Once you’ve written a book and look back at the process, it’s like the build-up to a goal. You wouldn’t change anything, even the missed passes and accidental ricochets, because they led to what turned out to be the thing.
Tom McCarthy interviewed about C (now out in paperback) in The Guardian.
C’s intellectual preoccupations can be fascinating, but they don’t always sit well together. The links it draws between radio, codes, and secrets suggest a new theory of literary modernism, calling to mind a literature that is party autonomic and partly scavenged, carried along subterranean avenues and fugitive broadcasts. His insistence on the omnipresence of hidden patterns enables McCarthy’s best prose, a kind of concentrated physical description which combines amoral detachment with the ecstatic possibilities of pure geometry.
Jacob Mikanowski on C in The Millions.
Tom McCarthy interviewed by Richard Wolinsky on KPFA (Berkeley), November 2010: “If you’re plagiarising five things at once, it’s not plagiarism anymore”.
A link to Tom McCarthy’s CBC Radio interview from November 2010.
He has written an extraordinarily smart, complex and entertaining novel, a real rarity. Amid all the hair-pulling about the death of the book and literature’s grim future—topics with which McCarthy is in constant if subtextual conversation—this novel, at least, is alive and unafraid of its mortality. Even as it declares the demise of literature’s most ancient hopes, from pylon to pylon C positively hums.
Ben Ehrenreich reviews Tom McCarthy’s oeuvre, and C in particular, in The Nation.
“It comes straight from Freud. Trauma is the condition of our identity. Trauma is the most basic condition of our existence,” McCarthy explains. The unnamed narrator in Remainder struggles to escape from an accidental trauma, an object which falls from the sky and almost kills him. The trauma in C is more psychological. “It’s a dual trauma, Serge’s seduction by Sophie his sister and then the loss of the sister,” McCarthy adds.
Tom McCarthy interviewed in Canada’s National Post.
Here’s the flyer for tonight’s secret Canadian gig during which Tom McCarthy and Douglas Coupland will discuss “books, art and the meaning of it all”.
If a fact-checker had come to his aid, C might have won the Booker after all.
Germaine Greer in The Guardian.
Tom McCarthy interviewed on WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show.
The mockery, forgery, theatre and pageantry, these imposed narratives of what man creates out of his existence are, incidentally, a recurring reverberation in all McCarthy’s work to date, so that the books can be seen in some way as reenactments of each other.
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer reviews C in The Globe and Mail (Canada).
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