Remainder by Tom Mc. Carthy . Mc. Carthy’s portrait of the pursuit of total control is arresting, and he is alert to the bland amorality that underlies it.” —The New Yorker“What fun it is when a crafty writer plays cat and mouse with your mind, when you can never anticipate his next move and when, in any case, he knows all the exits to the maze and has already blocked them. Mc. Carthy’s superb stylistic control and uncanny imagination transport this novel beyond the borders of science fiction. His bleak humor, hauntingly affectless narrator and methodical expansion on his theme make Remainder more than an entertaining brain- teaser: it’s a work of novelistic philosophy, as disturbing as it is funny.” —The New York Times Book Review“A chillingly clever novel of patterns that fools you into thinking it’s a novel about plot . It demands to be read in one sitting. Remainder - Kindle edition by Tom Mccarthy. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and. Two Paths for the Novel. November 20, 2008 Issue. Pantheon, 256 pp., $23.95. Remainder, by Tom McCarthy. Remainder by tom mccarthy.pdf FREE PDF DOWNLOAD NOW!!! Learn more Info for Support. Related searches for remainder by tom mccarthy Remainder: Tom McCarthy. Remainder Tom Mccarthy. 17-10-2016 2/2 Remainder Tom Mccarthy. Other Files Available to Download The book caught me in such a delirious spin toward fragmentation and left me feeling every detail of the matter of life more keenly.” —Sarah Cook, The Believer“Addictively strange.” —Details“Tom Mc. Carthy is shockingly talented. Remainder is one of those novels that you finish and turn immediately back to the beginning, to fill in the gaps you may have missed the first time around. It leaves you feeling sort of shaken and very impressed.” —Gawker. ![]() Remainder Tom Mccarthy. 21-10-2016 2/2 Remainder Tom Mccarthy. Other Files Available to Download Remainder is a 2005 novel published by British author Tom McCarthy. It is McCarthy's third published work, first written in 2001, although not published until 2005 in. Nihilistically modern and classically structured. Tightly knit, suspenseful . Mc. Carthy tells his tale calmly, as if taking long, yogic breaths.” —Bookforum“Captivating and challenging. ![]() Remainder isn’t a mystery novel—there’s no villain here apart from time and space—so if its core ripples with ambiguity, all the better for the reader, as this is a book to be read and then reread, rich as it is with its insights, daring as it is with its contradictions.” —Los Angeles Times“The nameless narrator in this eerie debut is a Londoner severely injured in an accident. Months later, he received an . Our hero then begins to wholly recreate and re- enact portions of his old life with a salaried cast of extras, set designers, and stuntmen. In taut and chilly prose, Mc. Carthy describes how this mission becomes a disturbing obsession; the horrifying conclusion is visible 3. Entertainment Weekly, A- “Tom Mc. Carthy’s first novel offers a vivid, subtle portrait of creeping madness.” —Time Out New York“A quick and gritty novel that begs, thanks largely to a cinematic plot, to be read in one sitting.” —Book. Slut“A stunningly strange book about the rarest of fictional subjects, happiness.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude“Remainder is a beautifully strange and chilly book. Very smart and unlike anything else you’re likely to read.” —Scott Smith, author of The Ruins“Tom Mc. Carthy has a singularity, a precision, a surreal logic and a sly wit that is all his own. It will be a long time before you read a stranger book—or a truer one.” —Rupert Thomson, author of Divided Kingdom“It will remain with you long after you have felt compelled to re- read it.” —Time Out London“An assured work of existential horror. Perfectly disturbing.” —Kirkus Reviews“Strangely gripping. Remainder should be read (and, of course, reread) for its intelligence and humour.” —The. Times Literary Supplement (London) Tom Mc. Carthy was born in 1. London. He is known for the reports, manifestos, and media interventions he has made as General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi- fictitious avant- garde network. Remainder is his first. He is known for the reports, manifestos, and media interventions he has made as General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi- fictitious avant- garde network. Remainder is his first. In France and England, REMAINDER was a success story for smaller publishers. What do you think about the book being published by a large company in the US? A. I think things are different in the US. In the UK, the corporate presses have gone so dumbed- down that if you’re a new writer doing anything vaguely . Remainder first came out in English with Metronome Press, a Paris- based art outfit; then new UK independent Alma Books took it—at which point it was getting good reviews and the corporate houses who’d knocked it back two years previously were trying to . The great thing about Vintage’s US edition is that it came about because Marty Asher, Vintage’s Editor- in- Chief, read the book when it was in its original Metronome Press edition, tracked the publishers down (which wasn’t easy) and offered for it off his own bat—it was never submitted to him. That—and the fact that big publishers in the US bring out serious authors like David Foster Wallace— gives me a lot of hope. Q. The film rights to the book have already been bought. What do you think the relationship is between REMAINDER’s re- enactments and the cinema? A. The relationship is strong—so strong, in fact, that I had to remove all cinematic paraphernalia from the book (the hero has an antipathy to cameras) in order to prevent it from becoming an allegory of cinema itself; although he does fetishise de Niro’s seamless ease in Mean Streets. But cinema is a technology of repetition, and that’s what my hero is obsessed by: repetition. He himself becomes like cinema, in as much as he becomes a repetition machine. At the same time, repetition existed before cinema: it’s a classical trope, repetition. REMAINDER has been called “the best French novel ever written in English by an Englishman.” How do you think American readers might respond differently to the book? A. Twentieth century French and American literature are not so far apart: both took part in the great adventure of Modernism, while England looked on from the sidelines. Eliot, for example, spent part of his early career writing in French; Burroughs, a little later, was completely immersed in the Paris scene, and so on. Remainder owes a lot to French writers, but also to American ones: landscapes of trauma and repetition are as much a part of Faulkner’s work (in Absalom! And it seems to me that the whole question of . America is where Baudrillard finds most of his examples of the . Are the re- enactments in REMAINDER based on real places and events? Can we visit the tenement in London? A. The tenement is based on a real building beside a real caged sports pitch- and- track in South London, but I’ve modified it (just like the hero does), so it doesn’t actually look like the real thing. The street shootout that the hero re- enacts is based on a shoot- out that took place exactly where it does in the book. Weirdly—although not unsurprisingly given the part of town—I recently visited that spot with two journalists who were doing a feature on Remainder, and there was a new police sign there saying: . REMAINDER is full of obsession, conspiracy, and the threat of violence. Were you thinking about terrorism at all when you wrote it? A. I finished the book in July 2. September 1. 1th, so . The figure of the terrorist has always fascinated me. I recently did an art- project based on Martial Bourdin’s attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in 1. Conrad based The Secret Agent on; and some years ago I wrote a long, rambling piece about Patty Hearst and the SLA which an art press in the US is bringing out next year. There are conventional terrorists lurking round the edges of Remainder, but terror in that book is more of a metaphysical condition: the hero is a victim of . As his grand project gathers pace, becoming more and more psychotic, terror takes on an aesthetic dimension: he looks at the world reflected in the pools of blood that flow from his victims’ chests and finds it beautiful. He’s like the protagonist of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, who says: . Your narrator’s ideas come to him in flashes and moments of d. Is this how the ideas for REMAINDER came to you? A. The idea came to me exactly as it comes to him: I was at a friend- of- a- friend’s party, in the bathroom, looking at a crack on the wall, and had an intense moment of d. Within minutes the whole novel had taken shape in my head. Q. You’re involved in the literary world and the art world. Are you a writer first and foremost? A. Yes, absolutely. I’ve always been into literature, and always thought I’d be a writer. In my early twenties, though, I discovered art and realized that artists were onto something which literature was also looking for. Brion Gysin said that painting was a hundred years ahead of writing; I think he was being too generous to painting, but he had a point. Most of my friends are visual artists, not writers. Having spent time among UK publishing people and art people, I can say without any doubt that art people are the more literate. Not only have they all read people like Beckett, Kafka and Bataille—people who the publishing crowd have barely even heard of—but they’re also doing projects based on their work: visual art projects, or performance ones, or text- based ones. In the current UK climate, art has become the arena where literature is creatively debated and transformed, not mainstream publishing. It’s paradoxical, but interesting. Your semi- fictitious avant- garde society, the International Necronautical Society, has been active in England, France and Germany. The INS is a parasitical, viral organization. Like the short, pale guy in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, we go where we are invited. Q. Who are your favorite contemporary writers and artists? A. Most of the contemporary practitioners who float my boat are artists, for the reasons I outlined a moment ago. I’m very interested, for obvious reasons, in artists who use re- enactment as a medium. In the UK, Rod Dickinson has had Stanley Milgram’s . Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard do elaborate and precise re- enactments of famous rock gigs such as Ziggy Stardust’s last concert or the Cramps’ notorious Napa Mental Health Institute set—again, highly orchestrated ur- events re- orchestrated. I love the Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez’s Dial H- I- S- T- O- R- Y, a . Two Paths for the Novel . Both are the result of long journeys. Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill, took seven years to write; Remainder, by Tom Mc. Carthy, took seven years to find a mainstream publisher. The two novels are antipodal—indeed one is the strong refusal of the other. The violence of the rejection Remainder represents to a novel like Netherland is, in part, a function of our ailing literary culture. All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene. These aren’t particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked. For Netherland, our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done—in a sense that’s the problem. It’s so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait. Netherland is nominally the tale of Hans van den Broek, a Dutch stock analyst, transplanted from London to downtown New York with his wife and young son. When the towers fall, the family relocates to the Chelsea Hotel; soon after, a trial separation occurs. Wife and son depart once more for London, leaving Hans stranded in a world turned immaterial, phantasmagoric: “Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.” Every other weekend he visits his family, hoping “that flying high into the atmosphere, over boundless massifs of vapor or small clouds dispersed like the droppings of Pegasus on an unseen platform of air, might also lift me above my personal haze”—the first of many baroque descriptions of clouds, light, and water. On alternate weekends, he plays cricket on Staten Island, the sole white man in a cricket club that includes Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian wiseacre, whose outsize dreams of building a cricket stadium in the city represent a Gatsbyesque commitment to the American Dream/human possibility/narrative with which Hans himself is struggling to keep faith. The stage is set, then, for a “meditation” on identities both personal and national, immigrant relations, terror, anxiety, the attack of futility on the human consciousness and the defense against same: meaning. In other words, it’s the post–September 1. In 1. 98. 5, was the Bhopal novel keenly anticipated?) It’s as if, by an act of collective prayer, we have willed it into existence. But Netherland is only superficially about September 1. If you subscribe to the print edition, you may also need to link your web site account to your print subscription. Click here to link your account services.
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