version

Well-known member
Anyone read him? I stumbled across his stuff relatively recently and haven't gotten round to any of it yet. Apparently Remainder's good and Satin Island seems as though it could be intriguing.
 
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jenks

thread death
I have read him - I really liked C - thought Satin Island less successful. I have also read quite a few of his essays - surprised he's not popped up on here before. i haven't read the Tintin book which is supposed to be his magnum opus.

he's clearly someone who wants to combine 'theory' with traditional story telling procedures but is also suspicious of those methods. When it's done well and doesn't become too arch then the writing bristles and fizzes as it does in C whereas when it becomes too self conscious it is just annoying - as it was for me in Satin Island.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I only just saw this thread so late response... but yeah, Remainder I thought was one of the most original and good recent books I've read. It's kinda like nothing else... at least until Synecdoche NY came out with the exact same idea, although they claimed they'd never read the book. In fairness it develops differently.
C is also worth reading, lots of it is fun but I'm not sure it added up to anything in the end, certainly not as much as Remainder did. The next one I haven't read.
I know that he is obsessed with Tintin and believes that Herge thought he was the rightful heir to the Belgian throne (or something) and that there are loads of secret messages and clues relating to this scattered throughout the Tintin book series. He also wrote about fifty essays and articles about the Tintin film that came out a few years back, basically saying that it was crap for millions of reason - one of which was that the filmmakers (Adam Buxton maybe?) had failed to grasp that the whole point of the books was to demonstrate Herge's claim to royal bloodline. In fairness I watched the film in the cinema in Paris with a French friend and he pretty much agreed to the extent that he almost cried and he wouldn't do anything after we went home until he'd watched the whole cartoon series from his childhood to cheer himself up. But I digress.
Isn't McCarthy also heavily involved in the Necronautical Society which aim to travel through death or something?

http://necronauts.net/manifestos/1999_times_manifesto.html
 

version

Well-known member
Clicking through corridors of trivia on his laptop he stumbles on information about the Shroud of Turin--and is struck by the degree to which our access to the truth is always mediated by a set of veils or screens, with any world built on those truths inherently unstable... U. is tasked with writing the "Great Report," an ell-encompassing document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions.

Dissensus and the dematerialisation thread in a nutshell.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
He was influenced by the 90s end-of-DTP (but pre-web) counter culture stuff like the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, London Psychogeoographical Association, Stewart Home (necrocards), etc. That's where the INS came from.

Had a curry with him and a bunch of people once and he seemed OK but there was a bit of snippiness about him from the more anti-careerist keep it real types.

I've not read his stuff but probably should.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
He was influenced by the 90s end-of-DTP (but pre-web) counter culture stuff like the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, London Psychogeoographical Association, Stewart Home (necrocards), etc. That's where the INS came from.
Had a curry with him and a bunch of people once and he seemed OK but there was a bit of snippiness about him from the more anti-careerist keep it real types.
I've not read his stuff but probably should.
I was thinking about AAA and stuff as I wrote that, assumed it must have been an influence.
Anyway, I would like to repeat my endorsement for Remainder, at the time i really thought it was amazing and I'd recommend it to everyone.... er, and if you don't like it, maybe I remembered it wrong it was a while back.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Um, I didn't think that when I read it. It just has loads of random and, not exactly unrelated, but not really following on from each other segments. I don't remember the writing style being like Pynchon. The overall effect might be similar but it's so much smaller, I think that the size of Pynchon books is part of how they achieve what they do (er, apart from Lot 49 obviously which you always have to say when you talk about Pynchon) and a short book by another writer never reminds me of him. My favourite bits of the book were when he ended up as a heroin addict in London and he's talking about how as part of that underclass you see another world imposed on the usual London world that others see - magic doors to paradise here, people in the know shuffling towards them, dealers having the keys to the kingdom etc. For me something quite beautiful in the way he drew a parallel between Narnia or E Nesbit style magic worlds for children and this subculture that is perceived as an underclass in a poetic way. Or that's how I remember it anyway.
But yeah, I suppose some of the topics - a world war, the radio stuff - are reminiscent of Pynchon.
 

version

Well-known member
I wouldn't be surprised if all three were a nod to that bit in Ulysses about the single-letter book titles:

"Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W."
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Oh you're way ahead of me now. I'm trying to remember how the book justified being called C, I can't though. I thought maybe it stood for code or something but that doesn't sound right.
Honestly though, although in synopsis C sounds very interesting, I thought Remainder was way way better.
 

version

Well-known member
He's got another called Men in Space which sounds Pynchon-y too,

Set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of communism, Men in Space follows a cast of dissolute Bohemians, political refugees, football referees, deaf police agents, assassins, and stranded astronauts as they chase a stolen icon painting from Sofia to Prague and beyond. The icon’s melancholy orbit is reflected in the various characters’ ellipses and near misses as they career vertiginously through all kinds of space: physical, political, emotional, and metaphysical. What emerges is a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration.
 
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version

Well-known member
There's another Tom McCarthy who wrote a book called The Greatest Sniper Stories Ever Told and yet another who was in The Wire and wrote Pixar's Up.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
I always forget Men in Space. I've not read it but I understand it was based on his time living in the Czech Republic.
I always mix him up with the artist who did George Bush and the Seven Dwarves (Paul McCarthy?).
 
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