Surplus Matter

Vancouver artist Lorna Brown’s art piece based on Tom McCarthy’s Remainder.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

Typically, Remainder’s unconventional character is expressed principally through its form, a narrativeless, first person affair where little happens in standard terms. There are no problems or solutions as such, just ideas to be explored indefinitely.

Remainder reviewed in new blog Slates.