidad, que puede recordar a ‘El Show de Truman’, tiene más de una lectura: realidad contra ficción, donde el protagonista únicamente se siente real cuando re-crea y se siente parte de una realidad escenificada, entrando en una clara paradoja; lo que cierta gente es capaz de hacer por dinero, cuando se les pide que se rebajen a realizar todo aquello que se les ordene; la realidad enfrentada al tiempo y al espacio, o movimiento perpetuo, cuando el protagonista se obsesiona en la re-creación de escenas; la obsesión por la materia y sus residuos.

Me pregunto cuándo deja de ser auténtico un hecho que se repite múltiples veces. Sin duda, la novela de Tom McCarthy está llamada a convertirse en un clásico.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Hmm.

That could be my whole review.

I'm glad I kept the faith while reading this book. The first part gives the impression that you're about to read a confessional weepy survivor story, and then the story veers without warning into a story that grapples in the most graphic way possible with the question of what makes our lives meaningful. It plays with the idea that a few perfect moments in one's life, however brief, are all that is necessary to give life meaning...and then it subverts this idea brilliantly. If you are a skimmer you might be tempted to skim right over some of the repetitive buildup of events. I advise against this and suggest you read as linearly as possible. It's worth making the effort to experience the story fully.

[Hakan · Rating 4 out of 5]

ingiltere'nin büyük yayıncılarının defalarca reddettiği bir romanmış kalan. küçük bir yayınevi tarafından basılmış, kitapçılara bile dağıtılmamış, derken bir tanıtım yazısıyla eleştirmenlerin dikkatini çekmiş, sonra ödüller almış, yazarına şöhret kazandırmış, on dört dile çevrilmiş...

bu tür başarı hikayelerine sahip romanlar genellikle biçim özellikleriyle ya da diliyle genel kabulden ayrılan romanlar oluyor. ancak kalan, son derece sade/basit bir dille yazılmış, biçim olarak "düz", okuru kesinlikle zorlamıyor. kalan'ı içeriği farklı kılıyor. bu ilginç. içeriğin gittikçe göz ardı edildiği bir dönemde dikkat çekici ve önemli.

peki ne anlatıyor bu roman?..kısaca, anlatılmayan şeyleri. anlatılamayan değil, anlatılmayan, anlatılmaya gerek duyulmayan şeyler bu romanın konusu. "şeyler" de olaylar değil hareketler, küçük hareketlerin oluşturduğu anlar ve durumlardan ibaret. bir adım atmak, bir yiyeceğe uzanmak gibi kendiliğinden olduğunu sandığımız basit/gündelik hareketleri geçirdiği kaza sonucu düşünerek/anlayarak yapmak zorunda kalan isimsiz bir kahramanı var romanın. bu isimsiz kahraman düşünülmeyeni düşünmeye başlıyor, düşündükçe sorguluyor ve arayışlara giriyor.

küçük, basit hareketleri düşünmeden/anlamadan yapanların böyle bir meselesi yokken isimsiz kahraman kendini "sahici olmayan biri" olarak hissediyor ve büyük sorusunu soruyor: gerçek olan nedir?..cevap için anları büyütüyor, zamanı genişletiyor, tekrarlara, "yeniden canlandırmalar"a kendini adıyor. okurun romanda izlediği "hikaye" bu yeniden canlandırmalar oluyor böylece.

gözden kaçana bakmak, detayları fark etmek, zamanın düşünmeye yer bırakmayan hızını düşürmek, düşünmek için yavaşlatmak, anlamak için tekrarlamak...kahramanının hayatından okura sundukları bunlar kalan'ın. kalan okumaya/düşünmeye değer kesinlikle.

[Laryssa Wirstiuk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally, I finished reading Remainder by Tom McCarthy. I have been reading this 300-something page book, which I purchased based on a recommendation from McSweeney’s, for weeks. Today, I willed myself to finish it.

My professors at the University of Maryland, Merrill Feitell and Maud Casey, constantly discuss the importance of the first fifty pages of a book. They believe that these introductory pages can make or break a novel.

When Victor LaValle spoke to our workshop, he recalled what it had been like to judge a novel competition; hundreds and hundreds of books were sent to him, and he had no choice but to screen them. If the fifty pages were compelling, he would continue reading. If the fifty pages said nothing of interest, he had to put the book aside.

I was more generous than LaValle might have been with McCarthy’s book. After fifty pages, this is all the reader learns: a young guy loses his memory after a horrible accident (unnamed), and his lawyer manages to settle for eight and a half million pounds, which the young man invests in the stock market with the help of a financial adviser.

McCarthy’s writing isn’t even all that compelling.

From the very beginning of the book, the dialogue is painful to read. Words that characters exchange in this novel are boring and unnecessary:

“‘Does this champagne smell like cordite to you?’ I asked.

‘What?’ said Greg.

‘Cordite,’ I said, raising my voice above the music.

‘Cordite?’ Greg said, raising his voice too. ‘What does cordite smell like?’

‘This,’ I answered.

‘I don’t think so,’ Greg said.”

I bet even Tom McCarthy would think that this dialogue is inane and boring, if he were to read it right here, outside the context of his imagination. Most of the conversations in the book follow this particular example, and I found myself skipping through many character interactions to get to the book’s strongest point: the narrator’s thoughts.

Starting on page 64, for a few brief moments, the novel gets really good. The narrator is at a party, and he experiences a strong sense of deja vu while staring at a crack in the wall of a bathroom. McCarthy writes: “I’d been in a space like this before, a place just like this, looking at the crack, a crack that had jutted and meandered in the same way as the one beside the mirror…I remembered it all, but I couldn’t remember where I’d been in this place, this flat, this bathroom.” I will spare you the entire passage because the narrator repeats the same thing over and over, basically.

This idea, however, is interesting to me. For the first time since the accident, the narrator remembers something, possibly from the life he lead before the accident. What’s even more compelling is how he responds to his sudden emotional upheaval. He is so moved by this deja vu, which made him feel “real,” that he decides to find a way to reenact the scene in the bathroom.

He hires a project manager, Naz, to help him find “reenactors” to play the roles of the people that he imagined and dedicates his money to the purchase of a building just like the one he remembered, with the same crack carefully made in a bathroom modeled after the one at the party.

Just when he thinks everything is perfect, everything goes wrong. He realizes that life is too volatile and random to allow for the manifestation of his desires.

That realization comes around page 150. One hundred and fifty more pages to go.

The narrator decides to reenact all types of events that occur to him in his “real” life, like a trip to the car mechanic, a murder he read about in the newspaper, and a bank hold-up. Naz never questions why he continually wants to reenact these events. The narrator has an idea, they execute the idea, he is generally unsatisfied, and then he moves on to the next whim. Over and over for one hundred pages.

I really liked some of McCarthy’s ideas, and I thought this book had a lot of potential. I mean, I did finish reading the book, despite all the issues that I had with it. I wanted to see if McCarthy would be able to develop this idea, the narrator’s desire for staging his most moving moments, and turn it into something that would make for a good story, one that could move forward and evolve. As it turns out, this was a horrible story but a great concept.

McCarthy seems to me to be a great thinker but a horrible storyteller. I liked the ending, but that, like much of the rest of the book, worked on its own as an isolated incident that gave me no insight into the narrator as a character and demonstrated neither change nor evolution. I don’t think the person at the end of the book is the person at the beginning of the book, but I don’t understand how McCarthy got from point A to point B.

Maybe I will have to reenact my reading of Remainder in order for me to better understand. Who wants to see me read five pages and then throw a book down in boredom and frustration?

[Mattie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, disturbing, strange, compelling. To actually write about Remainder would, I fear, spoil the book for anyone who hasn't read it. Even to list the variety of questions swarming around in my head seems like it could ruin it. So, I won't. I'll just say that this book is unlike anything else I've read and I loved it. I suspect this is going to haunt me for a while. Which is cool.

[Katia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to give this book four stars although I can not recommend it. It really drew me in. I couldn't put it down but then as I went on, it became more and more disturbing until it got just outright creepy. This book is so intricate and well-written. I think it will stay with me for a long time, but I don't really want it to. I was SO creeped out by the end of it, I actually felt anxious for several days after finishing it. It affected the way I looked at things around me, the details that you wouldn't normally notice. The book seemed to heighten my awareness and actually change my perception of my world, for a few days anyway. I want to believe that this is fiction and that there aren't people out there who are so disconnected from humanity and emotion.

[Lisa of Troy]

A very energetic gentleman on BookTube recommended this book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVism...

Apparently, a guy gets hit in the head and wins compensation. With his fortune, he attempts to recreate the day of the accident.

[Aslıhan Çelik Tufan · Rating 3 out of 5]

13-14.04.2021

İngiltere 'de yayınlatacak yayınevi bulamayınca Paris' te basılan ve daha sonra bolca ödül alan ve İngiltere 'nin son yıllarda çıkan en ilginç kitabı olarak belirtilen bir kitapla merhabalar.

Kitabımızda, elim bir kaza nihayetinde kahramanımızın hayatı tamamıyla değişmektedir. Öyle ki kendisi ne kazayı hatırlamaktadır ne de kaza öncesinde nasıl yaşadığını. Bunu hafife almayın, kelimenin tam anlamıyla yaşamayı hatırlamayan biriisinden bahsediyorum. Adımlarını nasıl atacağını, havucu nasıl ısıracağını bilmeyen. Kaza sonrası uzlaşma gereği aldığı tazminat ile hayatı tutkunun yol göstericiliği ile kökten bir değişime uğracaktır.

Son derece akıcı bir o kadar da sürpriz sonlu bir maceraya hazırsanız buyursunlar.

Israrla tavsiye ediyor ve keyifli okumalar diliyorum 🌼

#readingismycardio #aslihanneokudu #okudumbitti #2021okumalarım #okuryorumu #kitaptavsiyesi #neokudum #jaguarkitap #kalan #tommccarthy #çevirikitaplar #çağdaşdünyaedebiyatı

[Héctor Genta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Circoletto rosso.
Reminder (questo è il titolo originale dell’opera) come ricordo ma anche come residuo, rimanenza.
Il libro racconta la storia di un uomo colpito da un oggetto non precisato che gli ha provocato la perdita della memoria e che lo ha costretto a reimparare i movimenti, a capire il significato di ogni singolo gesto prima di poterlo, lentamente, mettere in atto. Un risarcimento multimilionario e il déjà-vu di un momento del passato (o forse inesistente) saranno la molla che porterà il protagonista a cercare di rivivere quel momento specifico e più in generale tutti quelli in grado di farlo sentire vivo e sereno inscenando delle rappresentazioni il più accurate possibili. Il risultato sarà però quello di trascinare l’uomo in un gorgo mortale, una coazione a ripetere fatta di continue limature, di gesti rallentati all’infinito alla ricerca di una perfezione impossibile da raggiungere perché l’asticella delle sue ambizioni si alzerà ogni volta di una tacca, rilanciando la sfida a se stesso fino a precipitarlo in un loop senza via d’uscita.

Déjà-vu è un’opera sorprendente, una scatola magica che una volta aperta esplode contenuti, idee e suggestioni in ogni direzione. C’è il tema della memoria, intesa come unico luogo dove l’uomo riesce a essere autentico, ma c’è anche il suo contraltare, quei falsi ricordi che stanno lì a ricordarci quanto la memoria a volte possa essere fallace. Il tema della memoria è inevitabilmente un chiaro richiamo a Proust ma quella che ne fa McCarthy è una rilettura attualizzata perché qui non c’è solo l’interiorizzazione del ricordo ma anche tentativo di portarlo fuori, di inserirlo nelle realtà. C’è poi il tema del denaro, come serpente tentatore che si insinua nelle nostre vite e le cambia. C’è il solipsismo, l’incapacità a vivere con gli altri, l’uso degli altri per perseguire la propria felicità. C’è la ricerca della spontaneità, la consapevolezza che siamo tuti attori che recitano una parte (viviamo per recitare e recitiamo per vivere). Ci sono riflessioni sul tempo che l’uomo cerca di manovrare, manomettere, rallentare per diventarne il dominus, con risultati disastrosi. Ci sono riflessioni sull’arte (con un accenno michelangiolesco allo sbarazzarsi della materia in eccesso). C’è il tema dell’inganno delle parole, che possono significare altro da quello che sembrano (come reminder), parole che rappresentano un terreno minato perché, analogamente al ricordo, se ripetute all’infinito si trasformano in qualcosa di diverso. E c’è, appunto, l’infinito, simboleggiato dal numero otto che si ripete dall’inizio alla fine del libro, il simbolo della ricerca di assoluto, di una perfezione irraggiungibile che porta l’uomo che tenta di trascendere il limite a precipitare nell’abisso.
Déjà-vu è un’opera vertiginosa e Tom McCarthy è l’avanguardia. Circoletto rosso su questo nome.

[Javier Avilés · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creo que es una de las mejores novelas contemporáneas que he leído.
Merece una explicación. En el blog. Pronto.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my third Tom McCarthy book and my favorite so far. It deals with the idea of a person of unlimited means using his fortune in a search for meaning. In this case the chosen method is recreating situations where the protagonist had an intutitive feeling of authenticity, a sort of tingle, a sense of naturalness, of everything being in the right place. It reminded me of Huysmans' A Rebours, where the hero also devotes his wealth to creating unnatural situations that will give him some meaning or at least validation. See also The Picture of Dorian Gray where Dorian consciously follows Huysmans in spending his wealth on hedonistic excessess in an effort to become an artist of hedonism. In all of these stories there is a druglike addictive pleasure in the hero's excesses, with an associated boredom and lack of affect when confronted with life outside of the coccoon of indulgence.

In Remainder, there is a suggestion that this quest for meaning is an expression of mental illness, perhaps stemming from the accident that got him the settlement that made him rich. But it is beyond that because all of us can relate to the idea of recapturing moments when everything seemed right, and wishing to live the lives of other people who seem to exist in a continuing perfect state. And in Remainder there is also a suggestion that the perfect state is one that exists on the border between life and death. If only we could capture and preserve that moment without going over the edge in either direction.

I thought that it was interesting that the concept here is a quest for authenticity through inauthenticity. It is exactly the falsity of the reenactments that gives them the magic that makes reaching nirvana a possiblility. In an odd way it echoes the feeling that I have always had about Disneyland and the tourist culture of Hawaii where I am able to feel the magic only when I fully embrace the bogosity.

[trovateOrtensia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tra Perec e Tino Sehgal...
Romanzo sorprendente: ricchissimo di spunti di riflessione su molteplici temi (arte, memoria, denaro, manipolazione, autenticità e inautenticità dell'esistenza, riproducibilità del reale e dell'esperienza), mai banale e narrato con grande sicurezza. Una storia originale solidamente costruita in un crescendo vertiginoso. Sono felicemente stupita.

[Daisy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was with trepidation that I embarked on this book - I'd read a lot of reviews that called it experimental and a lot of sub 3-star reviews citing it's post modern tendencies as a reason for the low score. I am not a huge fan of experimental writing or writing that exists only to show the world how clever the author is and how uneducated the reader, it seems to forget Cheever's adage about writing being like a kiss, “you can't do it alone”. However, this book was eminently readable and completely wonderful.
Essentially it deals with the modern existential problem of how real life appears lacking in comparison to the created world. Our unnamed narrator talks of how during his rehabilitation from a serious head trauma he had to learn to do things again. How to develop the smooth flow of movements to allow him to perform basic functions. An example that he keeps referring back to is the eating of a carrot. He is encouraged to visualise the carrot, grasping it and bringing it to his mouth and the disappointment he feels when presented with a carrot that is gnarled and twisted and unrecognisable from the perfect avatar carrot he pictured leads him on a journey to live the authentic, real life where everything is knowable and as it should be. The narrator says that in the movies every move made by the actors are effortless, a perfect unity of movement with their surroundings, they never drop a spoon, pull on a fridge door only for it to stick and need a concerted tug to open and this feeling, this experience is what he spends his £8.5million compensation payout on.
Now admittedly this book is not going to appeal to everyone, several pages devoted to describing a crack in the plaster of a bathroom wall, several more to the narrator's cataloguing of it and a couple more on the hired plasterer's attempt to recreate it in the bathroom of a building the narrator has bought, had decorated and filled with actors in a precise recreation of a memory he has is not everyone's idea of a good night in. But, if you stick with it (and honestly these sections are not tedious in the slightest, so good a writer is McCarthy that he even makes plaster drying sound enthralling) you will be rewarded with a book that looks at what happens when someone has undergone a trauma and is unable to talk of it – trauma victims often relive over and over what has happened, our narrator is denied this and so recreates and relives memories and later other people's traumas. It looks at how modern life finds it hard to distinguish between the real and the artificial, we no longer see films or images on social media as artifice but rather the ideal, that which we should aspire to.
McCarthy gives us a protagonist who despite his behaviour is relatable to (reading it I thought how similar he was to these Hollywood stars that make crazy demands, if you have enough money you will find someone who will indulge it rather than save you from yourself – Paltrow's vagina candles spring to mind) and is sympathetic. His need to control, to know exactly what will happen when and live in that safe loop is understandable when he was nearly killed by a freak accident. Less likeable is the fixer Nas who falls in love with his ability to fulfil any whim his client demands and ends up offering to arrange the ultimate fix.
A wonder of a book.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

April 2021: Began rereading, got through most of it and then my enthusiasm petered out but that's more of a reflection on my circumstances than the book because wow I kind of loved it all over again and for the same reasons I did the first time. McCarthy is SUCH a good writer. I also find the brain of the narrator... both fascinating and relatable. Five stars!

2007:
I *loved* this book, but probably because it has exactly the ingredients I like: "unreliable" narrator, sharp writing, and a page-turning plot -- so hard to find all of these in one book!

I thought the premise was moderately interesting, but it's not what captured me. Rather, it was the way the book spun out and the narrator unraveled that fascinated me. And Tom McCarthy is just smart and witty, and his prose is razor-sharp. Reading the other reviews on this site of this book, I was genuinely surprised how many people didn't like the book. I think I could read anything written with as much style and precision as this book. The overall idea reminded me a bit of DeLillo or Saramago, and the razor-sharp writing reminded me of Ian McEwan, Damon Galgut, and J.M. Coetzee.

Highly recommended!

Caveat: I gave this a 5, with the understanding that "Pale Fire" and "The Egyptologist" both score 10.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flawless. A taut, tidy, disturbing little piece of fiction, and one that certainly won't be for everyone. A novel that should have been stifling and airless somehow manages to feel aerated and cautiously expansive, like an inflating balloon on the verge of bursting.

This isn't the sort of book for readers in the mood for something filled with likable characters or lyrical emoting. I love those books, but Remainder is not one of them--it isn't for the heart, it's for the head. It is a thought experiment, intensely rational, with lovely descriptive passages of everyday minutiae.

I kept thinking of Observatory Mansions when I read this--the books are quite different, but there is a certain kinship in the quality of the bizarre on display (where Observatory Mansions is concerned with the practice of stillness and the collection of objects, Remainder is concerned with the practice of motion and the collection moments/experiences).

Some people will, undoubtedly, find it gimmicky and hateable. I sort of understand their point, despite finding this to be an uncommonly polished, pitch perfect piece of writing.

[Jamie · Rating 1 out of 5]

"The Remainder" won the Believer book award, and I thought that gave it a good shot towards being something I would like. Boy, I was wrong. This book is awful. It starts out okay, but then it just devolves into the most painful exercise in futility - which may be the point, but God, this book made me mad.

The unnamed narrator has come into a huge sum of money by being hit by a flying object. He barely remembers the accident but now he has an ungodly amount of money and nothing to do with it. He also doesn't feel anything. He hires a guy to help him reenact events of his life, over and over and over again, with the hope that it will help him feel again. His life becomes a giant piece of performance art, and eventually his obsessions become more and more brutal, leading to the climax, which is totally, woefully predictable in my opinion.

I wanted to like this book. I think maybe I should have liked this book. I HATED THIS BOOK.

[Baba · Rating 2 out of 5]

A survivor of a mysterious accident gets locked into repetition and analysis. An at times darkly humorous, well written debut novel by McCarthy, which almost defines classification, originally I was very lazy in just calling it dark humour, and eventually came to the conclusion of defining it as surreal logic! Maybe it was too smart for me, but I found it hard work trying to either understand or enjoy this, although the core premise was interesting. 4 out of 12.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really excellent and memorable read, unusually written but satisfying as matches interesting and deep themes with a well written, and internally coherent and consistent (if extremely bizarre) plot and with interesting characters: the narrator obviously but also the facilitator Naz – initially someone who arranges the diaries and lives of rich people but who becomes with this assignment an obsessive information management junkie, actually encouraging the narrator’s obsession rather than checking it.

Naz’s enthusiasm therefore reinforces the narrators descent into increasingly bizarre re-enactments: first of a trivial incident a tyre repair yard, then a shooting near his house and then more an enactment – of a made-up robbery on a local bank, before finally deciding to stage the re-enactment with real people which descends into an actual robbery and the death of an unwitting actor.

Themes of this very consciously literary and theme-exploratory book include:

Matter and substance - including both the physical matter and impressions left behind by actions & the idea that creation like the common quote re sculpting from marble is about stripping away the unimportant to get down to the residual/remainder/essence);

Reproduction/recreation/re-enactment – the idea that we re-enact scenes in our mind but also in everyday life we consciously play out roles e.g. from films or for others or our own benefit. The re-enactments acquire a meta level by the end when he starts thinking of how actual robbers rehearse robberies and decides to stage an enactment indistinguishable from a robbery.

[R.]

Me and a friend each received promo copies of this...as far as I understand, it's À rebours meets Groundhog Day...or a man relives aesthetic minutae, or aesthetic minutae becomes his life.

Or is that "I and a friend"?

Me (...) received (a) promo

I (...) received (a) promo

I and a friend received promo copies of this...as far as I understand, it's À rebours meets Groundhog Day...or a man relives aesthetic minutae, or aesthetic minutae becomes his life.

I received a promo copy of this. A friend did, too. It's À rebours (or Against Nature) meets Groundhog Day: a man relives aesthetic minutiae, or aesthetic minutiae becomes his life.

A friend and I received free copies of this book. As I understand, it's À rebours meets Groundhog Day; or a man pays for the reenactment of aesthetic minutiae, or aesthetic minutiae becomes his life.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is a stunner, a breathless plunge into one man’s obsession. For anyone who thought existentialism as a genre of fiction tapped out about the middle of last century is in for a treat. This is a very modern take and a story that invites a wonderful bounty of interpretation and handily ducks each of them. A critique of a society where we are increasingly at the mercy of the whims of the rich, on our need for authenticity, locating meaning in the events our urban surroundings, what is art, and what is reality. I of course make this book sound boring by asking these questions, and this book is anything but. The logic of this book takes over and if you can stand it (or stand to stop reading) you will find terrifying, funny, and slightly deranged book that will cast the world in slightly tilted light.

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I watched the 2015 movie a couple of years ago which featured a really good central performance by English actor Tom Sturridge. I had no idea at the time that it is in fact based on a novel, of which I wanted to read but never got around to it. After reading McCarthy's Satin Island a while back, and being disappointed, I delved straight into Remainder pretty much knowing, having liked the film, I would the book.
This is a really clever and complex novel that gets the grey matter going into overdrive to try and un-puzzle the mystery that lays before us.
What we know is this - an obsessive compulsive Londoner; who is unnamed, gets a huge pay out after an accident left him in a coma, where he awakens into a state of self-consciousness and memory loss. Trying to get back to normal life the story sees the narrator spend his wealth by reenacting and creating a world triggered off by the sensation and comfort of returning memories, to present events, and those that may not have happened and those that haven't even happened yet? - not to give anything away but a quite stunning finale. McCarthy looks at how a traumatized post traumatic mind might build the broken pieces back from their foundations, and how the disturbing obsession of re-enactment says more disconnection than it does connecting. There are nods towards the cold existentialism of Sartre's Nausea, but with an avant-garde style narrative filled with a sinister dark humour, and the sort of brain-teasing brilliance and intellect of Christopher Nolan - maybe the sort of film he could have made on a limited budget at the start of his career, all set in a contemporary London. As a debut, I thought it was stunningly good. The most original British writer I've come across in years.

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very damaged story of a very damaged man.
Q:
“If you were the last person to pass through, your ticket should be the top one.” “I was the last one through,” I told him. “No one came past after me. But that’s not my ticket.” “If you were the last one through, then this must be your ticket,” he repeated. It wasn’t my ticket. I started to feel dizzy again. (c)
Q:
Everything, each movement: I had to learn them all. I had to understand how they work first, break them down into each constituent part, then execute them. (c)

[Banu Yıldıran Genç · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tom McCarthy çok acayip bir yazar. C'yi de okuduğum için bulduğu konuların ilginçliğinden çok çalışkanlığı, işlediği konuyu en derinine kadar araştırması beni cezbediyor diyebilirim.
Büyük bir kazadan sonra "gerçek" olabilmeyi hissetmek adına anlatıcının yaptıkları hem inanılmaz hem de son derece anlamlı. Yazar bizi bu ikilemde sallanırken bırakıyor.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

He was hit, a piece of technology falling from the sky. He was hospitalized and then when he came to, struggled to remember his past and worked to relearn basic motor functions.
“As I sat by my window watching people go by, l wondered which of them was the least formatted, the least unreal...l was an interloper on this whole scene, a voyeur. There were other people sitting behind windows too, in other coffee shops, mirroring me: interlopers too, all of them.”

Awarded a settlement of over eight million dollars, he set out to understand and capture what was real, the definition of authenticity.
“I'd gone to these extraordinary lengths in order to be real. And yet l'd never stopped and asked myself if it had worked....The realness I was after wasn't something you could just "do" once and then have "got": it was a state, a mode one that I needed to return to again and again and again....A drug addict doesn't stop to ask himself: Did it work? He just wants more bigger doses, more often: more.”

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

When The Guardian reviewed this novel, they referred to it as "splendidly odd" and I think that is an excellent description.

After a major accident and subsequent rehabilitation, a man is triggered by a crack in someone's wall to "re-enact" memories (although they might not actually be memories). As he has £8.5 million in compensation to play with, his re-enactments are extravagant. But, clearly, his mind after his accident doesn't work quite like a "normal" mind. Things spiral downwards.

This book starts off clever and funny and ends up clever and dark. It explores identity and memory. You will wait a long time to read another book as inventive and unusual as this. McCarthy is a bit like Richard Powers, I think: both are fascinated by connections and patterns, both are clearly very, very clever, both write books that I really enjoy reading.

[Joel]

My girlfriend read this book and hated it. So there are two reasons not to bother:

1) I usually agree with her about this stuff, so why waste the time?
2) If I read it and love it, she'll just look at me with contempt and shake her head.

Sorry, Tom McCarthy. If it makes you feel any better, I decided to probably not read C all on my own. It just seems annoying is all.