Surplus Matter

Geometry is Everything

What this aesthetic shares with its uncomic nouveau roman forebears is an anti-naturalist, anti-humanist bent: we’re being given access not to a fully rounded, self-sufficient character’s intimate thoughts and feelings as he travels through a naturalistic world, emoting, developing and so on — but rather to an encounter with structure. In a wonderful sequence in Camera, Toussaint sets up a scene of dialogue in a restaurant and, having placed a bowl of olives on the table (as a naturalist writer would do to provide background verisimilitude), suppresses the scene’s dialogue entirely, and describes exclusively the movement of hands as they reach towards the bowl, the trajectory of fruit from hand to mouth, the ergonomics of pit-transfers from mouth to tablecloth and, most striking of all, the regularly spaced imprints made by the back of a fork’s tines across the skin of the lone olive the narrator toys with before stabbing it. We don’t want plot, depth or content: we want angles, arcs and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content, geometry is everything.

Tom McCarthy on Jean-Philippe Toussaint in the London Review of Books.

Mermaid Figurine

Two brief field surveys, carried out to / walk upon the beach / accumulated rainfall and runoff pollution which / snotgreen, bluesilver, rust / where U is wind and T is days / have modulated on the lyre of / drainage flow-rates for / the mermaids singing, each to / the ‘first-flush effect’, as visible in Fig. 3 / forehead is still red from the Queen’s kiss

Tom McCarthy has written a story to illustrate a mermaid figurine for Significant Objects. Both the figurine and story are up for auction on eBay. All proceeds go to 826 National.

Shot By Both Sides

Fascinating videos of Johan Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy at the Belgian premiere of Double Take at the Ghent Film Festival.

Only the Reel is Real

There is another way to think about prosthesis - as a form of puppetry. In his 1810 story-cum-essay “On the Marionette Theatre”, the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist recounts a meeting, at a fairground, with a choreographer who, watching marionettes being manipulated, marvelled at the way in which dance “could be entirely transferred to the realm of mechanical forces” and “controlled by a crank”. “Have you heard,” the choreographer asks the narrator, “of the artificial legs designed by English craftsmen for those unfortunates who have lost their limbs?” The implication is clear: prosthetic-clad man is like a puppet - which invites the question: who’s the puppeteer?

Tom McCarthy on David Lynch in the New Statesman.

His Writerly Erkenntnis

Tom McCarthy lists the books that have influenced him in Frieze Magazine.

A Weirdly Loveable Purgatorio

Tom McCarthy’s blurb for Tony O’Neill’s new novel, Sick City, out in July 2010.

McCarthy on Film

Tom McCarthy will be talking about “his writing in relation to film” at the Architectural Association in London on Friday 12 March.

Shot By Both Sides

Fascinating videos of Johan Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy at the Belgian premiere of Double Take at the Ghent Film Festival.

McCarthy Live

Details of Tom McCarthy’s forthcoming appearances in London and Paris.

Book of the Decade

If only for a fleeting moment, Remainder, a dark and spare novel about personal authenticity and murderous re-enactment, seemed to offer a creative alternative to the cul-de-sac of overwrought and twee novels emanating from Brooklyn (and creative writing classes everywhere). Sadly, the bloated and banal seem to have made a decided comeback (if they ever went away), but even so, the unashamedly intellectual Remainder stands out, perfectly capturing the fears and anxieties of the decade.

Remainder features among Village Voice and the (Canadian) National Post’s books of the decade.