Remainder
Ratings19
Average rating3.5
My second Tom McCarthy, which confirmed the tentative opinion I'd formed after the first that Tom McCarthy might be a proper nutter. This is the brilliant but maddening story of a man who, with more money than sense perhaps, engages a team of enablers to help him re-enact, down to the minutest detail, inane events from his life. Completely bizarre. McCarthy's writing is brilliant, pin-sharp, and reminds us of the old adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
What a weird cerebral novel that tickles one's brain. Imagine you're in that state where you'd have to learn to walk again. Instead of simply taking an intuitive step, you need to deconstruct all the individual movements into sequences of coordinated muscle contractions. That's how our protagonist seems to be experiencing life, when we meet him at the beginning of the story. He feels like he's faking it, something is off. To familiarise himself with life and living again, he takes an unconventional approach. He picks a place with a sequence of events of the past, and sets out to recreate them. He spends millions to reconstruct the scene and hires a large staff to orchestrate re-enactments. Wanting to get as close as possible to the real thing. Yet instead of having a goal in mind, he's stuck in these loops of reenactments. Unable to break them.
This is a very stylish concept novel, that's obviously not for everyone, but this spoke to me. Of artistic obsession and obsessive perfection, of a system thinking approach to life. Of simply setting out to execute a crazy idea, chasing those moments when your brain buzzes with the pleasure of perfection. Memorable.
When I clicked “I'm finished” on this one, Goodreads said: “Error!” As in: that's not possible. Goodreads is correct. It is not possible to finish this book. This tedious-tedious detail-ridden madness of a book.
I did finish, however, because the first 60-70 pages had been such good writing. It had injected a hope in me that it will get better in the end, that the end will make sense again. It didn't.
I'm sorry, Mister McCarthy, but I don't even want to understand what you were trying to do there.
I was so bored.
The narrator gets hit over the head by a mysterious falling object, and wins an outrageous amount of money in the settlement. Ok.
Then, he begins to use his newfound wealth to create experiences that remove his sense of artificiality with his life. He does so with a series of staged reenactments of real life events and places.
While at first a weird but interesting read, Remainder began to strike me as repetitive and just a bit too weird for my tastes. This was a tough read for me; I eventually finished, but it was tough to get there.