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    Remainder: A Novel
    Remainder: A Novel
    Remainder: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    Remainder: A Novel

    Written by Tom McCarthy

    Narrated by James Langton

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident, receives an outrageous sum in legal compensation, and has no idea what to do with it.

    Then, one night, an ordinary sight sets off a series of bizarre visions he can't quite place.

    How he goes about bringing his visions to life-and what happens afterward-makes for one of the most riveting, complex, and unusual novels in recent memory.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateDec 14, 2010
    ISBN9781452670102
    Remainder: A Novel

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    Reviews for Remainder

    3.5/5

    349 ratings32 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Remainder is easily one of the strangest books I've ever read. Our unnamed protagonist has been the victim of some sort of accident -- his £8.5 million settlement prevents him from sharing the details with us, but we do learn that it involves something falling from the sky -- and he's still missing months worth of memories. At a party one evening, he becomes enraptured with a crack in the wall of his friend's bathroom as memories start to flood his mind. With his newfound wealth, he sets out to re-create these memories: he buys and renovates a building to his memory's exact specifications, and hires people to help him re-create his interactions with them. They are to act specifically as he tells them and to be on-call constantly, so he may indulge himself in these recreations whenever he would like. He obsesses over the details: the shine of the wood floors, the smells wafting from the flat below, the exact position of the sunlight on the floor. Then, he takes it a step further: he sets out to continuously re-enact an encounter he has with three young boys at a tire shop, and then becomes involved with doing the same for a shooting just outside of his flat. And then everything begins to spiral out of control, leading up to one very odd ending.I have to admit: about three-quarters of the way through this book, I wanted to throw it across the room. A couple of hours (and a nap) later, I was back at it again, wanting to know how it was all going to turn out. I found myself getting as wrapped up as the protagonist himself, and I could only watch as what started out as a whim ('why not re-create this? I have the money, let's do it!') turned into an obsession. Maybe that's why I felt the ending was such a letdown: there's so much buildup and you spend so much time thinking about this strange man and his strange needs and then poof! it's over. That's it? And again with the urge to chuck it against the wall. A crazy, crazy book.
    • 1/5
      ACK! This guy can't write!
    • 4/5
      Tom McCarthy spins an outlandish, addictive thread to please readers with a penchant for the anti-hero. In his debut novel, Remainder, a nameless survivor of an unnamed accident receives an £8.5 million settlement on the condition that he remains silent on the event. The problem is "fixed" through no fault of his own -- our narrator suffers from memory loss and cannot recall the details of his injury. After stumbling through his initial post-rehab world, the narrator becomes fixated on the idea of rediscovering the fluid, uncalculated movements he once took for granted. With his newfound riches, he enlists the help of a bizarre agency to furnish his fantasy. The narrator invests his time and resources into "re-enacting" real or imagined moments, both mundane and violent. What begins as a bizarre past-time builds toward a tragic end for all those closest to him… McCarthy is an expert with convincing, first-person narration. This nameless narrator is relatable and has a simple sort of charm to him. For fans of Torchwood out there, all I could picture was Rhys Williams (played by Kai Owen) inhabiting this role. Excellent choice, I should think. Ideal for: Fans of first-person anti-heroes; Kids who like of experimentation in their fiction; People who love the smell of liver and the constant repetition of piano music (and also hate cordite).(less)
    • 3/5
      Unsettling tableau of a damaged psyche, the cause/ injury from a falling object hazily referenced. Through financial manipulation of others, the warped narrator is able to play out his jagged sense of reality, in the form of never-ending loops of exacting re-enactments. On the whole I enjoyed this, but the narrator's obduracy of purpose and his relating to the reader his every thought becomes tedious. Reminds me of Auster's New York Trilogy in its "post-modern" atmosphere.
    • 4/5
      Remainder is a very interesting and entertaining book, but hard to recommend because many people will find it the exact opposite of those two things. I don't usually go in for novels that have such a strong scent of the academy about them. Many people will find this book pretentious and suitable only for discussion around a seminar table. But McCarthy succeeded in drawing this reader into the protagonist's strange world. His search for authenticity through meticulously re-enacting scenes from his life is funny and terrifying at the same time. This novel discards with most of the basics people assume as being essential to fiction—at least of the popular sort. You need to read carefully to see the small changes that indicate the story is indeed moving forward. But despite all odds it comes together into a coherent and strangely beautiful whole.
    • 4/5
      Whoa. Not what I expected, and it takes a very dark turn towards the end. But it was an enthralling read.
    • 3/5
      Some interesting ideas surrounding authenticity and memory but the book didn't seem to work as a whole for me, especially towards the end.
    • 4/5
      A man has a mysterious and vague accident with extreme damage and amnesia, having to re-map his brain and actions.  Obviously the damage and amnesia can create an unreliable memory, hence an unreliable narrator. What follows is bizarre.  And I won't describe it more than that.  I thought Richard Powers wrote this book - turns out he wrote a book about injury and memory called 'The Echo Maker' around the same time as this one.  For fans of... if you threw in a bookish blender:  Jesse Ball, Kafka and David Lynch.
    • 2/5
      Overall, it has beautiful descriptions, but at times I totally felt as awkward, confused and crazy as the narrator... and I'm not entirely sure if that's a compliment or not!

      I was definitely looking forward to a different sort of story as the premise of the book is very interesting. But I was also looking for a true ending, where we actually find out what this mysterious accident really was and why he's so obsessed with re-enactments, etc., etc., and McCarthy definitely doesn't give us that.
    • 3/5
      Strange yet plodding and difficult to get through... but I think deliberately so. I knew it would be experimental, I didn't expect it to be so dreary. An unpleasant shock to my literary sensibility, but I'm not sorry I read it.
    • 3/5
      Hits a bit hard. Possibly too relatable? Just as a person gets self-conscious seeing their selves in photos or hearing their voices on a recording, I think I may have enjoyed this book on a whole other level if I wasn't distracted by my own reflection.

      Empathy isn't strong enough of a word.

      It also reminded me of one of me all time favorite Sherlock Holmes quotes: “My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”
      ― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four
    • 5/5
      I think what I liked about this book isn't what most people would like...
      But I loved reading about how a very efficient person carried out the very complicated and difficult tasks that were required of him by a crazy person with too much money.
      It was very deeply satisfying, on a sort of molecular librarian level.
      I think this would make a great book club book, because it's not too long and is pretty easy to read, and the weirdness of it would give you a lot to discuss.
    • 4/5
      I'm still mulling over 'Remainder'. It's like watching a film that you know is significant but you can't quite articulate why. It features the strangest, most obsessive narrator I have come across in a long time. After a traumatic accident a man attempts to capture and preserve mundane moments of life in order to reconnect with the sensation of living. He does so via a series of increasingly elaborate re-enactments. Enjoyable as it is, the attention to detail can be ponderous, at least initially, and for this reason it's not a novel that I am likely to return to in a hurry. But the peculiar trajectory of the book is marvelous and compelling. An imperfect book that is still rattling round in my head. So, four stars for its contrary infectiousness.
    • 1/5
      HATED this book.An unnamed narrator has just received 8.5 million pounds for being a victim of an "item falling from the sky" and has no idea or desires as what to do with it.One day, while attending a party, he sees a crack in the wall which brings back a deja vu scenario which he feels he must replicate.This leads him to re-enact other unusual events which gets him more and more in "touch" with reality.He clearly suffers from some sort of brain damage since the accident; but the book just goes on and on and on and on and on with minute descriptions of these re-enactments and not much else.I was unable to see the brilliance in this book, or the art of its writing, or the paen to existentialism .Boring, boring, and boring.
    • 3/5
      Post-modern psychosis meets post-apocalyptic zen.
    • 4/5
      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" 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?
    • 4/5
      There are times where I have flashbacks of scenes from this novel.
    • 3/5
      A book with very interesting ideas, similar to Synecdoche, New York, which raise questions about authenticity, reality and time, but the more playful early mood fades about midway through, and is sadly never recaptured. Too staid to fully hold my attention.
    • 5/5
      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 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.
    • 5/5
      The tyranny of matter…There that’s my summary of this debut novel by Tom McCarthy.You know its really refreshing, think about how many novels are thematically concerned with the tyranny of time…He already had established his avant-garde credentials as the founding member of the International Necronautical Society, where one of its axioms is: Death, is viewed by the INS as “a cipher for the outer limit of description, for the point at which the code breaks down”. The society explores the relationships between representation (in the artistic usage) and death.Where to begin…. There is the narrator hero of no name, who could be referred to as the Enactor, who surrounds himself with re-enactors, who also have no names with the notable exception of the head Re-enactor, or facilitator, Nazrul Ram Vyas, Naz for short. This will be explained forthwith…Lets see, the plot structure is chronologically straight forward. The prose has a captivating, unassuming pulse, is invested with its own logic, and pace is brisk.Our hero has experienced brain trauma, an accident involving some “bits” falling down from the sky. The first section is not so strange as we learn the nature and extent of his injury and the current state of his consciousness: that he is specifically amnesiac about the accident. But this works in his favor, as evidently this accident had a non-natural cause, and he receives a mysterious settlement of 8 ½ million pounds sterling. What is not in his favor, and which starts the novel’s own system of phenomenology, is that his primary motor functions have to be re-routed. He has to ‘learn how to eat a carrot’ by consciously thinking about every movement involved. As he gradually regains a semblance of normal life, and in the course of relearning, he develops an amazing ability to deconstruct: actions and events, the relation of objects in space.He also comes to a conclusion that he has become, or at least his actions have become, “inauthentic” faked. He learns to equate a ‘real’ action as an act devoid of self-consciousness of the act itself, of any self cognition of the act. While in a bathroom at a friend’s party, staring at a crack in the wall triggers an apparent mimetic-connected vision. These episodes of altered consciousness, manifest themselves in a bathtub or bathrooms. He has a sensation of a part memory, part vision, where he perceives a connectedness, a sense of being “authentic”. His profound epiphany sets him off on a quest to reproduce the setting, along with a sequence of actions by various tenants in this vision, the entire high rise apartment complex, along with the neighboring building, and the particular peculiar tenants that formed the component parts, in his ‘vision-episode’.In a mostly tongue in cheek and sardonic tone, its narrative is filled with metaphors of technology, especially telecommunications. It foregoes any interiority other than the narrator-as-commentator on his own discoveries, and the conclusions he draws from the series of successive replications. We go from one re-enactment, and all its logistics to another, but each time there is an associated revelation, sometimes in mid re-enactment, so that the novel’s processes are self aware, and has its own logic. The narrator examines the “residual”, what he has figuratively distilled from each series of enactments. This ‘remainder’ has both spatial and temporal connotations: a conclusion drawn, a residual of an event after the “surplus” matter (or time) is removed, or an actual physical residue. Each replication leads him to a new state of self awareness, advancing him closer to his quest for authenticity and subsequent moments of increasing “enlightenment” that his super-facilitators can make come to fruition. But what becomes troubling is that his visions are accompanied by an intensely pleasant physical sensation of tingling. They become an addiction, much like those that excersise to the point of enjoying their body’s own endorphin’s. Boundaries of what is not only possible, but what are ethical are pushed. After one particular adaptation goes awry, windshield wiper fluid gets re-routed through the dash of his old Fiesta and splatters his trousers, he requests that they duplicate this scene again, that his team make the fluid go away, disappear upward into space, dematerialize. He is informed that such transubstantiation is impossible, but he and his cohort Naz have become lost in their abstractions, they become detached from limits, in the enacting their ‘study’.The mind expands, the texture of time and space deepens and stretches out, there is Light, and Blood…there are figure 8’s…I must stop here.to avoid de-spoiling any further this amazing novel….I will leave you with the remainder…
    • 4/5
      This is a very difficult book to review - it's very quirky and original. Following an undescribed accident our unnamed hero get a huge pay off from those responsible. He becomes obsessed with authenticity and staging reenactments. Quite a few reviewers thought this book a work of genius. About half way through, I thought they might be right but ultimately this felt somehow hollow, inauthentic even. As our hero ramps thinks up, it becomes difficult to suspend disbelief. Good prose style though and full marks for trying something different.
    • 2/5
      Still conflicted about this book. It started out so promising but built to a sadly predictable end. The writing was great and there were wonderful moments throughout, but overall I was sadly unimpressed.
    • 1/5
      This might appeal to those who like Magnus Mills' books. I don't.
    • 1/5
      This book was a big disappointment. After suffering a horrible accident, the main character must learn how to move all over again. He must learn how to use his body, how to walk. After watching a movie with his friends, it occurs to him that all of his movements feel fake. Robert Deniro in the movie was not fake, he was smooth natural. He wants to feel that way. In order to accomplish this, he decides to re-enact memories of his life at a time where he felt real. He can make a perfect re-enactment from the most mundane of memories. He accomplishes this through his settlement from the accident (8million pounds). He buys an entire apartment building, hires actors, and creates smells and sounds just so he can feel that moment of "realness". Even though it isn't real. It seemed like this books was going somewhere by the concept. It didn't. He just kept re-enacting everything he saw, to the point that something very bad happens. Nothing is really resolved and there is no real epiphany here. Just a good idea, that falls flat.
    • 3/5
      Remainder is easily one of the strangest books I've ever read. Our unnamed protagonist has been the victim of some sort of accident -- his £8.5 million settlement prevents him from sharing the details with us, but we do learn that it involves something falling from the sky -- and he's still missing months worth of memories. At a party one evening, he becomes enraptured with a crack in the wall of his friend's bathroom as memories start to flood his mind. With his newfound wealth, he sets out to re-create these memories: he buys and renovates a building to his memory's exact specifications, and hires people to help him re-create his interactions with them. They are to act specifically as he tells them and to be on-call constantly, so he may indulge himself in these recreations whenever he would like. He obsesses over the details: the shine of the wood floors, the smells wafting from the flat below, the exact position of the sunlight on the floor. Then, he takes it a step further: he sets out to continuously re-enact an encounter he has with three young boys at a tire shop, and then becomes involved with doing the same for a shooting just outside of his flat. And then everything begins to spiral out of control, leading up to one very odd ending.I have to admit: about three-quarters of the way through this book, I wanted to throw it across the room. A couple of hours (and a nap) later, I was back at it again, wanting to know how it was all going to turn out. I found myself getting as wrapped up as the protagonist himself, and I could only watch as what started out as a whim ('why not re-create this? I have the money, let's do it!') turned into an obsession. Maybe that's why I felt the ending was such a letdown: there's so much buildup and you spend so much time thinking about this strange man and his strange needs and then poof! it's over. That's it? And again with the urge to chuck it against the wall. A crazy, crazy book.
    • 2/5
      Interesting concept, but flailed in execution.
    • 4/5
      I don't even know how to begin reviewing (or responding to this book). The main character takes the search for happiness (for contentment? for bliss?) to a narcissistic extreme. I suspect I'll need to re-read it to have any sort of coherent response, but it's not a book that I will forget anytime soon.
    • 3/5
      At first I thought, "somewhere between Ballard and Amis," but I gradually realized there wasn't much if any Amis influence after all -- none of the really dry, sardonic wit. I settled on mostly Ballard and a bit of Nicholson Baker, but not much. I'll have to think about this one a bit more, which is good, it'll stick with me, I suspect in much the same way Luke Rhinehart's "The Dice Man" has. Cautiously recommended.
    • 3/5
      Unsettling, for sure! It was a page turner. I truly couldn't resist reading to see what the crazy guy would do next. But the cover says it's a book about happiness? It seemed misleading to me. It's not about happiness as most people would see it - or find it. I was glad when it was finally over.
    • 4/5
      A deeply unsettling, compulsive read, which carried on worming its way inside me when I had to tear myself away from it. At the end I felt residual feelings of unease, disquiet and well admiration. Or is that recidual? I would say this is one to reread even if I didn't feel it was all part of some masterplan to mess with my head.