Surplus Matter

Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space makes it on to the Athens Prize for Literature shortlist.

Men in Space is on the longlist for this year’s Athens Prize for Literature.

Cruel et volontairement confus, Les Cosmonautes au Paradis est plus qu’un commentaire sur un monde en déliquescence c’est une belle méditation sur la disparition des êtres, et un livre étrangement puissant.

A short review of Men in Space in French magazine Chronicart.

A review of Les Cosmonautes au paradis (Men in Space) from Luxembourg.

Les Cosmonautes au paradis tient à la fois du polar, du conte métaphysique, du journal d’énigmes et du recueil de désillusions. L’ensemble est noir, grinçant et sans cesse cocasse. C’est la tragi-comédie d’un monde où tournent des individus comme autant de mouches folles voletant autour d’une ampoule clignotante.

Xavier Houssin reviews Men in Space in French daily Le Monde.

Les Cosmonautes au paradis (the French version of Men in Space) reviewed on France Culture.

Les Cosmonautes au paradis sont, en fait, un roman d’«ostploitation» choral (forcément choral), genre popularisé en Allemagne ou en Grande-Bretagne par le Russian Disco de Kaminer, et qui mixe allègrement le polar mafieux avec la satire glam-coke dans une nostalgie ironique de l’ancien bloc soviétique affronté au néocapitalisme : de «ost» = «est» et «xploitation», suffixe américain signifiant «qui exploite les particularismes culturels de».

Eric Loret reviews Tom McCarthy’s Les Cosmonautes au paradis (Men in Space) for Libération.

I think if there’s any one motif that will resonate most with readers of Men in Space it’s this cycle of questioning our ability to replicate or recreate what’s already passed. McCarthy proposes that we’re seemingly condemned to always be looking back, and doing so, we’re forced to always be catching up with life, as it hurtles forward into vertiginous space.

José Teodoro reviews Men in Space in Canada’s Edmonton Journal.

His knack of harnessing bold ideas to offbeat wit and close-focus storytelling skills makes McCarthy one of the fictional finds of the decade.

Men in Space is one of The Independent’s books of the year.

Events, objects, even people replicate one another in a self-referential echo chamber that renders each thing the double or copy of something else, until one realizes that the “originals” cannot be found. Story and form imitate each other: This tale of art theft and forgery becomes an agitated network of substitutions and absences.

Men in Space reviewed by Thomas Wharton in the Canadian Globe and Mail.