Satin Island

by Tom McCarthy

From the author of Remainder (the major feature-film adaption of which will be released in 2015) and C (short-listed for the Booker Prize), and winner of the Windham Campbell Prize, a novel that promises to give us the first and last word on the world--modern, postmodern, whatever world you think you are living in.

When we first meet U., our narrator, he is waiting out a delay in the Turin airport. Clicking through corridors of trivia on his laptop he stumbles on information about the Shroud of Turin--and is struck by the degree to which our access to the truth is always mediated by a set of veils or screens, with any world built on those truths inherently unstable. A "corporate ethnographer," U. is tasked with writing the "Great Report," an ell-encompassing document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions. Madison, the woman he is seeing, is increasingly elusive, much like the particulars in the case of the recent parachutist's death with which U. is obsessed. Add to that his longstanding obsession with South Pacific cargo cults and his developing, inexplicable interest in oil spills. As he begins to wonder if the Great Report might remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are startled awake by a dream of an apocalyptic cityscape. In Satin Island, Tom McCarthy captures--as only he can-- the way we experience our world, our efforts to find meaning (or just to stay awake) and discern the narratives we think of as our lives.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, 21st Century, Anthropology, Literature

173 pages, Hardcover

First published February 17, 2015

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

[Barry Pierce · Rating 1 out of 5]

What an utterly boring and navel-gazing novel. This was longlisted for the Man Booker!? In this novel we follow a character named U, no really, he's called fucking U, while he wonders and ponders for 200ish pages. I applaud this novel on its brevity, any longer and I would have literally died of boredom. 85% of this novel is just full scientific hokum that will just baffle and confuse any casual reader. Not to mention that it did one of my ultimate peeves. At some parts it reminded me of... Palahniuk... and once that happens it's game over for me, the red flags rise and I get the fuck out of dodge. Ugh. This is a literary Hindenburg.

[Nicola Balkind · Rating 1 out of 5]

Flashes of brilliance amid interminable shite.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jonathan Lethem, discussing his resistance to rereading Don DeLillo, wrote that he's "either as great as I thought he was when I thought he made all other writing look silly or he's a total disaster." I thought of that quote often as I read Satin Island. I don't know how to talk about this book other than to say I think it's a masterpiece. How can this plotless novel with a nameless protagonist who spends the course of the book looking at oil spills work so astonishingly well? Why is it a novel that makes all other writing look silly, like DeLillo's Mao II (or McCarthy's own Remainder) and not a total disaster, like Benoit Duteurtre's Customer Service? I can't recommend this book to you because I don't know who you are, but I'm thrilled Knopf took a chance on it, and I hope it finds an audience.

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow is this good - It's a strange, lean little novel/essay that has an incredibly interesting plot that it takes care to never actually show you (much of the critical work I've found on here is about that plot, which is funny). The meandering little linked essays recall Sebald, and stand as a refutation to 10:04, which I liked but seems bloated in comparison. There's even a superior cephalopod sequence! I loved McCarthy's Remainder, but this really is better. It takes on contemporary issues of attention span and monomaniac fixation and treats them anthropologically, without ever being boring or bogging down. There's an absolutely masterful sequence at the end of the book (I worry that people won't get to it) that's one of the most weird, exciting things I've read in a long time.

[Marc Kozak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Events! If you want those, you'd best stop reading now.

About 14 pages in, McCarthy issues this warning, and you should really take it seriously. If you have trouble reading books without things like interesting plots, memorable characters, evocative settings, romance, pacing, or normal narrative structures in general, then McCarthy is not for you. Seriously, turn back now.

McCarthy doesn't write; he strolls. He finds joy in things a step below the little things. He would likely be enthralled by actually watching paint dry. He would listen to a radio station stuck on static, and hear a symphony.

If you're still with me at this point, you're probably wondering why the heck anyone would ever read anything this guy writes. Other reviews use words like "boring," "pretentious," "weird," "self-indulgent," "exasperating," and "haphazard". And honestly, they're not even wrong! But this (and his previous, brilliant novel C) seem to go nowhere, until you put the book down, are wandering through the supermarket one day, and suddenly there's McCarthy -- hey remember what I said about that one thing? Can't stop thinking about it now, can you? And then there you are, trying to go to sleep -- there's McCarthy again. Hi, trying to go to sleep? THE UNIVERSE. Good luck sleeping now!

Satin Island is really the quintessential display of McCarthy's style. Using the mouthpiece of a corporate anthropologist who's working on some mysterious, impossible project, McCarthy tells essentially a series of seemingly unrelated anecdotes -- little nuggets of interesting historical facts, stray observations about people walking around, random musings about things from the television. Even the book's Afterword makes it clear that McCarthy was just writing down various things he happened to find interesting at the time.

But it works -- our corporate anthropologist has been tasked with writing THE great report -- a definitive piece that sums up our modern age, completely and fully. Obviously, this is impossible. So our narrator does what McCarthy does -- collects observations, files away summaries of objects and behaviors, grabs things here and there, and then tries to find any kind of connection, some sort of web that links it all together, hoping to stumble across a greater design, a moment of a larger truth, SOMETHING that explains it all.

McCarthy is essentially asking for the meaning of life.

As the book comes to close, a harrowing personal story from his lover makes him question if we should even be looking for a larger connection in the first place. Maybe we won't like the answer. Maybe a larger connection doesn't even matter at all. The woman's story unfolds heart-breakingly slowly, and the book's previous format of short, quick chapters gives it an even greater effect. It was a jarring shift into nihilism that physically tightened my chest. Admittedly, it leaves you feeling a little defeated at the end. There is no great answer, and the quest for the "great report" fails, as it was always destined to. But in his effort, you feel glimpses of something on the edge of your vision, a word that you can almost feel coming out of your mouth but can't remember how to say it. It's that feeling that McCarthy's work leaves you with most of all, which is maddening and enthralling.

McCarthy is one of my favorite modern authors. I don't blame others for not being able to get into his work, and I totally understand the criticisms. But every time I recognize a thought of his that floats into my head, I can't help but smile, and stare past the signals and noise of life into a place of symphonic static.

[Steven Godin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm all for writers trying something different, feeling like a breath of fresh air, and coming up with original ideas for a piece of fiction, and there were times here where I sat back and thought to myself that this guy is super intelligent and innovative, but on the whole, as a novel, it just didn't work for me. It simply isn't enough to just dazzle the reader with a show off narrative, as you have to reach the end and at least feel something; at least think about the characters and/or story - in this case there isn't really a story/plot but then at least have certain scenes floating about upstairs - in the hours and days to come, and I found hardly anything. One thing I will say in its defence is that Satin Island absolutely feels like it's in the right place at the right time in terms of exploring themes that are ever so apparent in the world of todays hashtag, engine search, information overloaded, iPhone obsessed, eagerly inquisitive restless generation. I much preferred McCarthy's Remainder. Difficult to tell weather this is meant to be read as a satire, but to be honest I couldn't really care.

[Maxwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I understand why people don't like this book that much, but I don't completely understand people who hate it. I mean, at some points there is nothing that exceptional. But at others it delivers these moments of clarity and insight that I have never seen put down in words before. And the connected nature of the storytelling and what U. as a narrator is examining was incredibly interesting and thought-provoking. He's not a particularly interesting character, though. He has virtually no personality which really allows you to just absorb his thoughts and notes with a sort of objective understanding. I found it, for such a short book, to be quite insightful and still leave me with questions of my own to ponder. I don't think it's award worthy, but there's something to it that's re-examining fiction, narrative, the world, these really big concepts, in a fresh way.

[Justin Evans · Rating 1 out of 5]

I give this book one star as a desperate cry for attention, which I figure is okay, since the book's blurb describes SI as "an unnerving novel that promises to give us the first and last word on the world" and suggests that in this book McCarthy "captures--as only he can--the way we experience our world." Take that, entire rest of the world!

Of course, the blurb is in part a joke, because the book's main character, U., is meant to write a report that is about everything--that will "name the world we live in"--for a rich business tycoon. And my one star is in part a joke, because it might also be a five star book.

How is this possible, you ask? Well, I have two readings of this book. In the first (one star), this is just another self-indulgent piece of flatulence, only yet more cliched than the self-indulgent flatulence that preceded it. I had repeated flashbacks to the '90s--here we have an anthropologist who apparently got his PhD without ever reading anything other than Levi-Strauss (compare: a biologist who still believes in genetic determinism); we have a lot of stuff about masks and performativity; he quotes Deleuze and Badiou as if they were fresh meat; he doesn't quote, but uses concepts from, Lacan; the novel draws false analogies between constructedness and fictiveness; IT BRINGS UP AND MISUES SCHRODINGER'S POOR ABUSED CAT [at this point my notes consist of the all-caps exclamation REALLY DUDE?!]; it quotes sous les paves la plage; like '90s theory it mistakes easily dissolved fallacies to produce apparent paradoxes (if a skydiver dies because the cords to his parachute were cut, when was he murdered? Incipit pages of guff); it acts as if writing was an act of oppression against the material world (words pollute us just like oil pollutes oceans!); it frets about the way media and the internet have changed everything (please ignore actually existing suffering and injustice); it somehow manages to imply that Mallarme was a totalitarian; it is a paeon in praise of trash and excrescence.

It does all this in what appears to be our new normal form: juxtapositions of random images that are meant to produce meaning. You may have experienced this as "modernism." But now, for some reason, it's freighted with all kinds of revolutionary freshness. McCarthy's images, fyi, are Staten Island, anthropology, material culture, oil-spills, the dead parachutist, media images of crowds, the Mallaremean 'book,' sex with a woman called Madison, Leibniz, pomo theory, corporate speak, Vanuatu, the Shroud of Turin, the internet, and cancer. It ends, of course, in New York. Thank you Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, et al.

Now, note "sex with a woman called Madison," because this where the book *might* get interesting, though no reviewers have picked up on this. The above list of cliches might have been produced by a random literary novelist who didn't bother to read anything and thinks he's being original. But introducing a woman who, for three quarters of the novel, does literally nothing other than be inseminated is simply not done any more, and McCarthy knows this. True, at the end of the book Madison confronts U. with the fairly trite observation that ideas aren't as important as, you know, actual suffering.

It is impossible to believe that McCarthy would willingly write a book so cliche-ridden as to include the girl who's up for anything sexually, and doesn't bother to, you know, talk or anything. And this leads me to think that the book's best scene is also the key to unlocking its secret. U. imagines giving a speech at a conference, where someone accuses him of aestheticizing of pollution. U. shouts down this dissenter, and it's quite funny.

But imagine for a second a writer so brave, so reckless, that he would actually write a spot-on parody of almost all of his time's most tiresome literary tropes. That he would do so with almost no sign whatsoever that he intended the book to be taken as a parody, except for this lone dissenting voice and the curious absence of one particular literary trope, viz., the excellent insistence that female characters be something other than sex toys. Why, I wonder, did McCarthy miss this one, even as he produced so much uncertainty, media fluff, internetism, and definitively boring theoretical goop? Could it be that McCarthy intentionally wrote a *terrible* novel, including a reckless act of immorality (i.e., objectifying the only woman in the novel) as a sign that he *knew* it was a terrible novel? Could it be that this is the best worst book ever written, a marvelous literary polemic taking aim at everything horrible in 'high-brow' literary writing, including the "now our hero comes into contact with other people and doesn't have to think about them anymore" conclusion?

I hope so, because otherwise this is just an even worse version of what everyone else is doing.

[Karen· · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little corner of the internet, this niche on a server somewhere in Thailand or Romania or wherever the digital archive that is connected with ·Karen·'s GR account is situated, what do you reckon, is that my little piece of immortality? How long after my death will these meandering reviews of books I have read since 2008 be stored, I wonder?

I loved this.

A running riff throughout the narrative is the story of a parachutist's death, which has its own resonance with me. We share our slightly unusual surname with a notorious German Liberal politician, who died on June 5 2003 when he cut off the main chute and failed to open the reserve. His parliamentary immunity had just been lifted to allow investigation of alleged tax evasion, arms dealing and misuse of party funds. For a long time when asked for my name the question, 'Oh, are you related to.....?' was almost inevitable. Here we are, only 13 years on, and that question is no longer asked.

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book gained a lot of publicity last year and seems to have divided opinion. Having heard talk of how McCarthy was reshaping the form of the novel, I was a little surprised how much this retained a traditional fictional structure, even though much of it does consist of semi-random musings on various oddities of modern life, and how they might be interpreted by an anthropologist such as the narrator U, who "works" for a shadowy corporation on a grand unifying project to understand and control the structures and patterns that underlie ordinary behaviour.

It is always readable and does contain sections that are insightful, but overall it felt a little directionless, and I am not convinced it amounts to much.

[Sam Quixote · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the most pretentious people I ever met was an anthropologist (the person would literally sniff and turn their noses up after making a point), so it’s no surprise to me that a novel featuring an anthropologist would turn out to be a load of pretentious crap. Because Satin Island is essentially a narrative about narratives (sniffs, turns up nose).

Our main character is U, a corporate anthropologist working for a major London consultancy firm that advises global corporations and governments on how to spot trends and manipulate them for future gain. U is hired by Peyman, the head of the firm, to write the “great report” on the age we’re living in - an extraordinarily abstract and humongous project and one that U unsurprisingly fails to accomplish. Nevertheless he attempts to write it by focusing on seemingly random events like parachutists who plummeted to their deaths after their chutes didn’t open, oil spills, and internet buffering and trying to find connections between them(!).

I think the narrator “U“ is Tom McCarthy’s way of putting “you”, the reader, into the same position as the protagonist. You are reading this novel and, in the reading, you are looking for clues as to what it’s about: its themes, meanings, etc. in much the same way that U is looking at random events and trying to figure out how it comes together as an understandable narrative. U and you are one and the same, and the effect is like reading a novel about someone experiencing a novel. Reading fiction is as much a way of understanding our world as an anthropologist taking random glimpses of humanity from various sources and teasing a narrative from them.

At least that’s what I took to be the point of the book. Because despite the meandering tangents on zombie parades, Amazonian tribes, the Shroud of Turin, and a hundred other things, McCarthy never really brings it all together into anything meaningful. There are no insights into our modern age and we’re no clearer to understanding it by the end of the book.

Then I realised as I was sitting there thinking about what I’d just read, I was doing what U does for much of the book: sitting in his increasingly Beautiful Mind-esque basement room trying to understand the information presented to him. Like the mirror effects of certain aspects of the story - the cancer that spreads through Petr’s body likened to the oil spill that spreads across the surface of the world - U and the reader are meant to be made parallel.

Which isn’t to say that that interesting-ish approach to a novel makes it worth reading or even enjoyable because it doesn’t and isn’t. It’s written well though it’s such a slight book because it’s all style that doesn’t leave much of an impression that I doubt it’s something I’ll remember for very long or return to ever again. Because like most self-consciously literary novels, Satin Island is unbearably tedious most of the time. It has an enormously dull protagonist with unconvincingly portrayed non-characters making up the rest of the small cast, a non-plot and a non-story to keep you from really connecting with the book, and a purpose that could be described as self-serving and self-satisfied at best.

Literary novels tend to have a thoughtful concept at its base, a few well-written lines, an idea or two worth pondering, and little else besides. I’d say at least 90%, probably more, of Satin Island is pure guff. That Tom McCarthy writes in the acknowledgments that “I spent (my artist’s residency in Stockholm) projecting images of oil spills onto huge white walls and gazing at them for days on end” and was paid to “sit and think about the general impossibility of writing a novel about the general impossibility of etc.” makes me want to slap him - assuming I could reach his head stuffed firmly up his arse!

I suppose some fans of Nicholson Baker might find elements to enjoy in Satin Island. Baker famously writes two kinds of novel - the ridiculously overtly sexy kind (House of Holes, Vox), and the most determinedly mundane ones possible. Box of Matches is about a man sat in front of a hearth staring at a fire; The Mezzanine takes place during an office worker’s lunchtime as he eats a hot dog; The Anthologist (probably the one closest to Satin Island) is about a poet attempting to put together a poetry anthology.

That readership plus anthropologists will probably enjoy this. Anyone else though is unlikely to know or care what the hell is going on.

[Jen Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YK28...

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The first move of any strategy of cultural production, he’d say, must be to liberate things – objects, situations, systems – into uselessness.”
― Tom McCarthy, Satin Island



I'm going to bounce back and forth between three and four stars on this one. When McCarthy is writing about things and dancing through data, symbols, fabrics, etc his prose reminds me of William Gibson and his Blue Ant trilogy. He has a way of organizing chaos or at least describing the chaos in a way that allows the reader to float and sometimes surf his text. When McCarthy is writing about place and people he reminds me a bit of J.G. Ballard (especially books like Crash and Super-Cannes). He creates an ambiant zone of transgressive urgency that is as smooth as Brian Eno pissing into Duchamp's little fountain.

But dear Lord, just skip the sections when he writes dialogue. They hurt. They feel like I was dropped from some lush avant-garden to some backwoods, underwatered, status of woe. Cotton-mouthed, McCarthy writes conversations that would be better dressed in most YA fan fiction. OK. Perhaps, I've gone too far, but seriously, the dialogue needed a bit of work. Other than that, it was a good book and didn't scare me away from reading more of Tom McCarthy.

[JimZ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, this could have been 400 pages….it was ONLY 189 pages. So that’s a “plus”. 😐

And I guess I should have read this review first (https://mastersreview.com/book-review... ) in which this is said:
• A few caveats before you rush to order the book off Amazon: it is not for everyone. If you do not see yourself being entertained by 192 pages of almost pure interiority—pages of pensive musings on things like the history of theoretical anthropology, the aesthetics of oil spills, and what video buffering implies about our experience of linear time—look for another purchase.

Not too thrilled with this. I had ordered it months ago and it sat on a shelf, and I finally decided to read it. I had read one other book by this author, ‘Remainder’, and it was so clever and so weird and a bit disturbing that it stuck with me…. lots of books regarding plot do not stick with me. Anyway, this story line was weird but ultimately not satisfying.

An anthropologist employed by a mega-corporation had a project given to him to write ‘the Great Report’, which I guess would make the corporation look good. That plot element failed to grab me. He had heard on the news about a parachutist who was killed because his chute would not open, and the police were considering it a murder case. So, I thought that would somehow be part of the plot but that fizzled out. A co-worker had thyroid cancer and initially they thought he would pull through, but he didn’t. There was an oil spill somewhere that got worse and worse… And then near the end of the book, his girlfriend revealed to him an incident that had happened to her many years ago when she was a student protestor in Genoa Italy right before September 11, 2001. And like, OK….so what did that have to do with anything?

This book reminded me a bit of Rachel Cusk’s works (Transit, Outline, and Kudos). Because there were long conversations between him and other people. Anyway, I cannot highly recommend this book. I’ll be anxious to see what others thought of it.

Reviews:
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
• https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/bo...
• https://www.theatlantic.com/entertain...

[Vanessa · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 stars.

I thought about writing a longer review for this, but when I tried to think of what I could possibly say about this book I drew an almost-total blank. Essentially, the one thought this book left me with was: what was the fucking point?

Why this has been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize I'll never know. Once or twice there were elements that I thought were quite entertaining (U's thought process on how he would have done his speech better was amusing), but for the most part this was a snore-fest and I took nothing away from it.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

If W.G. Sebald had written Remainder instead of Tom McCarthy, it would have turned out to be a book exactly like Satin Island.

The novel requires concentration. Events occur in repeating patterns and you get the feeling that these patterns matter, but you're not sure why. To my way of reading, the patterns feel like a refined and far more subtle expression of Remainder's "reenactments." The novel presents a way of looking at the world that is more rational than the world of Remainder, but no less disorienting. When I put the book down to go do something else, the feelings I had while reading the novel affected my lived experience. I saw things differently. It's as if the novel made me feel a little stoned. Quite an accomplishment for words on a page.

[Dannii Elle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can honestly say that this book is like no other I have read before but I am totally undecided on whether I loved, loathed or tolerated it!

Satin Island is set in the corporate world and deals with the overwhelming prospect of finding meaning to our existence and our place in the world around us, through an ethnographic approach. It is set out in the format of, what appear to be, seemingly disjointed journal entries penned by our protagonist, U. These entries help to build an image of the man behind them: U is inquisitive; intelligent; has a questioning mind with a broad spectrum; has diverse tastes; is disassociated with the world around him except in small, exclusive pockets; seemingly unempathetic to world crisis or immune to the ever-presence of them; unemotional; forensic in analysis and cold, clinical and robotic in nature. U is the embodiment of his job description. U is an anthropologist.

Despite being able to exact quite a precise study of him, I felt no empathy or understanding for my protagonist. He was my link to the story and I felt he failed in that respect, which is perhaps why I felt no attachment towards this book. U is, like us all I believe, struggling to find meaning and purpose to his life, and this should have made him a compelling protagonist but instead his thoughts were laid out with such clinical precision as to leave no conviviality to emanate from them to the reader. This book left me much like U’s personality – cold.

U’s desire to find a common thread between all the events that happen on earth and divine some grand significance and directive from them can be quite subtly and cleverly evidenced in various tropes McCarthy as deployed throughout the book. U(you), the company he works for (called only The Company, the ambivalent account U is attempting to summarise his findings into (The Great Report) and the secret and nonsensically named project his company is working on (the Koob-Sassen project) are all kept purposefully vague. And this is the base premise of all anthropology and all that U is attempting to decipher. All these examples refer to generalisations instead of actual, individual instances, as anthropology does not deal with the specific but with the overall.

This book made me think. Hard! And I believe that any book that makes me evaluate the world around me deserves some credit. It’s failings as a fictional read were its saving graces as a non-fictional study of both the mind of an anthropologist and the attempt to find meaning in a chaotic world.

[Joachim Stoop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mea culpa!
A friend/avid reader was so crazy about this novel, that it convinced me to reread it. To be honest, the first time I didn't find an entrance so I drifted out to reading it impatiently, ending almost diagonally. It was a reading experience of more effort than gain, with more sketchy, blurry texts than oxygen and patterns and it slipped away from me. I sensed it was brilliant but didn't see it.
The second time - more patient- I found out that my entrance lay a bit further up the road. I wasn't searching for a plot and tried harder to connect the dots and to see it as 'a sign of the times' both in content as in form. It's a tough read, but in the end it gave me more than enough satisfaction.

Lesson learned!


My original review:
Baudrillard, Lacan, Derrida would've liked it. Maybe Zizek will. I didn't. Not really. Some of it. I do understand the premise and the postmodern mirror, but it's just such a drag to read. But at the same time it's harsh and uncool to be so negative about something that -I guess- can be called brilliant. Maybe this whole review is redundant.

[Gerhard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Satin Island is an exasperating novel that occasionally hints at being extraordinary, but the reader’s enjoyment of it is constantly thwarted by Tom McCarthy himself.

Perhaps that is the ultimate point: this is one of those eyebrow-arched postmodern treatises on the meaninglessness of meaning in our information-saturated (Dis)Information Age.

Oops: ‘Treatise’ is one of the words that are struck-through on the cover, along with Report, Confession, Essay and Manifesto. That leaves Novel … but the reader has no idea how this ranks in the pecking order.

Certainly the reader has no clearer idea at this novel’s end, which shares one of postmodernism’s most irritating attributes: the lack of satisfactory closure.

U. is an anthropologist working for The Company, tasked to compile The Great Report. His agonising over this insurmountable task, which is never clearly defined, serves as a narrative platform for McCarthy to riff on anything and everything, from Levi Strauss to the symbolism inherent in parachutes.

While this makes for interesting reading – McCarthy has a voracious, prodigious intellect – the reader is never able to engage with the book or characters emotionally.

It reads more like all of the struck-through terms on the cover than it does as a novel. But, perhaps, that is also the point.

[Antonomasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Narrated by an anthropologist working for a large corporation, I'd guess at some point within the next five years, Satin Island deals with some topics I find fascinating that often get a rough ride on Goodreads: academic analysis of aspects of pop/contemporary culture which are not literary, artistic or scientific; and an area of corporate culture and relations best bracketed under marketing. (I sometimes think I might be the only person on GR who really likes the DFW story 'Mr Squishy', and that that's because a) the crossover between people who know this kind of jargon/have relevant work experience and read this kind of book is very small, and b) even then, hardly anyone else treats it as an enjoyable form of trash culture. A number of years ago, I had a crack-like obsession with reading about marketing segmentation systems; sometimes I found sites where full booklets with dozens of pages of categories and analyses, probably produced only for those in specialist industry areas, had ended up available to the public; locating these was as much of a kick as locating a rare record or book is for a collector. And if you're a proper 'literary' person, that stuff should be anathema, right? )

The short chapterlets (deliberately resembling sections in a long workplace report) often reminded me of the early paragraphs of long Goodreads reviews, the sort where the poster concentrates more on throwing around ideas and general knowledge than on personal stories or emotions: it was very interesting, but I rarely felt the need to note things unless I learnt something knew. (told him that the word tragedy derived from the ancient Greek custom of driving out a sheep, or tragos—usually a black one—in a bid to expiate a city’s crimes. Or Paris, Daniel explained when I commented on the pavement’s texture, has the smoothest street surface of any major European city. It’s because of sixty-eight, he said, the general uprisings, when revolutionaries pulled up all the cobblestones to throw them at the cops. )
More interesting than most novels, (I love non-fiction, but find it harder to review in the depth I'd like, so end up reading more novels) yet these paragraphs felt disposable because of their tonal similarities to abundant internet content.


My acquaintance with anthropology is pretty low; a few books, and some bits of theory introduced as approaches to other subjects I studied in more depth. Therefore, the following were, to me, interesting critique:

Following a description of cargo cults and the sneering approach of the first anthropologists who looked at them:
Didn’t we, too, have our own, Nazarene John Frumm? They were, of course, correct. Nor was this Messianism confined to Christians. It strikes me that our entire social organism—its economy, its social policy, its civil order—that these don’t implode, hurling us all into a wild abyss of plunder, rape and burning, is down to their being reined in, held in alignment, by a yoking to this notion of the Future;
Yes! On some level, almost everyone (except perhaps staunch Cioranites?) is waiting for something beyond their power to be improved in the future: even if one's own life were perfect, there would still be problems in wider society and environment we hope will be sorted out.

The narrator visits Claudia, a university friend who now curates a museum; it has objects that were taken from tribes during the colonial era. The two of them have been trying to work out what an unlabelled artefact in the store room might be:
Why not return it? I asked. That doesn’t work, she answered curtly. The tribe’s descendants don’t know what this wicker thing is for either; they’ve all got mobile phones and drink Coke. And besides, if you repatriate an object it just turns up on the market six months later — may as well just send it straight to the collector’s Texas ranch. That’s even worse than us having it. So they pile up here.

Those of us minded to the recording and keeping of history find irony in this:
When the last Aborigine who understood the cipher died without passing the knowledge down, they sent a delegation here, to see this book. It served as a kind of cheat-sheet for them. It was a weird scene: we had all these Aborigines here, wearing their ceremonial garb, walking around Frankfurt. They were grateful to the museum, she continued—although, after they’d looked at the book, they requested that all copies be destroyed.

Satin Island gives me the longed-for impression of a novelist writing an academic convincingly, by getting to know, and discussing, the discipline in depth. Books which give a character and academic background as a fact, but don't make it part of their thinking or the narrative annoy me, for example, Sense of an Ending and Hunters in the Snow. But would an anthropologist find Satin Island convincing and knowledgeable?


I liked the moments of self-awareness about laziness and limitations that can creep into casual, or non-peer reviewed academic discussion:
(we were, in fact, slightly confusing two separate scientific theorems—the Hawthorne effect doesn’t actually have much to do with Schrödinger’s hypothesis; but, not being quantum physicists, we didn’t know or care).


There's also a critique of first-world detachment here (the detachment of the academic, of the internet, of the corporation, of the aesthetic v the political), but pitched from an unusual angle, not just the typical Tumblr-SJW one seen all over the place these days. Some reviewers seem to be certain the author agrees with the narrator on these points, but there's really no reason to assume he does. I might be projecting my own opinions into the book, but it often seems to use detachment as a genuinely interesting approach, whilst showing there are points when it can go too far.
- The narrator watches footage of oil spills for their aesthetic qualities, using analogies of cooking toffee, PVC fetish gear, vinyl records, culminating in a grandiose fantasy of a triumphant conference presentation about this new way of looking at them.
Bad aesthetics, at that: misguided and ignorant. They dislike the oil spill for the way it makes the coastline look “not right,” prevents it from illustrating the vision of nature that’s been handed down from theologians to romantic poets to explorers, tourists, television viewers: as sublime, virginal and pure. Kitsch, I tell you (here I’d thump my fist onto the podium, three times in quick succession): kitsch, kitsch, kitsch! And wrong: for what is oil but nature? Rock-filtered organic compounds—animal, vegetable and mineral—broken down and concentrated by the planet’s very crust: what could be purer than that? When oil splatters a coastline, Earth wells back up and reveals itself; nature’s hidden nature gushes forth. The individual responsible for the spill, he should be considered a true environmentalist: nature’s more honest intermediary, its loyaler servant.
It may be interesting as pure idea/spectacle, but it's sociopathic in its disregard for real-life effect and the experience of organisms who could never see it that way.

- In a somewhat similar vein, crowds of worshippers at Mecca are a spectacle more than they are persons:
The process seemed endless, self-perpetuating: as each static row of white-robed figures was picked up and swept into the swirl, the next row moved up one to take its place, and each row behind this one did the same, a new row forming at the back, more pilgrims waiting behind this, and more behind.
But that's more ambiguous, less not-okay, because the people are not suffering, it seems allowable to view the crowd aesthetically - perhaps the previous discussion of oil spills makes one see a sinister absence of empathy where it wasn't essential in the first place, and maybe the dialogue seems questionable because it's about a group of people who are often criticised in the West - whereas there seems nothing dodgy about the comment on the footage of Parisian rollerbladers.

The Narrator's colleague also watches a lot of zombie parades. I was disappointed there was no analyses of these as a phenomenon, other that to acknowledge how common they are. IMO they are to do with people feeling like aspects of modern life have zombified them (which aspects? what do the participants think?) and/or that there is a rapaciousness in economic relations, led by the general shift rightwards towards a neoliberal consensus.(The 1% turning many of the 99% into zombies.) It's a while since I looked for anything about this, but last time I did, 2 or 3 years ago, there wasn't anything. Would have welcomed some dialogue about it, in the form of the book. This is the sort of pop-culture analysis I love.


I'm puzzled by one reviewer's negative comments about the portrayal of the narrator's FWB, Madison. It was noticeable to me how up-to-date the attitudes were in Satin Island, compared with other, only slightly older books - that there isn't the talk about sex acts and body parts that riles a lot of fourth-wave feminists; Madison is never shown as playing games, she is also only in it for casual sex, she seems to be interested in the narrator because of *her* fetishes rather than the other way round, and we hear her opinions about other, non-sex issues (and I think those are part of the reason she doesn't 'want more' from him - they don't agree on enough). It sounds to me like an egalitarian arrangement, just narrated by someone whose main focus in life is his work, these sexual encounters taking up only a small amount of time and headspace. And who's to say it's not that way for her too?


The narrator is trying to critique the internet age, he thinks he's original, but he isn't. (This is where it's very pointed that he's called U.) It's hard to be original when there are so many voices, so I'm sure the unoriginality is intentional on the part of the author.
He develops the concept Present-Tense Anthropology™; an anthropology that bathed in presence, and in nowness, which is also just switching your fucking phone/tablet/laptop off, and living in the moment - watching the gig instead of taking photos of it.

Write Everything Down, said Malinowski. But the thing is, now, it is all written down. There’s hardly an instant of our lives that isn’t documented.

What if just coexisting with these objects and this person, letting my own edges run among them, occupying this moment, or, more to the point, allowing it to occupy me, to blot and soak me up, rather than treating it as feed-data for a later stock-taking—what if all this, maybe, was part of the Great Report?

ethnographers—U-thnographers!—no longer scrolling through dead entrails of events hoping to unpack the meaning of their gestures, would instead place themselves inside events and situations as they unfolded—naïvely, blithely and, most of all, live—their participation-from-within transforming life by bringing its true substance to the fore at every instant, in the instant, not as future knowledge but as the instant itself, which, like a ripened pod, would overswell its bounds and rupture, spawning meaning, spreading it forth to all corners of the world 

Or something many of us must have thought, albeit in different words: modernity itself is no more than a credo in the process of becoming “dated,” or at least historical. The term epoch, I informed my listeners, originally meant “point of view,” as in the practice of astronomy; we should return to understanding epoch as a place from which one looks at things.

It was nice to find this idea, which I've often thought of myself, albeit more positively than Madison, who's speaking here: If knowing everything about a person were the be-all and end-all of human interaction, she said, we’d just carry memory-sticks around and plug them into one another when we met. (There are a handful of close friends I'd like to have given these to, so I didn't have to take up my and their time with so much goddamn writing about stuff from the past.)


Another curious satirical strand is about the narrator's friend who has cancer. In what appears to be an allusion both to antibiotic resistance and to alternative medicine approaches to cancer, the hosptical do lab sensitivity tests done for the cancer's reaction to a variety of naturally occurring substances such as rosemary, hummingbird saliva or orange juice. (cf efforts to develop new antibiotics from soil bacteria, and research on and use of substances like honey, essential oils and maggots). This friend, Petr, provides occasions for the narrator's clearest instances of empathy:
The windows of the hospital were smudged and blackened too; his room was on the twenty-first floor and they obviously didn’t bother to clean them that often, or at all. This upset me, much more than the fact of Petr’s illness did. For crying out loud, I felt like shouting to the nurse, ward manager, whoever: if you can’t save these people, at least clean the windows.
Petr's suffering is happening in person, in front of him, and it's also not work. They can talk, it's not just digitally interactive, there are words as well as images. The oil spills are thousands of miles away on screen and he approaches them academically.
The sentiment/idea there is not new, and it's somewhat reactionary (some people are more than capable of being empathic online), but I liked the way that McCarthy makes the reader work for it.


The last two chapters, much longer than the others, jarred. 13 was Madison's account of police brutality and bizarre experiences after being arrested at an anticapitalist demonstration in 2001. 14 is an account of U's journey to Staten Island during a conference; he earlier had a dream about 'Satin Island', and figured Staten was the origin of the name. Others praise this chapter but I found it the dullest in the book - it contains a lot more real-world experience than many of the others, but where this book worked for me was when it was analytical and/or strange. Perhaps the strengths of McCarthy's writing lie with the latter. My finding this last chapter dull may or may not have been intentional on the part of the author - it might be meant as a positive contrast to all the mediated experience elsewhere in the book and passed me by. Or, noting that McCarthy - whom I hadn't read before - has been called a 'laureate of disappointment', perhaps he is deliberately disappointing the reader in the way a person could get disappointed with a journey on a crowded, grubby old ferry not living up to dreams or the shininess of the internet, or that protest rarely changes as much as people hope, and/or with the way life isn't entirely coherent or story-shaped, and doesn't always make sense.

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost gave up on this. I couldn’t get a grip. A GR friend had said there was a great section at the end. I flipped there and discovered where SATIN in the title comes from, and noticed that in The Acknowledgements McCarthy talks about spending his grant time watching video loops of oil spills projected on his office walls. That was my entry point. I started again.

This profoundly disturbing novel is written in chapters that resemble memos to oneself while the main character, U, engages in a corporate job that requires much flight-time and international conferences. "Call me U" is an anthropologist, an in-house ethnographer for a consultancy.

"The Company (let’s continue to call it that) advised other companies how to contextualize and nuance their services and products. It advised cities how to brand and re-brand themselves; regions how to elaborate and frame regenerative strategies, governments how to narrate their policy agendas…What we essentially do is fiction."

It can hardly be said U was happy in his work. U would dream at night, like many of us, but his sexual dreams might have pieces of his work or things he’d read in the news incorporated. If he read about an oil spill, for instance, his dreams would have some kind of female figure, sexy, arising out of the sea covered in oil blobs:

“a sluttish Aphrodite frolicking in the blackened foam, her face adorned with the look that readers’ wives and models have in dirty magazines.”

At least two things were happening to U while he was preparing a report for the corporation he worked for. One was that he’d read about a parachutist whose strings to his parachute were cut before he took a dive, and the other was that a business associate of his was dying of thyroid cancer. Both men "were dead before they hit the ground," as it were. The crime scene was "in the sky", in the very air we breathe.

This is a novel about our death, but before the "fall" as it were. The parachutist "had been murdered without realizing it." The man with thyroid cancer is already dead while he continues to relate the doctor’s findings every day. The people on this planet are dead while we continue to document to infinitude the activities of humans past and present, including the oil spills and the waste dumps, one of which is Satin Island, formerly Staten Island, now covered over with golf courses and walkways and greeting visitors to the United States in the same general vicinity as the Statue of Liberty.

You (that is, U) don’t have "to go to Staten Island--actually go there--[that] would be profoundly meaningless....Not to go there was, of course, profoundly meaningless as well…the explosion’s already taking place—it’s always been taking place. You just didn’t notice…"

U has a sense, while he does his work as an anthropologist, of having come “too late.” He knows there is more to the patterns he sees in the oil spills and the sudden deaths but he can’t make them out until a coworker tells him of her experience as a demonstrator, a protester, against the G8 Summit in 2001.

The novel is disturbing because I also think there may be no way back to health on the planet, but I would never just give up. When some of our best scientists are thinking one way to save the human race is by sending representatives to colonize Mars, life as we know may be...let’s say, limited.

Only after finishing the novel did I know what that earlier reviewer I linked to in the top of this review meant. When you get there, you will see it, too.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting enough in places, but Booker Prize material? Nah. U. is a corporate anthropologist in London, coming off the success of the Koob–Sassen contract and facing the blank page of the Great Report he’s been tasked with writing. But not much happens here; the book is much more about his anthropological observations and the things he fixates on, like oil spills, a sabotaged parachutist, and Satin Island – a place he encounters in a dream and then, by word association, likens to Staten Island, a destination he doesn’t quite make it to. “Still sitting at my desk and blotter, I looked up at the sky and thought these thoughts,” he notes.

For me the most interesting parts of the novel were about narrative: U.’s friend Petr has terminal cancer, and is saddest about the fact that he won’t be able to tell anyone about the experience of dying. The book opens in Turin airport, and a major ‘event’ of the latter half is his girlfriend Madison telling him about a time she passed through the same airport. It’s a bizarre and unsettling story about attending a protest against capitalism in Genoa, being subject to police beating, then undergoing individual imprisonment and torture lite. And it’s all been forgotten because this took place shortly before 9/11.

But maybe, just maybe, he reasons, somewhere in between these two extremes—in between understanding so completely that an object’s robbed of its allure (on the one hand) and (on the other one) not understanding anything at all—there might be some ‘ambiguous instances’ in which the balance is just right.

I’d like to say the above was my experience of Satin Island, but mostly I found this a bit too clever for its own good. If you’re interested in the historical practice of anthropology, don’t miss Euphoria by Lily King; if you want a better book in which nothing much happens, I recommend Asunder by Chloe Aridjis.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was in a generous mood.

[David Katzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd and somewhat interesting book that felt flawed in execution but worth reading. The main character is an anthropologist with a corporate job, essentially helping to develop consumer cultural insights to help his corporation make more money. The book is split between mundane slice of life experiences and his esoteric/abstract social insights. Which I felt were a mishmash of intriguing analyses and vague bullshit. With quite a bit of denial and rationalization thrown in, to justify his working for a corporate paymaster, assisting it to be more corporatey and profitable-y. His relationships with his seeming only friend and his girlfriend are rather banal.

His vague ways are thrown into stark contrast about two-thirds of the way through the story where out of nowhere, he is told a story by his girlfriend that smashes up his rationalizations of the innocence of corporate wealth and power. Her story is extreme, horrifying and weird all wrapped together. And a mix of believable (I've been on the end of police brutality before, during an Iraq War protest) and farce. I find the intrusion of these types of Deus-ex-machina stories to be a bit "cheating" by the author. They just feel contrived to me. I can't deny the interest of it, but it was too much out of nowhere for me. A believable epiphany such as in the classic Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is hard won in storytelling. In this case, it felt arbitrary.

Overall, some interesting ideas presented here, and it was enjoyable to peek into the brain of a corporate anthropologist. But if you choose to read it, be prepared for a shocking side-story that may disturb you far more than you had been prepared for.

[Britta Böhler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-reading this book right after having finished A Brief History of Seven Killings, it made me realize - even more than the first time 'round - how much Satin Island is the anti-novel, anti-realism and anti-plot.

The main character, called U, (You, the reader? A reference to Ulysses?) is an anthropologist working for The Company and his main project is to write the ultimate book about our time and age.

As I said before, Satin Island is not about plot. If you enjoy books mainly because of the story, the twists and turns of the plot, this isn't the book for you. This novel is a Tower of Babel, a collage of thoughts, like the scraps of notes U is collecting. It's full of hints and references, and lots of them.

Satin Island is a brilliant account of our time, detached and fragmented and repetitive. Always buffering, waiting for reality to reveal itself. The book shows the constant bombardement with information, superficial, fleeting, just scratching the surface but with no deeper meaning. Just like us, U is trying to make sense of this world, he desperately wants to connect the dots and turn the arbitrary flow of information into something you could call knowledge, where it all makes sense and where the whole is more than just the sum of its parts. And it more than touches on big themes like faith and dying, and not least of all: The Future.

Satin Island, in short, makes you think. And think again.

[tJacksonrichards · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw McCarthy speak at the NYC Center for Fiction just a few hours after I finished reading this book. My first of his novels, I was initially attracted by its ubiquitous categorization as avant-garde fiction and then further intrigued by its many comparisons to DeLillo.

True to the latter descriptor, Satin Island often reminded me of DeLillo's vision of the Warren Report (apropos Libra) as "the Oxford English Dictionary of the assassination and also the Joycean novel." This link was corroborated when, at the speaking engagement, McCarthy referenced DeLillo's claim (in Mao II) that 'the world narrative belongs to terrorists now more than novelists' as thematic inspiration to Satin Island. But in this book, McCarthy explained, he updates 'terrorists' with the idea of 'the network'. In other words, he's asserting that the role of the novelist has been usurped by nebulous, unaccountable powers.

In so doing, Satin Island closes the book on a school of writers (Wallace, Smith etc) who cut their academic teeth on Critical Theory (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, semiotics, post-structuralism etc) by showing these once radical ideas subsumed into the machinery of capitalism; Theory is no longer an unreciprocated tool of the humanities. And so we wait - in buffer, in limbo - for a path forward. This is the book's most provocative implication.

While structurally clever and tonally commanding, Satin Island is in no way difficult, oblique or formally radical. So rather than avant-garde, it is profoundly contemporary by design. And if it lacks the emotional or aesthetic impression of a truly great novel - it has a lot more head than (he)art - then the ideas herein are still of lasting import, declaring the end of an era and standing as a significant challenge to new writers and thinkers.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

The theme of the conference was -- for once! -- not The Future. It was The Contemporary. This was even worse.

Yes, the Contemporary is much much worse than it seems. Or seemed. Things seem quite bad now, but here, a few years back, McCarthy was conducting a mass anthropological excavation of a dysfunctional post-modern world -- vast and inescapable systems, invisible power centers, lost objectivity, sullied data sets, and, at its heart a magnetically fascinating system of waste and decay. McCarthy briskly spins out his concepts in essayistic numbered sub-sections, self-dissecting and recomposing continuously. There's not really a plot, but there doesn't ever need to be. This gives me a new kind of reassurance in the continuing relevance of the classic high-concept late-modern/lightly-post-modern novels of Delillo and the like that I've lately sort of instinctually avoided.

[Héctor Genta · Rating 5 out of 5]

La Grande Relazione sulla nostra epoca.

Scrivere la Grande Relazione, “il Libro, la Prima e Ultima parola sulla nostra epoca, dare un nome a ciò che succede ora”, questo è il compito affidato a U. (you?) dalla società per cui lavora. Questo è anche l’ambizioso obiettivo che Tom McCarthy affida a Satin Island.
Libro importante, diciamolo sin da subito, di uno scrittore notevolissimo che segnerà gli anni a venire. Un altro di quei libri che escono dal postmoderno per aprire la strada del romanzo verso una direzione che per ora è priva di nome: neo-avanguardismo? post-postmoderno? Difficile dire, anche perché questo autore sembra battere una strada solitaria, un territorio che non è ancora una corrente letteraria. Delillo è il nome che mi viene in mente per fissare un punto di partenza al lavoro di McCarthy, tutto il resto probabilmente verrà con il tempo.
Satin Island è un romanzo di idee, nel quale i personaggi non hanno spessore e la trama serve solo a veicolare i pensieri del protagonista. Il mondo descritto è quello in cui viviamo adesso, un mondo privo di un centro, costruito intorno a tanti hub, luoghi di transito, nodi reali o virtuali che tengono in connessione persone e idee. Siamo dalle parti della società liquida baumaniana: bombardati da miliardi di notizie attraversiamo confusi le strade di un’epoca segnata dalla parcellizzazione della realtà. Una a una sono crollate tutte le certezze: la verità è morta, sostituita dall’opinione (più o meno condivisa).
Vita reale e virtuale si confondono in un orizzonte fatto di schermi e di link, di immagini che veicolano concetti contraddittori. McCarthy calca la mano proprio sull’indeterminatezza e sulla contraddittorietà del nostro tempo, presentando nel libro situazioni che si prestano a spiegazioni antitetiche ma che teoricamente potrebbero essere tutte vere. La fuoriuscita di petrolio in mare e la morte di un paracadutista sono notizie, immagini che si aprono a un ventaglio di interpretazioni sconfinato: la realtà è diventata una continua e impossibile interpretazione dei fatti.
È come se di colpo fossero crollati gli steccati che dividevano i concetti. Le definizioni sono diventate labili, discutibili e il disordine regna sovrano.
La sfida che McCarthy propone a se stesso con questo libro è titanica: raccontare la confusione della nostra epoca dal di dentro è come provare a cavalcare le onde del Pacifico sulla tavola di un bambino. Gli strumenti a disposizione sono inadeguati, la situazione muta ad ogni istante e soprattutto non conosciamo la direzione del nostro viaggio, costretti ad aggrapparci a un generico concetto di futuro in assenza di altri riferimenti validi. Impresa disperata, eppure McCarthy non cade, dimostrando di cavarsela più che bene in mare aperto. Non cade anche perché ha coscienza dei suoi limiti. È consapevole di trovarsi in una specie di loop: analizzare i meccanismi della società vuol dire analizzare anche se stessi, sapendo di essere soggetti alle stesse regole che condizionano gli altri, per questo non va alla ricerca di improbabili uscite di sicurezza ma concentra la sua ricerca sul tentativo di capire quello che sta accadendo. A questo proposito mi sembra perfettamente calzante la sua provocazione a proposito della Torre di Babele: “quello che conta davvero non è il tentativo di raggiungere il cielo, o di parlare la lingua di Dio. […]Questa torre diventa interessante solo quando ha fallito il compito che si era assegnata. Il suo valore sta nella sua inutilità. La sua inutilità la rende operativa: come simbolo, cifra, sprone all’immaginazione, alla produttività. La prima mossa per qualsiasi strategia di produzione culturale deve essere liberare le cose – gli oggetti, le situazioni, i sistemi – permettendo loro di essere inutili.”
Essere dentro alla realtà che si vuole raccontare significa allora che la Grande Relazione consiste più nel vivere le cose che nel raccontarle, questa è l’epifania di U. alla ricerca di una forma per dare voce alla sua ricerca: “ E se il solo fatto di coesistere con quegli oggetti e quella persona, a lasciare che i miei bordi di sciogliessero tra loro, occupando quel momento, o più precisamente permettendogli di occupare me, di asciugarmi e assorbirmi, invece di trattarli come dati da inserire per una valutazione futura… E se tutto questo, forse, facesse parte della Grande Relazione? E se la Relazione in qualche modo, chissà come, si potesse vivere, o essere, invece che scrivere? […] Mi sembrava che davanti a me si spalancasse sfolgorante un nuovo campo, un nuovo regno, tutto un nuovo Ordine di esperienza antropologica, i cui pezzi scintillavano e ballavano all’impazzata mentre cominciavano a prendere posizione all’interno di quello che un giorno, sospettavo, si sarebbe potuto rivelare uno schema stabile e logico. Nella mia fantasticheria vedevo un futuro nel quale gli etnografi non scrutavano più nelle viscere morte degli eventi nella speranza di ridurre ai concetti di base il significato dei propri gesti, e si collocavano invece dentro gli accadimenti e le situazioni mentre si svolgevano – in modo innocente, avventato soprattutto in diretta – e la loro “partecipazione dall’interno” trasformava la vita, portando in primo piano la sua vera essenza in ogni istante, nell’istante, non come sapere futuro ma come istante in quanto tale, che, come un baccello che matura, travalica i propri confini e si apre, generando senso, disseminandolo in ogni angolo della terra… Allora la Grande Relazione non sarebbe stata più qualcosa di prossimo venturo o di portato a termine, passato: sarebbe stata tutta nel qui e ora. Antropologia del tempo presente; antropologia come stile di vita. Trovato: Antropologia del Tempo Presente®; un’antropologia che s’immergeva nella presenza e nella contemporaneità: vi si immergeva come in una sorgente profonda, spumeggiante e colma di ninfe.”

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like a 4.5, but didn't feel it merited the rounding up! The shortest of this year's Man Booker Longlist selections, it might well prove to also be the densest in terms of intellectual gymnastics and pyrotechnics. Like some unholy godchild of early Pynchon and Nicholson Baker, in that it details (in MINUTE detail) the protagonist U's attempt to understand the modern world, while compiling his (perhaps sinister) corporation's Great Report on its Koob-Sassen Project. On the basis of this, I am tempted to read McCarthy's (also Booker nominated) magnum opus, C, but am afraid his writing might well lose its charms in any lengthier form.

I think one of the reasons why this resonated so much for me is that 25 years ago I spent a semester teaching on Staten island - and would take the ferry into Manhattan at least 2 or 3 times a week to see Broadway shows. The final chapter of U. at the ferry terminal brought back some fond memories for me. :-)

[Елвира · Rating 5 out of 5]

Преди да се впусна в истинско единение с тази книга под формата на статия върху може би всичко на Маккарти, което незабавно се зарекох да изчета, за този момент само ще кажа, че това е една брутална, висококонцептуална и суперавангардна книга. Трудна, изисква концентрация и допълнително четене, но така силно ме изпълни! Това е типът книги, който най-много обичам. Със сигурност ще избягвам да я препоръчвам на хората - биха ме намразили.

Няма конкретен сюжет, а има адски много случваемост. Много мисъл и чудесна, взривяваща родилна идея и обстановка. Абстрактна теория, изградена върху емпирични наблюдения. Сложни мрежи от връзки, които ни дават един съвсем прост отговор. Или пък не?