Remainder

Novela extraña donde las haya, pero también de las que perduran en la memoria tiempo después de su lectura. Mediante una prosa sencilla, Tom McCarthy aborda temas trascendentales como la imperfección de la realidad o la búsqueda de lo auténtico.

La historia tiene como protagonista a un londinense que nos irá narrando lo que le sucedió. Acaba de recuperarse de un accidente; algo le cayó del cielo provocándole unas lesiones que le dejaron temporalmente en coma, y borrándole parte de su memoria. Tras meses de recuperación, un abogado le comunica que ha recibido una indemnización por parte de una extraña entidad: ocho millones y medio de libras. A cambio, él no podrá contarle a nadie lo que le ha pasado.

Tras haberse show more recuperado y haber pasado por una etapa de re-aprendizaje, el protagonista se da cuenta de que no percibe la realidad de manera natural. Se muestra apático, y la mayoría de cosas le parecen artificiales, como aprendidas. Hasta que un día, en la fiesta en casa de un conocido, tiene un déjà vu que le hace recordar ciertas escenas y personas asociadas a ellas. No sabe quiénes son, pero le parecen unos recuerdos ya vividos. A partir de aquí, el protagonista se obsesiona por los ecos de estos recuerdos, por las sensaciones que le proporcionan. Y no es que se trate de nada extraordinario, se trata de recuerdos de una realidad anodina, pero eso sí, le transmiten esa sensación de naturalidad y autenticidad que tanto desea el narrador. Así que ni corto ni perezoso, decide utilizar su dinero para re-crear estos recuerdos, comprando edificios y contratando a la gente que sea necesaria para dar vida al proyecto. Pero los recuerdos serán sólo el principio de una espeluznante obsesión: repetir la realidad, una y otra y otra vez.

Este argumento que introduce la ficción en la realidad, que puede recordar a ‘El Show de Truman’, tiene más de una lectura: realidad contra ficción, donde el protagonista únicamente se siente real cuando re-crea y se siente parte de una realidad escenificada, entrando en una clara paradoja; lo que cierta gente es capaz de hacer por dinero, cuando se les pide que se rebajen a realizar todo aquello que se les ordene; la realidad enfrentada al tiempo y al espacio, o movimiento perpetuo, cuando el protagonista se obsesiona en la re-creación de escenas; la obsesión por la materia y sus residuos.

Me pregunto cuándo deja de ser auténtico un hecho que se repite múltiples veces. Sin duda, la novela de Tom McCarthy está llamada a convertirse en un clásico. show less

This was a very fun read, very consumable but also sort of dazzling in how it makes you inhabit the perspective of the main character, whose view of the world turns out to be pretty interesting and twisted (yet in some ways understandable if misguided). The prose is a cinch, the ideas fun, and the story a train wreck that you initially can't imagine will be the case but then suspect will be the case and can't pry your eyes away from. This was a better (if also probably much easier to write) book than McCarthy's C, and the two together definitely make me want to keep an eye on this author.

Remainder's narrator, victim of some unspecified accident, awakens from a coma and must relearn even the most basic skills—walking, speaking, eating—as if from scratch. Even out of the hospital, he still feels strangely detached from his own body. Everything seems difficult, and somehow unsatisfying. On the plus side, he's rich, thanks to a settlement from the accident. Bothered by memories of living in a certain apartment which he's never actually seen, he begins to finance a series of re-creations, using sets and actors to bring to life the scenes in his vision. As this obsessive quest consumes him, his increasingly elaborate productions bring things closer and closer to some sort of breaking point.The longing for "authenticity" show more is a common symptom of life in this post-modern world. Remainder plays off that desire, leaving us both appalled at the narrator's actions and yet also sympathetic to him. Don't we all secretly hope that if we could only observe things closely enough, break them down into sufficiently exclusive categories, that some sort of Truth will emerge? Doesn't the latest multi-hyphenated musical genre invented by a Pitchfork reviewer hope to touch something Real? The great mythical structures intended to comfort us--God, the State, Love--have been dissolved, leaving us in a world of simple, terrifying matter. We live in constant anxiety, observing and judging ourselves from moment to moment; our minds provide a running commentary on our performance.Remainder's protagonist becomes obsessed with a murder victim, because he feels that in "dying beside the bollards on the tarmac he’d done what I wanted to do: merged with the space around him, sunk and flowed into it until there was no distance between it and him—and merged, too, with his actions, merged to the extent of having no more consciousness of them. He’d stopped being separate, removed, imperfect. Cut out the detour."The internal critic, the ironic observer, is finally—irrevocably—silenced. This is the longing for authenticity at its most self-destructive. And, turned on the practice of fiction, it is the feeling that all storytelling is ultimately deceptive. Fiction, like our protagonist, can only imperfectly re-create. The realist novel, then, is exposed as a fraud: it can never actually reveal the truth it promises. McCarthy, having acknowledged the lie, can be read as asking us: what now? show less

I thought this was a very good book. It’s about memory, reality, authenticity.

The story is told in the first person by someone whose name we never learn. He has had some sort of freak accident involving something falling on him from the sky – we never learn what. He has apparently recovered, but is left with little memory and with the need, at first, to think through physical actions (such as walking) before he can take them. This makes him feel distanced, unreal, inauthentic. At a party, a crack in a wall triggers a memory of a block of flats where he may have lived, including details of various neighbors and specific events. He desperately wants to grab hold of this memory and make it real. Luckily, he has received a huge show more settlement – eight and a half million pounds – from whoever or whatever caused his accident (again, we don’t know). He searches methodically until he finds a building that fits the memory. He buys it and fills it with “re-enactors” to perform the fragmented sequences of his memory over and over again, absolutely identically each time.

At this point, it feels like the book will be about reconstruction – will he move on and remember more of his life? Will it help him feel more “real”? But it goes in a somewhat different direction. The protagonist then decides to re-enact a series of other events – first one he experiences personally, then one he sees the aftermath of, then one he just hears about, and finally one which hasn’t happened at all. His search for authenticity is moving further and further from his own memory and experience. And each event he reconstructs is more physically violent than the previous one.

It’s clear throughout that he is unbalanced, obsessive, and it only gets worse. He is happy when watching his reconstructions, knowing exactly what is going to happen, examining them from every angle. But he deals less and less well with real reality. He has no idea how difficult he is being with the re-enactors, making them “perform” over and over for hours on end, even when he isn’t there. He doesn’t realize how difficult his demands on his “facilitator”, Naz, are becoming. He starts to “zone out” occasionally, falling into trances.

At this point, I started to think about how it could end – there were various possibilities, I thought, probably involving reactions by the “normal” characters, such as Naz, who would surely eventually rebel, causing some sort of crisis. But I was wrong again. What shapes the final events is not a human response, but a tiny difference between planned perfection and actual reality. The author planned and executed this perfectly. I won’t spoil things by going further, but just to say I was completely surprised by the ending, but also saw immediately how perfect it was.

There were a lot of other things going on here, I know – the narrator’s recurring belief that he can smell cordite, his desire to hold single moments for as long as possible, his obsession with leftover bits and pieces (“remainders”), and the background of casual violence. I’m sure I’ve missed the significance of quite of lot of it. But the bottom line is that I liked this book a lot. It was easy to read, compelling in its construction of the narrator’s increasingly obsessed search for “authentic moments”, and a really interesting story, both on the surface and on deeper levels. show less

For a few years I’ve been teaching “The Loss of the Creature” by Walker Percy--an essay ostensibly about the feeling of discovery, but also about sovereign control of one’s own perceptions, about willful sacrifice of that control, and about the evil of sacrificing the present moment to the domination of the present and the future.
McCarthy’s protagonist is, to an extent, seeking a similar sovereignty. But he chases it through the reenactment: by returning obsessively, lovingly, completely, to the single mysterious moments in which he felt clarity. Staging them, rebuilding them, recreating them--and in this complete simulacrum, he feels closer than he ever has to being real.
On the surface it’s an easy reversal: nothing feels show more real except for the staged. But beneath is what can only be described as insight--for as the game continues, I agree with the narrator’s discoveries, even as the implications of them become more sinister. I feel their logic. And at the end of the novel--when the narrator is quite happy, in fact, and no one else has any good reason to be--I feel doubly possessed, haunted, by that conflation.
What I’m trying to say is that, when I finished Remainder, I didn’t talk for a while. I felt that some trauma had been done to my cherished little neural paths, and I needed some time inside of that trauma. It took a while to remember: it is a Sunday. I am at the window of my livingroom. I am looking over a courtyard. It is Fall. I came slowly back into myself--and I’m hardpressed to remember a book that had so thoroughly rewired me.
I should give some warnings: this machine takes a while to get to full speed. At or around page 80, I took a peek deeper in to reassure myself that the rest of the trip would be worth it. For the most part I speed-read the first 150 pages. Then, the patterns started looping back. And like some chant, I fell into its rhythms.
Other things I can’t stop thinking about: Buddhism (of course). But everything makes me think of Buddhism right now. Boys of Life by Paul Russell. Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek, Guy Debord, all the glorious complicators of the real. Autism, art, autistic art, and the smell of cordite. show less

Wow! Hmm.

That could be my whole review.

But let me add some advice. Keep going with this book. The first part gives the impression that you're about to read a confessional weepy survivor story, and then the story veers without warning into a story that grapples in the most graphic way possible with the question of what makes our lives meaningful. It plays with the idea that a few perfect moments in one's life, however brief, are all that is necessary to give life meaning...and then it subverts this idea brilliantly. If you are a skimmer you might be tempted to skim right over some of the repetitive buildup of events. I advise against this and suggest you read as linearly as possible. It's worth making the effort to experience the story show more fully. show less

I found this to be a disturbing novel. At first the main character seems perfectly normal, but it quickly becomes apparent he's got a few loose screws up there. And as the the novel progress, the character begins to develop a God complex. He wants everything and everyone to behave exactly, exactly, the way he wants them to. And what disturbed me was that by being rich, he was pretty much able to buy anybody or anything he wanted. At the end he was nothing more than a homicidal maniac. Clearly, one of the most self centered and immoral characters I've ever seen in a work of fiction. Watching how earning a huge monetary law suit settlement allowed a normal man to decend into becoming a murder was not a pleasant reading experience.