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Book Description

Publication Date: February 13, 2007

A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident, receives an outrageous sum in legal compensation, and has no idea what to do with it.

Then, one night, an ordinary sight sets off a series of bizarre visions he can’t quite place.

How he goes about bringing his visions to life–and what happens afterward–makes for one of the most riveting, complex, and unusual novels in recent memory.

Remainder is about the secret world each of us harbors within, and what might happen if we were granted the power to make it real.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

McCarthy's debut novel, set in London, takes a clever conceit and pumps it up with vibrant prose to such great effect that the narrative's pointlessness is nearly a nonissue. The unnamed narrator, who suffers memory loss as the result of an accident that "involved something falling from the sky," receives an £8.5 million settlement and uses the money to re-enact, with the help of a "facilitator" he hires, things remembered or imagined. He buys an apartment building to replicate one that has come to him in a vision and then populates it with people hired to re-enact, over and over again, the mundane activities he has seen his imaginary neighbors performing. He stages both ordinary acts (the fixing of a punctured tire) and violent ones (shootings and more), each time repeating the events many times and becoming increasingly detached from reality and fascinated by the scenarios his newfound wealth has allowed him to create—even though he professes he doesn't "want to understand them." McCarthy's evocation of the narrator's absorption in his fantasy world as it cascades out of control is brilliant all the way through the abrupt climax. (Feb.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Rejected in England before it was acquired by a small French publishing house, Tom McCarthy's debut novel is now a popular and critical success. The author, who in 1999 launched the semihoax International Necronautical Society (INS)—designed to map and colonize the space of death—transfers some of the Society's philosophical concerns to his novel. About human reality, social constructions, and the quest for identity, Remainder offers a highly original and insightful allegory of our times. In a clear, deadpan tone, the narrator, "an existential Everyman" (Los Angeles Times), tells a bizarre, disorienting, and compelling story. The vagueness may bother some readers, but most will enjoy pondering the ambiguity of it all.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist

The nameless British narrator of McCarthy's clever debut is the sort of Everyman one would never want to be. He loses virtually all of his memory in a bizarre accident ("it involved something falling from the sky") and accepts an 8.5 million settlement from the responsible party on the condition that he won't speak a word about the tragic turn of events. Our hero is at a loss as to how to spend the money until, one evening at a friend's party, he experiences a strange flash of deja vu. Inspired by this snippet from his past, he hires a facilitator to help render an exact replica of the tenement-style building he once inhabited. He even holds a "casting call" to select the building's residents, whom he directs to repeatedly perform certain tasks. The narrator then orders reenactments of seemingly random events that run the gamut from inane to insane. Londoner McCarthy delivers crisp, precise prose, though his offbeat tale might have been rendered in far fewer words. Allison Block

Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“Hypnotically creepy . . . McCarthy’s portrait of the pursuit of total control is arresting, and he is alert to the bland amorality that underlies it.” —The New Yorker

“What fun it is when a crafty writer plays cat and mouse with your mind, when you can never anticipate his next move and when, in any case, he knows all the exits to the maze and has already blocked them. . . . McCarthy’s superb stylistic control and uncanny imagination transport this novel beyond the borders of science fiction. His bleak humor, hauntingly affectless narrator and methodical expansion on his theme make Remainder more than an entertaining brain-teaser: it’s a work of novelistic philosophy, as disturbing as it is funny.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A chillingly clever novel of patterns that fools you into thinking it’s a novel about plot . . . [McCarthy] is a new author who’s ambitious and intelligent.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Fresh, funny, and deeply disturbing.” —New York Magazine

“A novel of astonishing genius. . . . . It demands to be read in one sitting. So deftly does McCarthy absorb you into the mind of his hero that you quickly feel you are living with him inside his head. . . . The book caught me in such a delirious spin toward fragmentation and left me feeling every detail of the matter of life more keenly.” —Sarah Cook, The Believer

“Addictively strange.” —Details

“Tom McCarthy is shockingly talented. . . . Remainder is one of those novels that you finish and turn immediately back to the beginning, to fill in the gaps you may have missed the first time around. It leaves you feeling sort of shaken and very impressed.” —Gawker.com

“Nihilistically modern and classically structured. . . . Tightly knit, suspenseful . . . [Remainder] pursues an authenticity with the monomaniacal focus of Francis Ford Coppola circa Apocalypse Now. . . . McCarthy tells his tale calmly, as if taking long, yogic breaths.” —Bookforum

“Captivating and challenging. . . . Remainder isn't a mystery novel—there's no villain here apart from time and space—so if its core ripples with ambiguity, all the better for the reader, as this is a book to be read and then reread, rich as it is with its insights, daring as it is with its contradictions.” —Los Angeles Times

“The nameless narrator in this eerie debut is a Londoner severely injured in an accident. Months later, he received an £8.5 million settlement on the condition that he never speak about the payout or the incident again—not a problem, since he doesn’t remember it. Our hero then begins to wholly recreate and re-enact portions of his old life with a salaried cast of extras, set designers, and stuntmen. In taut and chilly prose, McCarthy describes how this mission becomes a disturbing obsession; the horrifying conclusion is visible 30 pages off, but it’s no less shocking when it arrives.” —Entertainment Weekly, A-

“Tom McCarthy’s first novel offers a vivid, subtle portrait of creeping madness.” —Time Out New York

“A quick and gritty novel that begs, thanks largely to a cinematic plot, to be read in one sitting.” —BookSlut

“A stunningly strange book about the rarest of fictional subjects, happiness.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude

“Remainder is a beautifully strange and chilly book. Very smart and unlike anything else you're likely to read.” —Scott Smith, author of The Ruins

“Tom McCarthy has a singularity, a precision, a surreal logic and a sly wit that is all his own. It will be a long time before you read a stranger book—or a truer one.” —Rupert Thomson, author of Divided Kingdom

“It will remain with you long after you have felt compelled to re-read it.” —Time Out London

“An assured work of existential horror. . . . Perfectly disturbing.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Strangely gripping. . . . Remainder should be read (and, of course, reread) for its intelligence and humour.”

—The Times Literary Supplement (London)

Tom McCarthy is a writer and conceptual artist. He was born in 1969 and lives in central London. He is known for the reports, manifestos, and media interventions he has made as General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network. Remainder is his first novel.

McCarthy's debut novel Remainder initially made no impact on larger UK publishers. It was eventually published in November 2005 by small Paris-based art publisher Metronome Press and distributed through gallery and museum shops, but not in chain bookstores [1] and then received widespread critical attention in the literary and mainstream press. The London Review of Books called it "a very good novel indeed" and The Independent claimed that "its minatory brilliance calls for classic status".[2] The novel was re-published in a much larger UK print-run by the more conventional English publisher Alma Books (2006), and in the US by Vintage (2007), where it ranked as an Amazon top one-hundred seller and entered the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list. On its American publication the New York Times dedicated the front cover of its book section to the novel, calling the book "a work of novelistic philosophy, as disturbing as it is funny".[3] In 2008 Remainder won the fourth annual Believer Book Award.[4] Zadie Smith wrote in the New York Review of Books that it was "one of the great English novels of the last ten years", suggesting it showed a future path that the novel "might, with difficulty, follow".[5] It has since been translated into fourteen languages, and an adaptation for cinema by Film4 Productions was begun in 2008.[6][7] Since the success, several big publishing houses who had turned it down originally returned to him with enthusiastic offers, which McCarthy rejected, commenting that "it's the same book as it was two years ago."[1]

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
about the accident itself I can say very little. Almost nothing. It involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits. That’s it, really: all I can divulge. Not much, I know.
It’s not that I’m being shy. It’s just that—well, for one, I don’t even remember the event. It’s a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been—or, more precisely, being about to be—hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who’s to say that these are genuine memories? Who’s to say my traumatized mind didn’t just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap—the crater—that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers.
And then there’s the Requirement. The Clause. The terms of the Settlement drawn up between my lawyer and the parties, institutions, organizations—let’s call them the bodies—responsible for what happened to me prohibit me from discussing, in any public or recordable format (I know this bit by heart), the nature and/or details of the incident, on pain of forfeiting all financial reparations made to me, plus any surplus these might have accrued (a good word that, “accrued”) while in my custody—and forfeiting quite possibly, my lawyer told me in a solemn voice, a whole lot more besides. Closing the loop, so to speak.
The Settlement. That word: Settlement. Set-l-ment. As I lay abject, supine, tractioned and trussed up, all sorts of tubes and wires pumping one thing into my body and sucking another out, electronic metronomes and bellows making this speed up and that slow down, their beeping and rasping playing me, running through my useless flesh and organs like sea water through a sponge—during the months I spent in hospital, this word planted itself in me and grew. Settlement. It wormed its way into my coma: Greg must have talked about it to me when he came round to gawk at what the accident had left. As the no-space of complete oblivion stretched and contracted itself into gritty shapes and scenes in my unconscious head—sports stadiums mainly, running tracks and cricket pitches—over which a commentator’s voice was playing, inviting me to commentate along with him, the word entered the commentary: we’d discuss the Settlement, though neither of us knew what it entailed. Weeks later, after I’d emerged from coma, come off the drip-feed and been put onto mushy solids, I’d think of the word’s middle bit, the -l-, each time I tried to swallow. The Settlement made me gag before it gagged me: that’s for sure.
Later still, during the weeks I sat in bed able to think and talk but not yet to remember anything about myself, the Settlement was held up to me as a future strong enough to counterbalance my no-past, a moment that would make me better, whole, complete. When most of my past had eventually returned, in instalments, like back episodes of some mundane soap opera, but I still couldn’t walk, the nurses said the Settlement would put me back on my feet. Marc Daubenay would visit and brief me about our progress towards Settlement while I sat in plaster waiting for my bones to set. After he’d left I’d sit and think of sets—six games in tennis or how- ever many matching cups and plates, the scenery in theatres, patterns. I’d think of remote settlements in ancient times, village outposts crouching beneath hostile skies. I’d think of people—dancers, maybe, or soldiers—crouching, set, waiting for some event to start.
Later, much later, the Settlement came through. I’d been out of hospital for four months, out of physiotherapy for one. I was living on my own on the edge of Brixton, in a one-bedroom flat. I wasn’t working. The company I’d been with up until the accident, a market-research outfit, had said they’d give me paid sick leave until May. It was April. I didn’t feel like going back to work. I didn’t feel like doing anything. I wasn’t doing anything. I passed my days in the most routine of activities: getting up and washing, walking to the shops and back again, reading the papers, sitting in my flat. Sometimes I watched TV, but not much; even that seemed too proactive. Occasionally I’d take the tube up to Angel, to Marc Daubenay’s office. Mostly I just sat in my flat, doing nothing. I was thirty years old.
On the day the Settlement came through, I did have something to do: I had to go and meet a friend at Heathrow Airport. An old friend. She was flying in from Africa. I was just about to leave my flat when the phone rang. It was Daubenay’s secretary. I picked the phone up and her voice said:
“Olanger and Daubenay. Marc Daubenay’s office. Putting you through.”
“Sorry?” I said.
“Putting you through,” she said again.
I remember feeling dizzy. Things I don’t understand make me feel dizzy. I’ve learnt to do things slowly since the accident, understanding every move, each part of what I’m doing. I didn’t choose to do things like this: it’s the only way I can do them. If I don’t understand words, I have one of my staff look them up. That day back in April when Daubenay’s secretary phoned, I didn’t have staff, and anyway they wouldn’t have helped in that instance. I didn’t know who the you was she was putting through—Daubenay or me. A trivial distinction, you might say, but the uncertainty still made me dizzy. I placed my hand against my living-room wall.
Daubenay’s voice came on the line after a few seconds:
“Hello?” it said.
“Hello,” I said back.
“It’s come through,” said Daubenay.
“Yes, it’s me,” I answered. “That was just your secretary putting us through. Now it’s me.”
“Listen,” said Daubenay. His voice was excited; he hadn’t taken in what I’d just said. “Listen: they’ve capitulated.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Who? Them! The other side. They’ve caved in.”
“Oh,” I said. I stood there with my hand against the wall. The wall was yellow, I remember.
“They’ve approached us,” Daubenay continued, “with a deal whose terms are very strong each way.”
“What are the terms?” I asked.
“For your part,” he told me, “you can’t discuss the accident in any public arena or in any recordable format. To all intents and purposes, you must forget it ever happened.”
“I’ve already forgotten,” I said. “I never had any memory of it in the first place.”
This was true, as I mentioned earlier. The last clear memory I have is of being buffeted by wind twenty or so minutes before I was hit.
“They don’t care about that,” Daubenay said. “That’s not what they mean. What they mean is that you must accept that, in law, it ceases to be actionable.”
I thought about that for a while until I understood it. Then I asked him:
“How much are they paying me?”
“Eight and a half million,” Daubenay said.
“Pounds?” I asked.
“Pounds,” Daubenay repeated. “Eight and a half million pounds.”
It took another second or so for me to take in just how much money that was. When I had, I took my hand off the wall and turned suddenly around, towards the window. The movement was so forceful that it pulled the phone wire with it, yanked it right out of the wall. The whole connection came out: the wire, the flat-headed bit that you plug in and the casing of the hole that that plugs into too. It even brought some of the internal wiring that runs through the wall out with it, all dotted and flecked with crumbly, fleshy bits of plaster.
“Hello?” I said.
It was no good: the connection had been cut. I stood there for some time, I don’t know how long, holding the dead receiver in my hand and looking down at what the wall had spilt. It looked kind of disgusting, like something that’s come out of something.
The horn of a passing car made me snap to. I left my flat and hurried down to a phone box to call Marc Daubenay back. The nearest one was just round the corner, on Coldharbour Lane. As I crossed my road and walked down the one lying perpendicular to it, I thought about the sum: eight and a half million. I pictured it in my mind, its shape. The eight was perfect, neat: a curved figure infinitely turning back into itself. But then the half. Why had they added the half? It seemed to me so messy, this half: a leftover fragment, a shard of detritus. When my knee-cap had set after being shattered in the accident, one tiny splinter had stayed loose. The doctors hadn’t managed to fish it out, so it just floated around beside the ball, redundant, surplus to requirements; sometimes it got jammed between the ball and its socket and messed up the whole joint, locking it, inflaming nerves and muscles. I remember picturing the sum’s leftover fraction, the half, as I walked down the street that day, picturing it as the splinter in my knee, and frowning, thinking: Eight alone would have been better.
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