Remainder: Tom McCarthy

I have never read a book like this one. You cannot get it out of your head and it really does make you start to look at the world differently. I read this on regular half-hour train journeys and, each time, when I arrived at the destination I didn't want to tear myself away from it. And when I did and finally stepped out into the Railway Station I viewed everyone in a completely different way and began seeing things previously unnoticed. No-one else around me seemed to be taking anything seriously - until I realised that everyone else was behaving normally and it was just me that had been reprogrammed. Another reviewer mentioned that the book `got under their skin' - it does just that. All of a sudden, every action, little task or movement takes on greater import. The only disappointment was the ending, where the whole bizarreness just got to be a bit too much. But by that time the book had already altered my mind. It was too late for me.

I liked the story and style a lot except that some description of the set-up can become tedious (despite it matching the obsessive nature of the protagonist) and certain aspects pushed credulity beyond breaking point. It does well because the ending was fun rather than something I wanted to hurry along and be done with.

Had an interesting premise and started well but I really felt it failed to deliver by the end. The main protagonist was neither engaging or likeable. This was by design and an important part of the story, but the trouble was the story wasn't really engaging either (and the writing style was pretty standard). So as the book went on and the original set-pieces failed to deliver anything meaningful, it just began to feel like a bit of a drag. Not a terrible book by any means but it wasn't good enough for me to recommend it to anyone as a worthwhile read.

An excellent story, one which is out of the ordinary and subtly insightful. Utterly relevant to 'modern' life and written in such a way that at no point does it feel tiresome.

Quite gripping! Tom McCarthy gets us lost inside the main character's head. Pretty disturbing if this condition really exists. Strange ending though.

This book follows a story about a man who, after an accident lost his memory, but received 8.5 mil £ from insurance. Excellent idea, marvellous introduction and excellent first 50 pages evolve into a nightmare of a sociopath. The book was a readers’ club topic, so, instead of reading translation, I bought a copy in English. After reading it, I felt such disgust that I considered leaving the readers’ club. If the author’s intention was that his readers feel bad - he was successful. If literature is going to be either a shallow romance/thriller bestseller branch or a nausea causing novels like this one, I will have problems. And a lot of people who still read books.

Excellent - tragic and comic in turn, dragging you deeper in to the weird world of the protagonist. Recommended!

In the run-up to McCarthy's recent Satin Island, I thought I'd revisit his debut avant garde piece. Like all seminal fiction, it doesn't feel a day old and while I have my reservations on its repeat value, it's a confident, original performance on the written page that deserves soaking a few of your mortal hours in. In a post-coma world, one man tries to recreate the pre-coma normal consciousness of an experienced moment. He has come into a sizeable settlement from the accident of 8.5 millions and he wants to pump it into recreating the taken-for-granted moment-to-moment perception-and-sensation loaded reality. It's his key to feeling real once again. It's a thoroughly imaginative semantic exercise: in our protagonist's expositions to the baffled hearers of his scheme, we hear him articulate notions of fluency and fluidity of moving through the world as the one thing that separates his new, detached, learned-but-contrived self from the people around. This deeply felt void of consciousness leads him to kickstart a series of re-enactment experiments where we see him trying to recreate whole physical environments to simulate random pre-and post-accident events from memory. With an almost inexhaustible stash of funds, he manages to mobilise a battalion of actors, designers, property developers, construction crew to actuate his schemes and the rest of the book chronicles his frustrations at getting these experiments just right, just real enough. He is seen moving himself and his employed army in that crepuscular zone between enacting and living, as he becomes obsessed with the idea of embodiment. This deranged enterprise, while on one level hilarious in laying bare the endless possibilities with cash in hand in today's world, is at another level achingly tragic as we see this one man's bottomless thirst to recreate a moment of rapture that for us, i.e. normal, neurologically intact readers would be a disposable everyday moment. When you read him wax eloquent about this instant as a tingling rising from the base of spine, usurping the whole body and rendering it weightless, then spreading its "edges out until it became a still pool swallowing everything up in its contentedness", your empathic self can't help but be exalted in the narrator's abstraction, be edified by the the relativism in spiritual currency and be completely convinced about all his actions to achieve this transcendental climax in an Everyday Instant. Other than the take-a-bow-worthy subtextual and textual density, the beautiful juxtaposition of neurological rehabilitation of motor control with a philosophical enquiry, it's disappointing that the same multi-level syntactical and thematic synaesthesia that enthralls you also drags the book down in its later pages as the narrator develops a moment-creation fetish and keeps his comfortably-facilitated and funded affairs going and going. You empathise with the aphrodisiac effect for this irreparably broken man of that intact apogee of consciousness called the Moment, but the particularities that are pursued in rigour and discipline of short, brick-like phrases to execute the giant experiments on the page do exasperate. By design, this is a challenging book to read, hence I give you my reserved recommendation, but the boundary-pushing work does provide many moments of sublimity and a taster for what makes McCarthy one of the best living contemporary authors.

While this book remains one of the most original concepts of the last years to come out of literature, it does have issues with its resolution. Maybe it's meant to, as our nameless protagonist is mental, after all. But unreliable narration aside, the whole reason he starts his project is never addressed in any way. I cannot decide if this is intentional, given McCarthy messes with the reader the whole book, and I do love the ending, but having no payoff at all is a difficult pill to swallow after so much dense text and problematic development. Maybe the payoff there is no payoff. If variation truly lies in repetition, I should read it again. I certainly haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I finished. And here I am, making no sense with this review. If you liked Hamsen's Hambre (3ª edición) (Biblioteca Nórdica) , or the movie Synecdoche, New York [DVD ], this book is exactly your kind of read. The protagonist is unable to control himself, he cannot control the reader, and however many times he repeats himself and sees different results, he can never get the result he is looking for. This book is highly recommended, despite its incredible demand for the reader. But don't read it if you are not willing to go with anything that happens, because it's easy to see from reviews here that if you try and take just a crumb of expectation in with you, you won't come out of it in one piece.

The moment that I finished Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, I began reading it again, slower this time; often pausing and re-reading a particular passage 10 or 20 times over again. I would spend hours going over a single sentence to the point where the words entirely lost their meaning and the very act of reading became the mechanical exercise of my eyes discerning the white space between the black of the type. At one point in the process of turning page 97 over to page 98, I became so enthralled by the way that the texture of the paper fell away from my fingertips and settled so serenely under my opposite thumb that I spent the rest of the afternoon reliving this moment, practicing that exact transition from 97 to 98 until I could do it effortlessly and exactly every time. Other days I would lie in the bath and simply think about reading the book as it sat on my bedside table and that would be enough. Any and all of the above methods for fully appreciating Remainder should be taken under strict advisement by the reader; however, if you begin to experience black outs or mild seizures, then I must advise that you consult a physician immediately.

Great book

Does it occasionally happen to you that particular detail in your field of vision attracts, then absorbs your attention and becomes, for a brief moment, larger than life? Children have this capacity to read the world in its smallest details, which are very real to them, but then their horizons don't yet much extend beyond the small world around them. Grown ups tend to disregard the insignificant detail as mere trifle, larger perspectives are what makes their world view. Now imagine viewing and construing your world again from such trifling observations. A crack in the wall, viewed as a path to a long forgotten past. Repetitive piano tunes defining your acoustic world. The smell and sizzling noise of liver being fried in oil. Then start to reconstitute a world from these details - and ask yourself, where this might take you. The hero of Tom McCarthy's breathtaking novel does just that. Having survived an accident which involved some unknown object falling from the sky, he receives compensation and suddenly finds himself a rich man. A chance observation sets in motion the kind of train of thought sketched above: He begins to reconstruct a more authentic world than the one he lives in from trifling details which he arranges according to some felt, but never quite explicit plan. To this end he recruits the help of man people, building up and simulating his imaginings in every precise detail. It is his aim to get reality perfectly right, and to this end scenes are acted, or more precisely, re-enacted numerous times until every detail is just perfect. But the hero fails to grasp reality to the extent he had expected. This drives him on into the re-enactment of of scenes taking from the real life around him. But what starts in a harmless way, when a particular event at a filling station is re-enacted, takes on an ever more frightening aspect when the hero turns to scenes of murder. And, eventually, to a scene, that has not had its counterpart in the real world yet. Tom McCarthy has written a gripping and yet witty, sometimes even funny story which follows a crystal clear and inescapable logic: If you start to rethink reality in a quest for authenticity you will, inevitably, unless you stop in time, run into the risk of shaping reality. You might then end up in the air, as the hero does, going in circles between what is real and what is unreal.

ずいぶんと絶賛された作品のようで、間違いなく面白かろうと読み始めた初日は好印象。二日目はちょっと細かいなぁ、くどいなぁと違和感。ここで半分。三日目に残りを読み上げたのは、面白くてやめられないからではなくて、イライラがどんどんつのって、早く結末にたどり着きたいという一心から。微熱で体調の悪い中読むには最悪の本でストレスが3倍増。せめてラストはカタルシスがあるかと思ったが・・ストーリーはある日、空からの落下物で危うく命を落としかけた若い男が巨額の賠償金（通常の事故とは桁が違う）を得るところから始まる。事故前後の記憶がすっぽり抜け落ち、退院後の生活に現実感を持てなくなった男は大金を投じて奇妙なヴィジョンの再現にのめりこむが、次第に正気を失っていく。