Cross posted.......
Remainder
Tom McCarthy has received much acclaim for his first novel, and rightly so. The writer-turned-artist has crafted a story that is unique, provocative, and intelligent. While pushing the envelope, he has used the medium of the novel to explore the questions of reality, memory, authority, and obsession in a unique way. Like the epic theater movement, founded by Bertolt Brecht in the early twentieth century, Remainder presents an idea and asks the reader to make his or her own judgment about the story; here, put another way, is a further definition of the Brechtian approach: “Epic theatre assumes that the purpose of a play, more than entertainment or the imitation of reality, is to present ideas and invites the audience to make judgments on them.”
And, thus empowered by the author, we are free to arrive at our own evaluation of Remainder. Able to observe, dispassionately, the struggle of a disturbed man battered by both misfortune and great fortune, for whom the re-creation of his past becomes the driving force in his life, we can, with clarity of vision and lack of emotion observe the search for self by a man who has neither. We can watch as he relentlessly marches towards madness, taking others with him, in the pursuit of the unobtainable. Or, we can regard the novel as an absurd work of art whose purpose is the minute examination of the inner processes of a disturbed man, providing no meaning for us other than as an abstraction of a bizarre idea. Like Brecht, McCarthy presents an idea; the rest is up to us.
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