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Tom McCarthy Interview (Part 2)
by Dan
Author Q & A + Fiction / October 25, 2006
In the second part of the interview (click here for Part 1), author Tom McCarthy (Remainder and Tintin and the Secret of Literature) discusses ideas of authenticity, technology and the work of J G Ballard.
Raincoast Blog: Authenticity is a recurrent theme in Remainder and yet a lot of contemporary culture strives to be arch, or ironic. As an artist/author, is authenticity something important to you in your own work? What makes something authentic? Is authenticity possible through repetition? Are irony and authenticity mutually exclusive?
Tom McCarthy: These are complex questions, and to even begin grappling with them we'd have to go back to Plato, the notion of the simulacrum, and so on. Art's whole currency and mode is inauthenticity, and yet it strives to be ‘truer' than, say, propaganda, science, journalism - in fact, than all other mediums. Paul de Man wrote a brilliant essay on irony and inauthenticity called ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality'. I hadn't read it when I wrote Remainder but it could be describing the book. He says that to recognise your own inauthenticity doesn't mean you become authentic: you just repeat inauthenticity at more and more self-conscious levels, and that double, triple, quadruple language is called irony. Having said that, there's ‘sincere' irony and pat, smug irony, like you get in the worst one-liner, get-it-got-it kind of art. In Remainder I wanted to deal with the whole question of inauthenticity authentically, if that makes any sense.
RB: Remainder starts with the narrator describing being knocked unconscious by an unexplained lump of technological hardware, and in his subsequent quest for authenticity he has an aversion to using technology during his re-enactments. Do you have reservations about technology? (I appreciate it's kind of ridiculous to be asking you this on email!)
TM: I'm not sure he's averse to technology. He doesn't want any cameras present during his re-enactments, but that's largely because that would collapse the whole book into a Baudrillard-style meditation on media and the image, which I really didn't want. He invests the huge sum of money which he gets as compensation for the accident in technology stocks. I'm fascinated by technology, or by the theme, at least. Techne means showing, revealing, and technology is the gauze through which the world reveals itself to us - and behind which it retreats. It's the veil.
RB: Do you own a mobile phone?
TM: My god, yes. I'd rather leave home naked than without my phone.
RB: What will the future look like?
TM: Who on earth knows? I don't even know what the present looks like! [J G]Ballard says we've collapsed the future into the present and we're surrounded by fictions and fantasies from which we can pick at will. He says that the writer's job is to invent the reality. I like that, that's very good.
RB: It's interesting that Remainder has been compared to J G Ballard, the author of Crash. Ballard seems to have this fascination with technology, and both Crash and Remainder have this clinical air of unease.
TM: Crash was a big influence. It's more the repetition side of things than the technology. Ballard's hero Vaughan re-enacts car crashes of the rich and famous. He's also obsessed with becoming authentic, as is Ballard-the-character-in-the-book. He keeps saying things like ‘the car crash was the first real thing that had happened to me'. The heroes of both Crash and Remainder use re-enactment and stylised violence as a portal towards the real - and fail spectacularly, excessively, luxuriously.
RB: Are you a fan of Ballard?
TM: Ballard is fascinating because he's a great writer without even being a good one. I don't mean this negatively: I'm a huge fan. But he doesn't care about polished prose (compare his sentences to Nabokov or Updike and they look like pulp) or depth of character. Having said that, Crash has an intense lyricism that comes from its almost incantatory, modulated repetition of technological and sociological terms, and Vaughan is a much truer presence for me than, say, some boring ‘rounded' figure out of Jane Austen. That's the great thing about Ballard: he's got a vision, he's a visionary, that makes him great, and the niceties he doesn't bother with. He knows exactly where he stands in this respect. I talked to him once and told him my theory that Crash was a re-write of Don Quixote, whose hero also re-enacts stylised violent moments on the public highways in a bid for ‘authenticity', and also fails fabulously - and he answered: ‘Your theory is great, but I've never read Don Quixote. I don't really read proper books, I'm very low-brow.' Genius.
RB: Who are your literary inspirations?
TM: I'm very un-Ballard in this respect. I went through a phase of worshipping Joyce, and read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake inside out. And before that, Conrad: I'd copy out whole passages from Heart of Darkness. Burroughs, Pynchon, Melville, Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury is the best book ever written in my opinion. I read lots, and try to work out how they do it. If you wanted to be really good at football you'd watch videos of Pele and Zidane and try to emulate their moves, then take them somewhere else. I like the French a lot: Genet, Blanchot, Bataille, Ponge. I like Shakespeare, and the Greeks. I'm really traditional I'm afraid. But then I've just published a book about how brilliant the Tintin books are from a literary viewpoint, so maybe I'm not all canonical!
The final part of the interview will appear tomorrow
Tom McCarthy will be appearing at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on October 27th and 28th, 2006.
IFOA - Tom McCarthy
by Dan
October 25, 2006
The final part of our interview with Tom McCarthy will appear tomorrow. Meanwhile, the Torontoist blog has posted a feature on Tom as part of their coverage of the International Festival of Authors (IFOA) in Toronto this week. Tom is part of a roundtable discussion at 7pm on Thursday, October 26, 2006, in Studio Theatre at the Harbourfront Centre and is reading from his novel Remainder at on Friday, October 27, 2006, in the Brigantine Room (also in the Harbourfront Centre) along side Clifford Chase and Raincoast authors Patrick McCabe and Ralph Steadman.
Tom McCarthy Interview (Part 1)
by Dan
Author Q & A + Fiction / October 24, 2006
In Remainder, the extraordinary debut novel by author Tom McCarthy, the nameless victim of an unexplained accident uses compensation money to painstakingly reconstruct and re-enact his memories of a London apartment building. A darkly comic and unpredictable exploration of memory and identity, it was originally published by underground French publisher Metronome Press, and is now available to a wider readership courtesy of Alma Books.
Tom McCarthy's non-fiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature is published by Granta Books (also available from Raincoast), and Remainder will be published in North America by Vintage in 2007. Tom is also the General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network. He was born in 1969, and lives in London, England.
Raincoast Blog: Remainder has several incidental moments that appear significant but are ultimately unexplained. Do you know exactly what happens?
Tom McCarthy: If you mean do I know what exactly the ‘accident' consisted of, no. It's not Memento: it's not important what the accident is, simply that it happened, that we're in its aftermath. If you want to be literal about it, some bits of a satellite or plane falling on the hero's head wouldn't be a bad guess; if you want to be allegorical, you might think more along the lines that the ‘accident' is history, time, being thrown into the world in the first place. All the other loose ends have their place and function at one level or another - short councillors, extra cups of coffee, even cordite!
RB: Is ambiguity a virtue?
TM: For sure. If you were simply communicating a message you were certain about it wouldn't be any good as literature.
Jaime Hernandez at IFOA
by monique t
Graphica + News / October 23, 2006
Jaime Hernandez, author of Ghost of Hoppers, appeared at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto this Saturday.
There are some interviews coming up that I'll post when they appear, but in the meantime, have a look at the posting on Torontoist.com.
Quote: “Bottom line? Hernandez has the stunning ability to write complex stories entirely populated by minorities - women, bisexuals, punks and hispanics - and make them universally appealing. This is comic book snob canon.”
Blindness, the Movie
by Siobhan
October 18, 2006
Blindness, the bestselling novel by Portuguese Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, is coming to a theatre near you. According to Variety, Fernando Meirelles (director of “City of God” and “The Constant Gardener”) is taking on the project. Writer/director/actor Don McKellar has adapted Saramago's book and will also play a supporting role in the movie, which is set to film next summer in Toronto and Sao Paolo, Brazil.
Blindness is a thriller about an epidemic of blindness that tears through an unnamed city and pushes society to the brink of collapse. Jose Saramago's companion book, Seeing, was published this Spring.
Amy Butler’s In Stitches
by Siobhan
October 13, 2006
As part of their recent “craft book-a-day” feature, Craft: magazine's blog reviewed Amy Butler's In Stitches and interviewed the talented fabric and pattern designer.
We've all drooled over Amy Butler's fabrics and patterns and her new book, “In Stitches” is no different. [...] A must have book for any crafter who loves to sew.
Amy talks about how she got started, where she gets her inspiration, how the book came about, and even shares some sewing tips. Read the full book review and interview here.
Nick Bantock to launch newest book Windflower
by Danielle
Events + Fiction / October 05, 2006
Nick Bantock will be launching his new book Windflower, Thursday October 12th, at the Arts Club Theatre on Granville Island.
Windflower
The launch, which is open to the public and free in admission, will include a book signing and speech by Nick Bantock.
Books will be for sale.
Nick Bantock at the Arts Club Theatre
by Danielle
Events + Fiction + News / October 05, 2006
Nick Bantock's premier of the Griffin & Sabine play open tonight at the Arts Club Theatre on Granville Island.
Arts Club Theatre
So Many Ways to Begin Hits the Bestseller List
by monique t
Fiction + News / October 04, 2006
Jon McGregor's second novel So Many Ways to Begin is now in its second week on the Calgary Herald bestseller list. It debuted at #5 last Sunday and is still in the top 10.
Jon McGregor will be in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal in October.
Vancouver and Toronto are Writers Festival events.
Montreal is a brunch at Paragraphe on Sunday, Oct 29 at 10 am. For information call: 514.845.5811
Katy Hutchison, author of Walking After Midnight
by monique t
Biography & Memoir + Events + News / October 04, 2006
Katy Hutchison, author of Walking After Midnight: One Woman's Journey through Murder, Justice and Forgiveness, is making her way across Canada on her book tour.
Katy was in Toronto in late September, in Winnipeg and Saskatchewan earlier this week, and she's in BC all this week.
Watch for Katy today on radio (CKNW The Bill Good Show and CBC: On the Coast) and tv (CBC: Canada NOW). She'll also be on Breakfast TV tomorrow and OMNI Media.
Katy's story is a very public one. In 1997 her husband Bob McIntosh was killed trying to break up a teenagers' house party. The tragedy was widely publicized. Walking After Midnight, however, is not just the story of tragedy, it's Katy's story of how she triumphed, challenged society's expectations around grief and loss, and actually reached out to Bob's killer, Ryan Aldridge. Ryan now participates with Katy in her speaking engagements to teens and other groups about social responsibility, restorative justice and the power of forgiveness.
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