Surplus Matter

A Melancholy Technologics

Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see it completely differently: as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I’m on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.

Tom McCarthy, in the Guardian, on the links between technology and the novel.

The Remix the Novel Has Been Crying Out For

“I see what I’m doing as simply plugging literature into other literature. For me, that’s what literature’s always done. If Shakespeare finds a good speech in an older version of Macbeth or Pliny, he just rips it and mixes it. It’s like DJing.” On the evidence of C, McCarthy is quite possibly the remix the novel has been crying out for. “Here we are, rich inheritors of all this magnificent detritus,” he says. “How do we want to recombine it? I think it’s a good time to be a good writer, actually.”

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Robert Collins in the Sunday Times.

McCarthy’s MacGuffin

Tom McCarthy interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme about Double Take. He describes WMDs as “a good example of a MacGuffin”!

Ink Sets

C is about the age of wireless: the roar of transmission, signals flung from towering masts, global reaches crackling out of earphones. And empire. And insects. And incest.

The Casual Optimist interviews Peter Mendelsund and Tom McCarthy about the American jacket of C.

Artist of the Impossible

A video of Tom McCarthy’s March 2010 talk at the AA School of Architecture. The author discusses the relationship between film and literature with reference to Greenwich Degree Zero, Remainder, Double Take and C.

Eagerly Awaited in Necronautical Circles

There are passages that are very impressive: particularly some of the descriptions of flight, and one euphoric hymn to the wireless. But, though it is no doubt horribly middlebrow to say so, the deliberately flattened, almost mechanical characters (who, incidentally, speak like present-day art students) and the endless technical prose make for joyless reading.

Theo Tait reviews C in the Sunday Times.

C Makes Man Booker Longlist

Congratulations to Tom McCarthy whose new novel C is on the Man Booker Prize longlist announced today!

High-Flying Picaresque

Remainder established McCarthy as a contemporary champion of the experimental novel and heir to the postmodern stylists of the late 20th century, but it’s difficult to come up with a suitable thematic or stylistic precursor to his unclassifiably brilliant latest.

The influential American Publishers Weekly gives C a rave review.

Architecture, Neurosis and Death

An evening of discussions and interrogations organised by the International Necronautical Society on 29 July 2010 at the Barbican in London:

Tom McCarthy will be joined by award-winning novelist Chloe Aridjis and scholar Richard Martin as they interrogate acclaimed writer and psychoanalyst Darian Leader and leading architect Patrick Lynch. The proceedings will be monitored by INS Chief of Propaganda Anthony Auerbach and INS Environmental Engineer Laura Hopkins.

In the Wake of Curiosity

Cold caplets covered Carrefax’s contraption crouched cannily… It is tempting to start in this way a review of C — the book eagerly anticipated by Tom McCarthy’s admirers for the last couple of years, which at one point was rumoured to contain only words beginning with the eponymous letter. Reader, it does not. Despite the proliferation of c-words, they are interspersed with others. The result is a heady — or, more aptly, captivating — concoction that constantly keeps you switched on. Far from being reduced to a word game, the text is spanned with verbal landmarks which make for a mock exercise in uniconsonantism the author clearly enjoys.

Anna Aslanyan reviews Tom McCarthy C in 3:AM Magazine.