Customer Reviews

Remainder

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Remainder is a novel to be read for the existential discomfort that it leaves you with. Those who read this for a plot will not be satisfied. It attempts to recreate (or "re-enact") the soul and its connection to the material world, and cleverly poses the question who is observing who and what is the real self.

If you do not wish to contaminate your experience of the novel, then do not read on. Just read the following paragraph, which is my conclusion:

I highly recommend this book to those interested in exploring existentialism, the philosophy of body and soul, and also post-traumatic stress syndrome. Besides that, I found this to be an entertaining novel that I could not put down, full of a quirky British sense of humor.You may find yourself reading the book a number of times to digest the full meaning.

What is reality? The author may have cleverly "tricked" the reader into thinking that the novel takes place in the "real" material world....

My take on this novel(and this can be interpreted in many ways) is that the whole sequence is a dream, possibly of someone dying on a ventilator in an ICU, having experienced a horrific trauma. It may even have occurred at the instant preceding death...there is much emphasis on slowing down and stretching time.The re-enactments cleverly contain dream-like images and metaphors of the events surrounding the trauma. As he struggles to live (possibly within a coma and a paralysed body)he recreates the moment of "death", stuck in a state that borders on life and death at the moment of the trauma. As he struggles to hang on to life, he reinvents the traumatic moment...he is stuck at that point. At the end, he appears to hover between life (and its pain) and death (with its release) as the plane metaphorically banks to and from the airport. At that point he has released the trauma, relinquished his fear, and recovered his soul... and lost the painful need to understand.

I consider this book to be an excellent piece of literature which enables the reader to experience multiple levels of the soul. Life and our sense of what is real are paradoxes. Tom McCarthy has managed to express this in a fascinating novel. The interpretation is clearly left with the reader...some may find that unsatisfying...but that's the whole point...there is no ultimate answer, simply re-enactments of existence.

I highly recommend this book to those interested in exploring existentialism, the philosophy of body and soul, and also post-traumatic stress syndrome. Besides that, I found this to be an entertaining novel that I could not put down, full of a quirky British sense of humor.

This book has no real plot, but that's the beauty of it. It swirls and goes over the same events again and again, deeper and deeper, a little more intensely each time. It has echoes of Palahniuk, Pynchon, Ballard, Ellis...the writers of extreme fiction have a new addition to their ranks. The book is disturbing on a profound level simply because one can understand the narrator's obsession...empathize with him, understand why he goes where he goes and does what he does though on the surface they seem to be completely insane. Even the surprises make sense. I haven't been this haunted by a book in a long time.

Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy is a kid with a box of crayons and his own set of rules. Remainder, a first novel, could best be described as the story of what could happen at the crossroads of weird and possible. What happens when you give a guy a mysterious brain injury and more money than he'll ever need? Throw in a little bit of disoriented pride and you've got the makings of this strangely compelling novel.

We first meet our hero as he relearns how to walk, eat, and talk, one laborious maneuver at a time, but this is no heroic recovery novel. Soon he is able to appear to be the same as he once was. He has lost his memory, but it is slowly coming back to him, and as a huge lawsuit settlement turns him into a multi-millionaire, he goes on a quest to create, or recreate, a moment that will make him feel something real, something non-maneuvered. So much money not only allows him to go about this quest in whatever way he sees fit, but it also allows him to refuse to explain himself as the money flows.

The unnamed narrator, unnamed perhaps because, as the title suggests, he is less of a real person than the remainder of a real person after the accident. How much humanity remains in this remainder? How far is he willing to go to feel something real? How many rules of society will his money let him break, and how long will that money last? The crescendo of this mad fugue will keep adventurous readers enthralled.

I picked up this book on the basis of the strength of a review in Entertainment Weekly (an A-, I believe.) It might be worth the $9 Amazon is selling it for now, but don't go out and buy it at your local store for full price.

The beginning is a bit slow but, overall, the novel is not poorly written. It was an enjoyable read in general - right up to about the last few pages. Given what McCarthy has written and how, the story escalates the only way it can (savvy readers will see it coming) and yet, the end is unsatisfying. I found myself unsympathetic - or maybe unempathetic - to the main character and I had trouble believing & understanding his motivations. It felt like the book ended too early and there are several red herrings / character circular thought patterns that don't really lead anywhere.

I think McCarthy's book is a bit self indulgent. I think I was supposed to feel it was all very clever and cool but I feel like it was several hours that would've been better spent reading something else. That being said, it isn't the worst book I've ever read - it's squarely middle of the pack material.

McCarthy's story of an obsessive and meticulous trauma survivor is very well put together. I really enjoyed the descriptions and the peek into the mind of someone's painstaking plans and perfection in orchestrating of events in 'Remainder'. The repetitiveness detailing the "re-enactments" are like inside jokes shared with the reader in this fast paced book.

I really wanted to like this. I love Paul Auster's 'New York Trilogy' and Mark Haddon's 'Curious

Incident' and was expecting similar mind games. But 'Remainder' didn't work for me, I'm

afraid. The writing feels forced and maddeningly artificial. The dialogue is plain bad. The

sluggish pace means you're always a few steps ahead of the narrator. Which is never a good

place to be. A disappointment, sorry.

God, I disliked this novel. In fact, it earned the distinction of being a "window book": books that I've thrown out my window, exasperated, into the trash area below.

I used to be a voracious reader of ambitious fiction but a new hobby has taken up much of my free time so I read far less fiction than before. I don't know much about the contemporary literature, so when I happened upon this novel in a list of "Best Books of the Oughts" I snapped it up.

Ugh. So unenjoyable. Not a word of it struck me as interesting or insightful or lyrical or entertaining or thought-provoking. I loathed its metaphysical setup from the beginning, failing to find it remotely clever or post-theory or whatever. It's just tedious. And it's quite obvious the author read George Perec's novel "Life: A User's Manual" and wanted to write something in that vein. Too bad his inspiration remains infinitely superior.

I'm pretty sure the author also read Mirukami's "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" as well which explores some similar themes.

And finally, the author betrays an acquaintance with Alain Robbe-Grillet's "La Jalousie."

I sympathize with the weight on any would-be novelist's head, trying to carve out something new here in the 21st century. And I'm very open to experimentation, playfulness, and reinventions of the novel. But this certainly wasn't it.

This actually started out as one of the best books I have read in some time. Superb writing and interesting characters. Someplace in the middle, though, it starts to get tedious, and then just as it appears the story is going someplace again it falls completely off track.

I would put this on the shelf right between Garland's Coma and Kaufman's 'Synedoche, NY'. What if your life was nothing but a set of re-enactments? A never-ending quest to attain some ineffable quality, a certain shade of lighting, a particular view, an aroma, a conjunction of background noises? What if you approached every instance in your life with the methodical precision of a crime scene investigation? What if you had the resources to actually do it? Life as perpetual re-enactment, as rehearsal... Where would this eventually lead? Can anyone exist viewing life as a run thru, a trial run? Would this ultimately lead to a sense of control that just doesn't exist anywhere. Would that sense of control slide over into megalomania, excess and madness? Although McCarthy is a capable writer, the subject matter itself comes off a bit dry and may not be for everyone. Nevertheless, I, for one will not forget it.

With the hope of countering my tendencies to avoid most "new" fiction I purchased this book thinking I could be proven wrong; to be shown that most literature that enters the marketplace in the 21st century is not a thoughtless waste of time. The first 60 or so pages of this book had promise, but then it revealed itself to be a forced, semi-imaginative and uninspired mass of pages. I feel somewhat bad for saying this but it cannot be helped. Instead I picked up "The Goalies Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" by Peter Handke, which is a tidy, superior and exceptional novel. Sorry Tom.