Surplus Matter

The two actors slip out of character and profess not to know very much about the whole thing. The real Tom McCarthy is beaming with delight, having watched from backstage. “We could franchise this,” he tells me. “Imagine Keanu Reeves and Brad Pitt standing in for us!” Everyone is relieved; it all worked out. The press people, the technical staff, and the rest of the INS staff slope off to the pub. In the emptying lobby, a spray of crumbs and crushed cups coat the floor and the sofas, like a punch line: “the brute materiality of the external world,” waiting around for the cleaners to turn up.

Ben Street reviews the International Necronautical Society’s Tate Declaration on Inauthenticity in Triple Canopy.

Tom McCarthy is mentioned by Nicholas Lezard in his Guardian article on Tintin.

Les Cosmonautes au paradis sont, en fait, un roman d’«ostploitation» choral (forcément choral), genre popularisé en Allemagne ou en Grande-Bretagne par le Russian Disco de Kaminer, et qui mixe allègrement le polar mafieux avec la satire glam-coke dans une nostalgie ironique de l’ancien bloc soviétique affronté au néocapitalisme : de «ost» = «est» et «xploitation», suffixe américain signifiant «qui exploite les particularismes culturels de».

Eric Loret reviews Tom McCarthy’s Les Cosmonautes au paradis (Men in Space) for Libération.

It has been rumoured, post event, that McCarthy and Critchley hired a couple of actors to impersonate them up on the stage in front of the packed auditorium. Contrary to popular opinion I can confirm that it was, in fact, the artist/novelist Tom McCarthy and Professor of Philosophy Simon Critchley before us, thus solidifying the event’s authenticity for those in attendance. This, some of you may recall, is not the first time the INS has caused such controversy.

Lee Rourke reviews the Tate Declaration on Inauthenticity for 3:AM Magazine.

According to the INS, we are all dividuals – the self is divided, split, is inauthentic, we are comic, incomplete; the art we make, which informs our existence, is fake, a forgery, is indeed the there of our thatness. Our journey to death (Necronaut) is a way to navigate existence – there is no transcendence – our matter matters. So: Beckett, Blanchot, and Bataille as drawn by Chuck Jones.

Steve Finbow reviews the Tate Declaration on Inauthenticity for 3:AM Magazine.

The narrator’s form of therapy, in other words, is nostalgia, a way to reach back to a time when his life still felt whole and authentic. Yet as the narrator grows more and more obsessed with living only in these flawless moments, Remainder suggests that our fixation with authenticity may be itself a trauma. It describes the truth of representations and stars a man who erects his memories as gigantic art pieces and finds himself frustrated by how simulations can only stand-in for reality.

Ken Chen reviews Remainder in Rain Taxi.

In its brutal excision of psychology it is easy to feel that Remainder comes to literature as an assassin, to kill the novel stone dead. I think it means rather to shake the novel out of its present complacency. It clears away a little of the dead wood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward. We could call this constructive deconstruction, a quality that, for me, marks Remainder as one of the great English novels of the past ten years.

Zadie Smith reviews Remainder in the New York Review of Books.

Proust has a similar command of setting, and so does Anthony Powell, but literature demands that their characters grow old. Tintin is exempt from that demand. This is one way in which he, and a host of comic-book characters, are not literature: Even narrative time has no grip on them. This fact isn’t especially mysterious, but it is striking. And it occurs to me that this may, in a way, be the secret of Tintin and the Secret of Literature, although I don’t mean to undercut McCarthy’s scintillating book by saying so: Losing yourself in Tintin is a good way to imagine that you will never grow old.

Paul La Farge reviews Tintin and the Secret of Literature in Bookforum.

In the same way that Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy tells its story through architecture in book form, Remainder is an art installation disguised as a brilliant novel.

Tom McCarthy’s Remainder receives The Believer’s fourth annual Book Award.

There’s a secret written into the book’s very title. McCarthy is telling us less about, say, what literature is than what it isn’t. We come to a novel expecting it to tell us everything that it can, to be replete. McCarthy lifts the rug to show us that the more a story tells us, the more it hides. Channeling Barthes, McCarthy characterizes Tintin — whose exploits so often involve misread missives, misunderstood map coordinates, misconstruction of another character’s language — as standing “guardian . . . at the heart of a noise.”

Eric Banks reviews Tintin and the Secret of Literature in the Los Angeles Times.