Summary: Literary essay about Andersen's whimsical sense of storytelling. But was he better than Kafka?
A writer like Hans Christian Andersen changes the fundamental question "what is literature?" into that of "what is a story?" Of course, all of us claim to appreciate good storytelling. But after the English courses, MLA conferences and controversies about canon, the learned reader develops a preference for the meaty stuff. Simplicity is fine, but complexity is better. A good story is not enough. Great works have to be more than just great stories.
Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen--Enjoying the childish things
Andersen's great contribution to literature is recognizing how little is needed to produce a story and how little a great story really needs to say. Andersen seems capable of turning anything into a story. One story relates the dialogue between an ancient tree and a day old fly. Another images the private thoughts of a dying match girl . One of my favorites, "Top and the Ball " tells of a chance meeting and spurned friendship between two toys in a drawer. The amazing thing about Andersen's stories is that they seem made up at the spur of the moment. (Unlike the Brothers Grimm, who merely collected popular folk tales, Hans Christian Andersen really did make up most of his stories!). I can imagine Andersen at his desk deciding to write a story with a top and a ball, then embellishing it with personalities and a romantic situation. The success of these minimalist stories derives not from plot development but the wit and snappy dialogue. Other stories belonging to this form ( animal fables of Phaedrus, Buddhist jatakas , Krylov's fables and Kafka's anti-fables) require little more than a paragraph to describe the consequences of greed or deception. Phaedrus" fable of the wolf who devises ridiculous pretexts for attacking the sheep hardly contains suspense or development or denouement; it is less than a hundred words long. The function of this miniature form is to uncover motives, give each side a parting shot before one gobbles the other.
Andersen and Kafka embody the two poles of imaginative writing. Andersen has a natural mastery of story forms and a perfect dramatic sense. He churns out stories without really caring if its elements are hackneyed or contrived. Everything is spontaneous and done in good fun; if it works, the story glides a foot off the ground; if it doesn't, the story is still readable, but empty calories for the reader. Andersen chases after magic, love and laughter; if beauty and insight happen to tag along, so much the better. But if they don't, it's not going to spoil the show.
Andersen is a sloppy writer, but Kafka attends to every detail. Andersen could care less about his world making sense. Kafka will do anything to make the absurd seem perfectly sensible. Andersen, however melancholy, avoids dwelling on an event or situation and focuses on changing with it; if the ugly duckling spent the whole time pondering his own ugliness in a mirror, there would be no change, no possibility of transformation. For Andersen it is the distracting external world that makes a final epiphany possible. Kafka is the master of stasis and self-absorption; for a glacier, even a single inch of movement is of terrifying significance.
The beautiful but unsettling "Little Mermaid" contains one of Andersen's most Kafkaesque endings. Forget the Disney version; it is completely different. One commentator takes the didacticism at face-value; he writes:
The purpose of the romance is to get the children involved in the fate of someone beside themselves. After the mermaid makes her selfless decision and receives the old choice of rewards for not being good , the last paragraph puts responsibility for her fate and others into the hands of the reader, teaching us that our most personal actions have an effect beyond us, and that whether we are good or bad is material not merely to the state of our own soul and happiness but to people we don't even know and will never see.
The analysis of the ending is exactly right. But it misses the point. It overlooks the dramatic value of such a narrative rupture. The ending changes the terms of the whole discussion. It surprises in a convincing way. It widens the scope of possibilities and eliminates the dichotomy between the two choices open to the little mermaid.
Every writer has to choose between giving a story a good ending or a bad one. It is a terrifying choice sometimes. A reader could potentially absorb the story's perspective and values. If Andersen gave his story the upbeat Disney ending, he would be extolling self-sacrifice and expressing a faith that love triumphs over everything. If he chose the tragic ending, he would be crushing love's illusions and comparing love to the sharp knives that wound the mermaid's delicate feet.
The nobility of giving up one's life for the sake of love has been one of fiction's most enduring messages. It is also one of fiction's most dangerous and self-deceiving. Andersen's solution is to create a magic that neither repudiates the romantic feelings nor affirms them. This solution acknowledges that the conflict is irresolvable, that a good or bad ending would be equally unrealistic. The jolting and otherworldly end of this story is reminiscent of Sophocles' "Philoctetes," where a demigod's intervention keeps the Greeks from attacking a single virtuous citizen.
Instead of killing the mermaid, Andersen allows her to be transformed into a new type of species. The Little Mermaid records a series of transformations from innocence to the yearning for incarnation to the yearning to transcend yearning itself. The transformed mermaid is told by the daughters of the air:
A mermaid has no immortal soul and can never have one unless she wins the love of a mortal. Eternity, for her, depends on a power outside her. Neither have the daughters of the air an everlasting soul, but by good deeds they can shape one for themselves. We shall fly to the hot countries, where the stifling air of pestilence means death to mankind; we shall bring them cool breezes. We shall scatter the fragrance of flowers through the air and send them comfort and healing. When for three hundred years we have striven to do the good we can, then we shall win an immortal soul and have a share in mankind's eternal happiness. You, poor little mermaid, have striven for that with all your heart; you have suffered and endured, and you have raised yourself into the world of the spirits of the air. Now, by three hundred years of good deeds, you too can shape for yourself an immortal soul.
This fateful pronouncement permits the possibility of mercy without promising anything. Mercy and redemption is possibly, but ultimately the power to bestow these gifts lies beyond that of individuals.
The ending is thus a tentative affirmation. A century later Kafka would duplicate this same tentativeness and suspension of hope in his enigmatic endings. In "Before the Law," the doorkeeper informs the waiting traveler that the door he guards was meant only for him. In the unwritten last chapter of the "Castle," the castle was to have informed K. on his deathbed that he would be permitted provisional residence in the village while the castle considers his claim to live there. Endings in real life are never simple, and a simply one-dimensional good or bad ending calls into question the legitimacy of the story process itself. A beautiful ending conveys neither finality nor closure but a sense of beginning; it lets us soar above the preceding conflict and see new possibilities for living. It neither paralyzes nor sedates, but invigorates the yearning for the unknown and unexpected. A good ending doesn't resolve a character's problems; it renders them irrelevant.
One Danish critic said that Andersen wrote more self-portraits than Rembrandt ever painted. Almost anyone could see his own portrait in "Ugly Duckling". Who has not been taunted one time or another for being ugly or stupid or different? A duckling who cannot understand the innocence of the taunts has to survive them somehow, even if he years for exoneration. My name once turned up on a list of the "10 Biggest Jerks on Campus"(or something to that effect), a notoriety I later learned to cherish. One moves on. Self-images change. Life becomes so busy and hectic that one forgets to notice the changes in onself. Obsession with one's own inadequacy is a sign one is not fully grown, nor will one ever be. An ugly duckling is a swan afraid to face the mirror. [source: http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/essays/literary/hcastories.php]
Are you a writer longing to be discovered? Submit your manuscript for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. It’s the perfect opportunity to become the next great novelist: the winning author will receive a publishing contract from Penguin Group, including promotional support for their book on Amazon.com, and a media suite from Hewlett-Packard. All entrants are eligible to self-publish their novel with CreateSpace and sell it on Amazon.com. Enter your manuscript for consideration by November 5, 2007.
Contest Process and Timeline
Amazon.com is accepting unpublished English language works of fiction for entry in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award through November 5, 2007.
Once the submission period ends, Amazon editors and top Amazon customer reviewers will read submissions and select authors for the semi-final round, beginning January 15, 2008. Each semi-finalist will receive a full review of their manuscript by Publishers Weekly and a book page on Amazon.com featuring a short excerpt from their novel that customers can download, read, and review. Penguin will select manuscripts to read from the semi-final round based on customer feedback and Publishers Weekly reviews and announce the Top Ten finalists on March 3, 2008. Amazon.com customers will then select the winner of the Amazon Breakthrough Award, to be announced on April 7, 2008.
Register now and break through! Only the first 5,000 submissions will be accepted. The registration deadline is November 5, 2007.
Prizes
The winner of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award will receive a full publishing contract from Penguin Group, including promotional support for their novel on Amazon.com, and a media suite from Hewlett-Packard. The nine remaining finalists will receive a free Total Design Freedom self-publishing package from BookSurge and a media suite from Hewlett-Packard. Semi-finalists will receive a review of their manuscript by Publishers Weekly. Upon conclusion of the contest all entrants will be eligible to make their books available for sale to Amazon.com customers via the CreateSpace self-publishing service at no charge. In addition, all entrants will receive discounted self-publishing services from BookSurge for custom cover design, formatting, and editing.
Visit Amazon to get the detail information
A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia
Translated by Arch Tait
(Random House, 2007)
Reviewed by Michelle Risley
Anna Politkovskaya’s brutal murder reveals the incredible risks and the dangers she faced as a journalist reporting on the limitations of Russian democracy. A Russian Diary, her blow-by-blow catalogue of power abuses by and under Putin's government was being translated when, on October 6, 2006, she was shot pointblank in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building. Although the government has denied blame, suspicions against it remain high. Since Putin’s 2000 election, independent reportage has withered as Russian journalists have been threatened, beaten, and murdered. Politkovskaya stood out as one of the few who continued to relentlessly investigate the government's human rights abuses, especially in its war against separatists in the mostly Muslim Chechen Republic.
Politkovskaya includes dismaying examples of these abuses into her diary, and ably folds intricate, complex histories into cogent and readable entries. In a section devoted to the murder of Aslam Maskhadov, Chechnya’s former (and democratically elected) president who later led the resistance against the Russian Army, the details are gruesome. The FSB, successor to the Soviet KGB, announced that it paid $10 million for information on his whereabouts before he was killed. Afterwards, “(h)is stripped dead body was shown all day in close-up on television.” Whatever his faults—and Politkovskya shines a more glowing light on Putin’s opponents than they seem to deserve—Maskhadov restrained extremist factions who considered the Beslan murders of over 335 hostages, including 200 children, to be justified. His assassination at the hands of Russian special forces was praised by government officials.
Because her commentary is more screed than analysis, it would be a relief to credit the reportage to Politkovskaya. Her sweeping and reductive generalizations are meant not to transmit facts, but to convince readers that Russia and Russians are imperiled. "It's as simple as that" seems to sum up her explanation of how Putin’s Russia reached its current array of political, social, and economic crises, but Yeltsin skips off scot-free. "Re-Stalinization is a reality," she asserts. Facets of it have undoubtedly resurfaced, yet the differences in how tyranny was wielded in Soviet Russia and today are as relevant as the similarities. Politkovskya glosses over these. She equates the battle against Chechnya, a war fought in a republic bordering Georgia, against non-ethnic Russians, and which Putin has used as a pretext to slowly consolidate power, with the Great Terror, a top-down, nationwide inquisition that led to the destruction of whatever civil society existed in 1937. Meanwhile, Europe overlooks Putin’s authoritarian tendencies because it "unfortunately, is tired of hearing how evil Putin is," preferring instead "to be fooled by how good he is." More likely to be at the root of Europe’s tolerance is its dependence on Russian oil.
Interspersed between these diatribes and her capricious assessments of what ails the Russians, who are in turn blighted, lazy, self-absorbed, and cynical, she sympathetically presents disturbing evidence that their lives are becoming ever more precarious. While Russia scaled to third place on this year’s Forbes breakdown of billionaires-by-country, Politkovskaya reports that "(f)orty percent of the population live below even our dire official poverty line." (She goes to great lengths to stress that even oil oligarchs have had to toe Putin’s political line.) The substantial benefits that swathes of Russians—the disabled, soldiers, retirees, victims of the gulag—were accustomed to, and which were possibly the Soviet Union’s only positive legacy, have been virtually extinguished. Putin’s administration sharpened this economic divide by revoking tax privileges for charitable giving in 2002. As a result, the giving halted. Conscripted teenage soldiers are often sent to Chechnya and return to their mothers either maimed or unstable. The government won’t investigate the "suicides" among them, a classification many parents believe is a cover-up for manslaughter. In the Russian Army, hazing can be deadly.
A Russian Diary is wildly uneven and often exasperating. Yet it is also a terrifying, brave, and broad exposé of Putin's metastasizing grip on a people who don't seem to know how to react, or why they should endanger themselves by bothering. To Anna Politkovskaya, indifference was merely self-interest. For all of her cynicism, she genuinely believed that democracy was worth the risk, if not for her, or for her children, then for her grandchildren. Her murder will inspire few to follow suit.
::link source
Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006
Reviewed by Harry Morales
Paradise Travel, the entrancing new novel by Jorge Franco, offers a heartbreaking and illuminating glimpse of the multi-faceted and confusing world of illegal immigrants in the U.S. For Franco, the Medellín-born prize-winning author of Maldito Amor, Mala Noche, and Rosario Tijeras, the underside of society is familiar ground. An integral member of the gritty realist literary movement known as "McOndo," he is one of a number of Colombian authors in their late 30's and early 40's whose work focuses on the country's problems with drugs, corruption and violence.
In Paradise Travel, Franco turns his lens from his own country outward to examine the life of an illegal Colombian immigrant in New York City. The narrative unfolds in two alternating time frames, shifting back and forth between lower-middle class Colombia and immigrant New York, a storytelling technique which is handled quite aptly by Franco.
As the story begins, Marlon Cruz, a teenager living with his parents in Medellín and trying to gain entry into the local university, is seduced by his obsessive girlfriend Reina into emigrating into the U.S. with her. When their request for the elusive visas is denied, Reina steals $10,000 from a relative and pays a conniving travel agent from the "Paradise Travel Agency" to arrange illegal passage through Mexico. Extorted and abused at each leg of their hellish journey up Central America and through Mexico, the pair finally arrive in New York without documentation or money. Then, their first night in Queens they accidentally become separated. Unable to find Reina, Marlon is left alone to cope with an unfamiliar, confusing and unforgiving land.
After suffering through a period of homelessness, Marlon eventually learns how to survive and fit into the growing Colombian community in Queens. Franco's exploration of the inequalities between the U.S. and South America, specifically Colombia, is quite vivid, as is his accurate and charming portrayal of expatriate Colombian life, especially in the scenes involving Roger Pena, a wanna-be dandy and professional shoplifter who only chooses to steal from Macy's and Bloomingdale's -- articles of clothing, mostly, that are later given to Marlon as gifts; Patricia, a strong-willed and compassionate restaurant owner who helps Marlon believe that he can survive in New York; and Caleña, a stripper/hooker Marlon first meets in Medellín through the Paradise Travel Agency and again later in New York who promises to help Marlon locate Reina and keeps her word.
The second time frame encompasses Marlon's narration during a bus trip from New York to Miami to see Reina whom he has located after a 15 month feverish search. During this bus trip, he remembers his now seemingly distant past life in Medellín, his initial infatuation and eventual love affair with Reina, and his subsequent struggles in Queens.
Marlon's journey through the underbelly of Queens and his transformation is revealing and his climatic reacquaintance with Reina is saddening. Franco's typical harsh realism is balanced by humor and a sharp but sensitive eye for the constantly shifting panorama of life in the U.S. and in Colombia. Cinematic and unforced, Franco's voice is wonderfully preserved in Katherine Silver's accomplished translation.
Paradise Travel is a fine urban novel which successfully informs the reader about what it is like to enter the U.S. illegally, not for the promise of elusive riches, but for the love of a woman. For Mr. Franco, it is an intriguing creative departure which explores the experience of love and loss as the core of what it is to be human.
::link source
Translated from the Dutch by Susan Massotty
(Grove Press, 2007)
Reviewed by Robert Buckeye
"The Darkness of the Lived Moment"
One does. She, someone, she is not sure, leaves her home in a wealthy neighborhood of Sao Paolo and drives, she does not know why, perhaps it had been the car or Bjork on the tape deck that had done the driving, to "the very worst favela of all, a hell rather than a paradise," where the engine dies and the favela dwellers come out of the night, "a hate and rage so deep that they could swallow you up forever" and leave her behind, "as if she were rubbish." "It had been like a black cloud," she tells police of her violation. Afterwards, she has to get away from the mystery of why she had gone into the favela and goes with her friend Almut to Australia, a secret talismanic site from their teenage years, to locate Aborigine Dreamtime, "the time before time and memory began," where she meets an Aborigine artist and stays with him for a week, "a man who has taken nothing of mine."
One doesn’t. He is middle-aged and out of sorts. Divorced, a literary critic increasingly disappointed and dyspeptic, out-of-touch with the new generation of writers, his girl friend, Anja, half his age, tells him. He no longer has a future, and the novel he writes he consigns to the trash can. "It was too late to learn Norwegian," he notes, "or emigrate to Australia." ("Too much past can kill you," Cees Nooteboom comments in All Soul’s Day.) His friends and Anja advise him to go to a spa in Austria—he will come out a new man they say— and force him out the door against his will. Once he arrives at the spa he questions his decision. At dinner the first evening—a potato with thick drops of linseed oil on it—he is reminded of "the cod liver oil he had been forced to swallow as a child."
One does. At the spa, the substitute masseuse is the woman he met as an angel in Perth, Australia, three years before. He had been at a literary conference—the usual kind—and out of boredom had gone on a tour whose aim it was to discover how many angels could be found in Perth. He tells her at the spa that he fell in love with her the moment he saw her in Australia, but after the tour at the angel party at a beach—"Tonight we’re being expelled from Paradise," she tells him—just as they are about to make love, police arrive and she flees because she has no work permit. He cannot find her and returns to a life he no longer wants. When he sees her at the Austrian spa, this time he does not want to lose her.
One doesn’t. She has found a lost paradise in the Aborigine’s world, but it is not hers. His painting will never be hers no matter how much she identifies with it; his silence returns her only to her own; his gestures may point but do not explain. Her black cloud can never be his nor his hers ("All past time is present time"). She must seek the Indian in herself, the shadow that her friend Almut sees in her, "as if you always have someone with you, and be "a wanderer, so I can make the world my desert" (as the limitless expanse of Australia is the Aborigine’s desert because it is his). She has put Brazil behind her for Australia, a gig as an angel instead of one in the fast lane of the affluent, trained as a masseuse, surfaced for the moment in Austria. At the spa, she reminds him of the last words she said on the beach in Australia before she fled from the police, "Angels and people aren’t meant to be together." "See you next time," she adds, reminding him (and us, perhaps her) that our efforts to regain paradise never cease.
The epigraph for Nooteboom’s novel, Lost Paradise (Grove Press, 2007), comes from Walter Benjamin’s meditation on Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus, whose angel faces the past and sees the catastrophe of events pile up into wreckage at his feet while a storm from Paradise rushes him towards a future he cannot see, since his back is turned, and thus he cannot warn anyone about what is coming. "This storm," Benjamin notes, "is what we call progress."
Since Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise, the storm we call progress has been one train wreck after another. "What started out as a misunderstanding," the author (Nooteboom and not Nooteboom) says in an epilogue, "has gone on to repeat itself over and over into infinity." If Milton’s title refers to the Paradise that has been lost, Nooteboom’s calls attention to the one we seek.
"There are perhaps paths,"—it is Benjamin once again—"that lead us again and again to people who have one and the same function for us: passageways that always, in the most diverse periods of life, guide us to a friend, the betrayer, the beloved, the pupil, or the master." In Australia, she finds her teacher and he his angel, though they cannot stay with them. The only paradise we can have is the one we cannot regain, though we may find it at moments in the ineffable, the lost and forgotten, silence.
In a prologue, the author on a flight to Berlin-Templehof sees a woman look over a thin volume which nevertheless has numerous chapters and thinks the author "has taken considerable risks." When she holds the book up so that he can see the title, he realizes, "It’s this book," the one we have just read. In an epilogue, he sees the same woman on a train to Moscow still carrying, "the book I thought I had written, the book I still have not been able to shake off," and this time talks to her about it. A world where the prose is dense, demanding, the intellect rigorous, a challenge, the detail that of the polymath, the form answerable only to itself. The world of Nabokov, Gass, McElroy—"those cobwebs of yours"—Anja tells him no one reads any more. Today, she adds, "They're used to a fast pace."
Robert Buckeye has had two works of fiction published, Pressure Drop and The Munch Case and has written on film and art as well as literature.
::link source
Every now and then, in the depressing mass-market orientated and behemoth-dominated publishing world of today, we hear a story of rightly-earned success and true talent duly vindicated. Tom McCarthy’s quick rise from cult-novelist to the big-time scene couldn’t offer a better example. His debut novel, Remainder, had been sent around to the usual suspects of the UK’s publishing establishment, and although many editors loved it, sales and marketing departments were sceptical about its commercial potential. As a consequence, it never saw the light of day.
But as it’s a well-known fact that no prophet is honoured in his own country, McCarthy didn’t give up, and sent a copy of the manuscript to underground French publisher Metronome Press – a latter-day equivalent of legendary ’50s publisher Olympia Press – who fell in love with it and decided to take the risk and publish it. Without any real marketing, publicity or distribution beyond the art circuit, and with a modest print-run of 750 copies, it made its tortuous way into the wide, wide world – yet, somehow, rave reviews started to pour in from the most prestigious UK magazines and newspapers, like the TLS, the London Review of Books and the Independent, who even argued about the “classic status” of this book.
In the meantime, Jonny Pegg of Curtis Brown, who had championed the author from the very beginning and made it his mission to have this book published by a good UK publisher, sent it to new independent publisher Alma Books. Within a couple of weeks, Alma snapped up the UK rights for Remainder and planned an immediate release, just in time for the 2006 Man Booker Prize submission.
Alma has an uncanny habit of such timely strikes – they bought the UK rights to William T Vollmann’s Europe Central just before it won the high-profile National Book Award for Fiction in the US, and they went for two Paola Kaufmann novels, The Sister and The Lake, just before the former landed the prestigious Casa del las Américas Prize and the latter took the Planeta Prize.
When things started to look good for Remainder in the UK, Jonny Pegg also received an offer from US publishing giant Vintage. Somehow they had heard about the book through the publishing grapevine, and after getting hold of one of the last (and now almost collectable) Metronome copies, Vintage’s Editor in Chief Marty Asher got so enthusiastic about the novel that he decided to take up personal editorship of it. ‘Remainder is a complete original. A novel so strange and unpredictable that once I started it, dishes went unwashed, cats unfed, work stopped until I got to the end, which was both surprising and inevitable. It’s a stunningly accomplished piece of work which defies categorization and which Vintage is thrilled to be publishing.’
The strange rags-to-riches fate of Remainder echoes that of its nameless protagonist, whose life takes a strange turn after he’s hit by a never fully explained object falling from the sky and receives a fortune in compensation – money which he puts to increasingly psychotic effect, paying for his own memories to be reconstructed and replayed in microscopic detail.
And the title? “The hero, his body and his mind are a remainder, what the accident leaves,” explains McCarthy. “The world he reconstructs is a remainder, made up of fragments left over from his ideal ‘remembered’ world. And I love the provocation of calling a book Remainder.”
Alma publisher Alessandro Gallenzi is jubilant at the coup: “This is a major catch, and together with Anthony McCarten’s Death of a Superhero will make for a very strong Alma Books submission to the 2006 Booker.”
REMAINDER by Tom McCarthy
ISBN: 1-84688-015-7, Hardback, £10.99, 336 pp.
Publication Date: July 2006
SIGNED EDITION AVAILABLE - Please call us on +44 (0)20 8948 9550 for further details
'A splendidly odd novel... a refreshingly idiosyncratic, enjoyably intelligent read.' The Guardian
'Remainder is an intelligent and absurd satire on consumer culture.' The Times
‘McCarthy’s prose is precise and unpretentious. His anti-hero is a sympathetic Everyman, and it is difficult to resist the dominion of his obsession... its minatory brilliance calls for classic status.’
The Independent
‘...strangely gripping... Remainder should be read (and, of course, reread) for its intelligence and humour.’
TLS
'The storyline mesmerizes in its imaginative brilliance... the novel explores complex philosophical ideas about "being" in a simple and direct way. And through McCarthy’s attention to detail, the fantastical plot always retains a feeling of plausibility. The story raises fascinating questions about whether human experience is ever really original or always in some ways an imitation or performance. And in the dark denouement, we are left feeling that there is something integral to human identity that can’t be rationalized, summoned up, or manufactured.'
The Sunday Telegraph
'Enthralling, dotted with dark humour and undoubted originality… it really sticks around in the mind, nagging at one afterwards, and the most complimentary thing that can be said about this novel of repeating scenes is that it really does deserve to be read a second time.'
The Irish Times
‘This isn’t how we expect a novel to be, but it’s why it’s a very good novel indeed. It trains you out of a certain way of thinking.’
London Review of Books
‘...a seamless work of fiction infused with dark humour and echoes of Heidegger, Camus and Burroughs.’
Dazed & Confused
‘Remainder, with seamless prose, endlessly probes the surface of the ‘event’, its infinite elements, angles, perspectives, how it comes about, how it can be brought about again, then lived and relived in Ballardian orbits and Beckettian vibrations... It will remain with you long after you have felt compelled to re-read it.’
Time Out
'Remainder is one of the quirkiest books I’ve read in a while. In a feat of almost Beckettian precision and austerity, McCarthy conjures this absurd and darkly funny vision seemingly from the air.'
The Melbourne Age
‘A masterpiece waiting to happen - again and again and again.’
3:AM Magazine
'Remainder is a triumph and probably one of the most refreshingly brilliant novels you will read for a very long time to come. You will treasure this novel, it will sit on your book shelves with pride, you will hold it in your hands and grin like a child at Christmas. It will be passed onto friends and family. You will read this remarkable novel again and again and again.'
www.readysteadybook.com
