Remainder

What I liked about this novel is that it attempted to portray the point of view of someone whose outlook has shifted from what we might call homeostatically normal, to one that we might call disturbingly obsessive.Our thoughts return to center once we understand anxiety's effect on them; but the man in this story cannot do that. His being is stuck in an endless loop. Eventually, he becomes an exaggerated caricature of the obsessive. The physical parts of him that were altered in his accident make processing sensory data extraordinarily difficult. Because he will never return to "normal" (his center), I found his story a very sad one.All serious fiction attempts to hold the mirror up. To show us what we're really like, who we are. What being is. What perception and consciousness are really like. New methods are needed every generation or so to break the old modes that have tried to communicate to us the world as it really is. REMAINDER succeeds partly in getting the reader to see being as it has always been in a new way.But when I finished the novel I was happy to put it aside. I didn't like the main character. I got tired of his obsessions (and, yes, perhaps that's partly the point of the novel--how tiresome modern existence really is). Unfortunately, the repetitions, which are at the core of his obsessive outlook, give the story a dry, tiring sameness, an over-and-over-again sameness that was hard to like. Perhaps the novel is just too long.The first 100 pages were riveting.

As the book begins, the narrator (never named) has just received an enormous financial settlement for a traumatic accident which is never quite revealed. With this money he tries to find a moment in time which will deliver him an epiphany, his Faustian "stay a while" moment.(For those needing a quick refresher: Goethe's Faust tells the devil he may have his soul if he can deliver a single moment so profound, so recondite, that Faust tells the moment, "Stay a while, you are so beautiful." The devil takes him all over the place, gives him all kinds of experiences, but in the end, Faust has a moment of bliss in spite of the devil's efforts, not because of them).But not just any epiphany, he has a specific scene in mind. And a bizarre scene it is. He buys an entire apartment building. He hires actors to live in the building, each in their own apartment, just practicing to be the person he requires them to be. He does this through a factotum he has hired expressly to make it all happen. He spends Croesean amounts of money to have people live his extravagant fantasy, and re-enact his dream, over and over again, until he decides he's done.Then he witnesses an incident on the street, involving a car and a bicycle, and spends even more money, using his same logistics manager, to re-enact that scene.And then he decides to re-enact yet another scenario, even more complicated than before.What is the narrator searching for? Does he finally achieve it, and if so, what form does it take? Or does he keep going, believing the moment will yet arrive? Did he achieve it, but miss it? Does he give up, understanding the moment will never come? Or does he realize he's already had that moment, and settle down?And if this is Faust, is there a devil? Is the devil the factotum, that logistics expert who gives him everything he requests? Or is it the narrator himself? After all, he is the one with all the power and money to make it all happen. Or maybe there is no devil at all; maybe the narrator is being driven by his own "inner demons", as it were.Personally I think the ending is brilliant. Yes, as other reviews have mentioned, it is a bit existential, a bit philosophical, a bit un-plotted; but I like the way McCarthy brings us to the conclusion, and shows us the choices the narrator ultimately makes, and lets us steep in the conclusion to live with our own thoughts and reactions.And the writing along the way is simply fantastic. I love the way McCarthy applies philosophical filters to everything, how he sees tangible objects and real happenstance in terms of events and interactions, some real and some inscrutable.A very thoughtful and deep book, a smart retake on the Faustian myth, and a satisfying read.

I bought and read this novel many years ago, but find myself thinking of it often as it concerns a man trying to verify the authenticity of his experience—as many of us struggle to do in the Trump era. Sadie Smith published a beautiful essay in the New York Review of Books in which she compared Remainder to Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland which was the publishing sensation of the year. Her thesis was that while Netherland was well written and interesting, Remainder was the more important text suggesting new avenues for books. I never got through Netherland, but I have never past Remainder.This is a valuable read for that person who enjoys a good postmodern read.

"Remainder" is not your average book, and one must submit to the style and story and let it take you. Don't skim. Read every word. Read it out loud. The descriptions are detailed and for a good reason. Not much really happens in the story, but it's the journey that makes the read worthwhile. Think of it as following a man's quest to find happiness...at all costs.

I found this novel to be a completely effective, and thoroughly entertaining modern existential gem. It sparkles with wit and talent; It was dark, gruesome, hilarious, bizarre, and utterly original. The story of a misanthropic, almost Dostoyevskian victim of falling debris, mental imbalance, amnesia, and an evil imagination; a man turns injury into creative malice, trying to artificially rebuild a broken memory by staging the world around him until reality itself turns wretched, broken and false. See it as metephor, expressionism, or a claim on man's soul, vision, or insight...but see it as a comedy first, because it truly is one of the more risky and out-there comic takes on modern humanity I've yet come across. Virtuosic but somehow simplistic, a great summer read you won't soon forget.

Mind-blowing! Tom McCarthy's first novel is so brilliant you ask yourself how on earth it could have been rejected by so many publishers. The answer probably lies in its originality. Publishing houses like cookie-cutter novels and safe bets, but in doing so they underestimate their readers. If you love Alain Robbe-Grillet's work and are familiar with French structuralist and post-structuralist theory, you will also fall in love with this book.

the narrative is fantastic, fascinating and as long as you buy into the premise, you'll enjoy the book. The message of the story did not live up to the excellence of the prose.

I liked the story and style a lot except that some description of the set-up can become tedious (despite it matching the obsessive nature of the protagonist) and certain aspects pushed credulity beyond breaking point.It does well because the ending was fun rather than something I wanted to hurry along and be done with.

This is a strange book. A man has an accident that seriously injures him. The accident required him to learn activities that he's previously taken for granted. While in recovery he gets the sense that he (and his actions) are "second hand," and "distant" from "real life" in some way.After his release into "real life" (and on the receipt of considerable compensation from the accident), he gets the urge to re-enact memories and incidents that he viewed as "real." As the book develops, the re-enactment get weirder and weirder. At one stage, for example, he wants to see a cyclists murder re-enacted. On another occasion, he has a tyre change repeated again and again.The book's weird. I didn't really get it. I couldn't see the point of it if I'm honest. It's well written, it's just I found it hard to believe (oh and the compensation was far too low)

I have never read a book like this one. You cannot get it out of your head and it really does make you start to look at the world differently.I read this on regular half-hour train journeys and, each time, when I arrived at the destination I didn't want to tear myself away from it. And when I did and finally stepped out into the Railway Station I viewed everyone in a completely different way and began seeing things previously unnoticed. No-one else around me seemed to be taking anything seriously - until I realised that everyone else was behaving normally and it was just me that had been reprogrammed. Another reviewer mentioned that the book `got under their skin' - it does just that. All of a sudden, every action, little task or movement takes on greater import.The only disappointment was the ending, where the whole bizarreness just got to be a bit too much. But by that time the book had already altered my mind. It was too late for me.

In later Monty Python shows some sketches were ended by a military type marching onto the set and saying ‘stop, this is just silly’. I felt much the same way about this book.

brilliant book