Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005), hysterical realism and a journey that leads to nowhere!

I’d grabbed McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) randomly from a row of books in a bookshop in Tokyo and read the summary. Apparently, it’s hero had had some sort of life-threating accident and was trying to reconstruct his life after it, in a new search for identity. Coming from a risky hiking accident in September 2016, when I had almost, literally, rolled into an abyss, that was enough to sell the story for me. I paid and turned the next corner, towards a nearby park, where I sat in a bench and started reading straight away.

Now, that I have finished the novel, I can say it was a boring read, yet, I can’t say I am too disappointed. I didn’t read it with any expectations, just wanted to follow the story of a fellow life-threating-accidents club member. And that exactly how the story reads: like a newspaper that tells the factual, yet boring story of a man’s life. I can hardly call it literature at all. No twists, no real story telling, not much plot, not real character. A novel without density. Yet, what surprised me was how well it had been accepted by critics!  And this is an article about that.

Therefore, let’s point out to some of the critics that have praised Remainder. Probably its stronger advocate, Zadie Smith in Two paths for a novel, goes as far a calling it “one of the great English novels of the past ten years”.

Patrick Ness, a British-American, among others, and author, lecturer and journalist, in an article published by The Guardian considers it as one of the great books that almost went unpublished (it had to wait 7 years to finally being picked up by a French publishing house, which would pave the way to later British and American publications).

Critics have been talking about the depth of this novel, describing it as “complex” with a looping structure yet with no closure. I fail to see all of this and rather classify it as another item in the list of hysterical realism that bores you to death. Frankly, if I wasn’t an avid reader, I would have stopped reading Remainder long before I had reached the half point.

All I can say is that if Remainder is somehow a milestone in the current English literature, then the literature is in a dying stage and I rather wait for its rebirth that further dabble into this stage. For people who choose a different path, well, good luck./*54745756836*/