Blog
In Conversation with Tom McCarthy Part Five
by Dan
Author Q & A + Fiction / October 12, 2007
In the final part of my conversation with Tom McCarthy, we talk about the future. (Read the previous installment here).
WARNING!: This conversation contains adults themes and references to German literary Professors!
Part Five
DW: So, can you tell me about your new novel 'C'?
TM: It's advancing slowly, is the main thing I can tell you - not least because I find myself constantly doing interviews about Remainder and Men in Space (which don't get me wrong, I love doing, especially with you Dan). I'm about a third of the way into the first draft. In a word, it's a novel about mourning. In more words, it's a novel about the relationship between mourning, communication technologies and family structures. It's set around the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, when radio was emerging and acquiring a quasi-mystical dimension: whereas spiritualists, for example, used to wait for their departed relatives to communicate with them by rapping on tables, now they'd trawl through the white noise, scanning the aether for hidden signals. I've been reading this brilliant book by a professor named Laurence Rickels called Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts. He says that in this period, technology itself becomes the crypt in which the dead are mourned - and, further, that German literature in particular is one big death cult. I love that. If Remainder was, as 3:AM Magazine claimed, essentially a French novel written in English, C will be my German one.
DW: Any final thoughts?
TM: Yes: big love to all my friends at Raincoast - and in Toronto, Canada and www-land.
DW: Thanks Tom. I hope you'll be back in Canada soon!
