Surplus Matter

Roderik Six reviews the Dutch translation of Remainder on cultural website Cutting Edge.

Before seeing it I’d heard that it involved Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character staging an enormous “theatre event”, filling simulated rooms with actors simulating actions and this sounded shockingly like a conceit lifted straight from Tom McCarthy’s radical and brilliant novel Remainder. The real shock of watching the film, however, had nothing to do with such perceived borrowing — in its doublings, replications and simulacra the film is full of tropes seemingly pilfered from postmodern novels. What was really startling was that the presentation of those ideas was on a greater and more complex scale than these (apparent) literary antecedents.

Hermione Hoby on Charlie Kaufman’s Synechdoche, New York.

Italian reviews of Remainder (Déjà-vu in Italian).

Cruel et volontairement confus, Les Cosmonautes au Paradis est plus qu’un commentaire sur un monde en déliquescence c’est une belle méditation sur la disparition des êtres, et un livre étrangement puissant.

A short review of Men in Space in French magazine Chronicart.

A review of Les Cosmonautes au paradis (Men in Space) from Luxembourg.

In English, it’s called Remainder: there’s always an extra — something too much. (Laughs.) So there’s always this material extra and, in a way, it is an allegory of art. No matter with how much craft we simulate the world, the world itself will be too much.

Tom McCarthy interviewed on Radio Eins during his German tour.

Les Cosmonautes au paradis tient à la fois du polar, du conte métaphysique, du journal d’énigmes et du recueil de désillusions. L’ensemble est noir, grinçant et sans cesse cocasse. C’est la tragi-comédie d’un monde où tournent des individus comme autant de mouches folles voletant autour d’une ampoule clignotante.

Xavier Houssin reviews Men in Space in French daily Le Monde.

Tom McCarthy will be in Berlin for the launch of 8 1/2 Millionen (Remainder) on Saturday 14 March 2009 at Volksbühne (9 pm).

Les Cosmonautes au paradis (the French version of Men in Space) reviewed on France Culture.

The Joint Statement was presented at Tate Britain this January and revolves around the notion of “originary inauthenticity” — the trauma of materiality which prevents us from feeling at one with ourselves or the world. Art and literature frequently try to deal with this problem by sublimating matter and “elevating it into form”. Necronauts reject this temptation — they are “modern lovers of debris” who choose to “celebrate the imperfection of matter”. McCarthy points out that “what makes the trajectory of Yeats’s work so fascinating is the shift from early idealism to late materialism, And that’s where Joyce begins: debris, detritus, fragments, Stephen Dedalus squelching rubbish on the beach. That’s the landscape that has to be navigated, here, now — and celebrated, not transcended.”

Andrew Gallix on the International Necronautical Society in the March issue of Dazed & Confused.