Surplus Matter

In the books, money both stands for genealogical fakeness and is fake itself (a brilliant scene in The Crab with the Golden Claws shows Thompson and Thomson tricked into passing off the very counterfeit coins they’ve been charged with tracking down: a doubling of illegitimate faces and false “metal”); in the film it literally pours down, in one scene, from the skies, Haddock’s reward for being “true to himself”. Thus Hollywood’s idiotic “message” is forced on an oeuvre that is great precisely because it drives in exactly the opposite direction. It’s like making a biopic of Nietzsche that depicts him as a born-again Christian, or of Gandhi as a trigger-happy Rambo blasting his way through the Raj.

Tom McCarthy demolishes Steven Spielberg’s Tintin.

Those people who recommended Remainder to me said that one of the best things about the book is that it sticks around in your breadpan long after you’ve finished reading it, that it’s one of those books that quietly urge you to reread after you’re done. I started out as a McCarthy unbeliever. I finished as a McCarthy convert.

Bookmunch revisits Remainder.

Ben Marcus quotes Tom McCarthy in HTML Giant.

An excerpt from Remainder features in an exhibition entitled Translated By currently running at the AA Gallery in London.

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.

A Russian review of Remainder in Kommersant.

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.

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).