Tom McCarthy (writer)

Tom McCarthy (* 1969 ) is a British writer and artist and lives in London .

Life

Tom McCarthy was born in London . He grew up in Greenwich , in south London. He studied English literature at New College (Oxford) . McCarthy lived in Prague in the early 90s , where he worked as a nude model and barman in an American bar, supplementing a small grant from the British government. Then he moved to Berlin , where he lived in Prenzlauer Berg and worked in an Irish pub. During his next stop in Amsterdam he reviewed books for the local edition of Time Out and worked as an assistant cook in a restaurant kitchen.

McCarthy's time in Prague served as the basis for his novel Men in Space . He also worked as a screenwriter for television and was co-editor of Mute Magazine . Before his breakthrough, he lived and worked in a high-rise apartment on the Golden Lane Estate next to the Barbican in London.

Publications

McCarthy's debut Remainder (in German: 8½ million) was written in 2001 and rejected by the major UK publishers. It was published in November 2006 by the small art publisher Metronome Press , based in Paris, and sold in galleries and museum shops, but not in bookstore chains. The curator and co-founder of Metronome Press, Clémentine Deliss , wanted to go back to an artistic-publishing practice of Olympia Press in the 50s and 60s and to print literary works and erotic art together. The book received widespread critical acclaim in both the literary world and the press and was on the bestseller list in the UK and the US for a few weeks. One of the first reviews appeared in December 2005 on ReadySteadyBook , which called it "one of the most important novels in a long, long time." The London Review of Books described it as "a very good novel indeed" and The Independent said that "its menacing acumen calls for classic status." The novel was reprinted, in Great Britain by the independent publisher Alma Books (2006), in the USA (2007) by the Bertelsmann subsidiary Vintage . The New York Times dedicated the front page of its book section to the American publication of Remainder, calling it "a work of novel-like philosophy, as disturbing as it is funny". In 2008 it won the fourth Believer Book Award . Zadie Smith wrote in the New York Review of Books that it was "one of the great English novels of the past decade," and went on to claim that it shows a future path that the novel "may, possibly, with difficulty" follow. It has since been translated into 14 languages ​​- the German translation was released in 2009 - and a film adaptation by Omer Fast was released in theaters in 2016. The world premiere as a stage play will take place on November 4, 2016 at the Münchner Kammerspiele in a production by Alexander Giesche. Some of the major publishing houses that had previously turned down the novel approached McCarthy with enthusiastic offers, which McCarthy refused with the comment that it was the same book as it had been two years earlier.

In 2004 he published an essay on excrement in the work of James Joyce in the online literary magazine Hypermedia Joyce Studies . In 2008 an essay by him on Alain Robbe-Grillet , an author for whom he has often expressed admiration , was reprinted in the Oneworld Classics English edition of Robbe-Grillets Jealousy .

In June 2006, a literary theoretical work of McCarthy by was Granta Books published Tintin and the Secret of Literature (Tintin and the Secret of Literature). The book tries to create a reading of Hergés Tim & Struppi through the prism of structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory. The reviews were divided, with some bothered by the references to Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes . Kilian Fox praised in the Observer "the obsessive approach of its author, his breathtaking understanding of the work and the sheer exuberance with which he approaches his subject". In the Guardian , however, Kathryn Hughes criticized the method and style: “McCarthy's text has a smug grin that was characteristic of the early 1990s when journalists began to use the critical theory of academies, and they liked how it made them feel felt smarter ”. McCarthy commented, "Granta asked if I wanted to write a book about Freud or Derrida or someone like that, and I said, 'Ok, if I write about Hergé, I can write about Freud, Derrida and a whole bunch of other people, and it will be a lot more fun. ' For the most part, it was well received. There were one or two highly amusing English reviews in which one could almost see how the veins of the critic were bursting with Little England fury at the continental arc that the book spans. "

In 2007, Alma Books published the second novel, Men in Space , most of which was written before Remainder . It has been translated into many languages, including Greek and French. His third novel, C , was published in 2010 and was nominated for the Walter Scott Prize in 2011 . In February 2015, McCarthy published a new novel called Satin Island , which was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and was nominated for the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize . When he started writing it, he said: "It will have a theme of a parachutist falling to earth after realizing his parachute was sabotaged: his relationship with the landscape, with death, with technology."

McCarthy has also published several short stories, essays, and articles on literature, philosophy, and the arts, including a. in The Observer , The Times Literary Supplement , The London Review of Books , Artforum, and The New York Times . He was also involved in the anthologies London from Punk to Blair (Reaction Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press), The Milgram Re-Enactment (Jan van Eyck Press) and The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth (Serpent's Tail). He has already given lectures at various institutions, such as the Architectural Association , the Royal College of Art and the Southern California Institute of Architecture .

Remainder (in German: 8½ million)

Remainder tells the story of a nameless hero who was traumatized by an accident that "involved an object falling from the sky". Eight and a half million pounds richer thanks to a compensation agreement, but hopelessly alienated from the world around him, the protagonist of Remainder spends his time and money exploring vaguely remembered scenes and situations from his past, such as: Obsessively reconstructing and re-enacting, for example, a large building with piano music from afar, the familiar smell and sound of fried liver, or lethargic cats on roofs that hang around there until they fall down.

The repetitions, re-enactments, are driven by the need to live in the world "authentically" rather than in a "second-hand" way, which resulted in his traumatic situation. When the restoration of everyday processes fails to satisfy his hunger for authenticity, he begins to act out increasingly violent events.

Men in Space (not yet translated)

Set in Central Europe, which was rapidly fragmenting after the end of communism, Men in Space follows an ensemble of rampant artists, political refugees, football referees, deaf secret agents, contract killers and stranded astronauts in their hunt for a stolen icon from Sofia to Prague and beyond. The melancholic sphere of influence of the icon image is reflected in the ellipses and near-collisions of the various characters, while they move at dizzying speed through all possible spaces, be they physical, political, emotional or metaphysical. McCarthy uses this setting to show a vision of humanity floating in history, in a world in a state of dissolution.

C (in German: K)

C begins in England at the beginning of the 20th century. It is the story of a boy named Serge Carrefax, whose father spends his time experimenting with wireless communications while running a school for deaf children. Serge grows up surrounded by noise and silence, with his highly intelligent, but troubled older sister, Sophie: an intense sibling relationship that accompanies him while he moves into a larger, more problematic world. After flirting with a nurse in a Bohemian spa town, Serge worked as a radio operator for reconnaissance aircraft during the First World War. When his plane is shot down, Serge is taken to a German prison camp, from which he can escape. Back in London, he is recruited for a job in Cairo for the seedy Empire Wireless Chain.

C was released in 2010, by Knopf in the US and Jonathan Cape in the UK, and has divided critics. McCarthy named dealing with technology and grief as topics in the novel in interviews. The book was on the shortlist of the Man Booker Prize 2010. Tom LeClair described McCarthy as a "young and British Thomas Pynchon ". It was also on the shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize .

It was designed by Neel Mukherjee of The Times described as "undoubtedly ingenious, unique in a useful way by his, confusing view of modernism, the model of psychological realism scarring, which is the dominant mode of our conservative time" and Jonathan Dee from Harper's Magazine as "An avant-garde epic, the first I can think of since Joyce's Ulysses".

Satin Island

"U., who calls himself" corporate anthropologist, "is commissioned to write the Great Report, a universal ethnographic document that sums up our entire age. But he quickly feels overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data and the apparent impossibility of translating what he has found into some kind of meaningful narrative. When he begins to wonder whether his project can even succeed, a dream of an apocalyptic urban landscape with a gigantic waste incineration plant enthroned in the middle changes his perception.

In a way that only he can, Tom McCarthy captures how we experience our world, how we try to make sense of it and recognize the narrative we believe to be our lives. A disturbing novel that promises to formulate the first and last word about the time in which we move - be it modern, postmodern or whatever label we want to give it. "

Artistic work

International Necronautical Society (INS)

In 1999 McCarthy became general secretary of the semi-fictional organization International Necronautical Society (INS), which he founded with his friend Simon Critchley . This is dedicated to projects that do for death what the surrealists did for sex. After he failed to find publishers for his novels in 2001 and 2002, he started art projects under the INS stamp. McCarthy distributed the INS Manifesto at a pseudo art fair organized by artist Gavin Turk . The activities of the INS consist of publications, live events, media interventions and conventional art exhibitions.

In an interview he gave to the Bookninja website in 2007 , McCarthy explained the circumstances that led to the creation of the INS: “I was pretty well involved in the London art world in the late 1990s, and I've also had an interest in for some time the forms and processes of the avant-garde of the early 20th century as well as the futurists and the surrealists: their semi-corporate, semi-political structures of committees and sub-committees, their use of manifestos, proclamations and denunciations. "

Despite his initial assertion that the INS was "not an art project," McCarthy, in his capacity as Secretary General of the INS, accepted invitations from art institutions around the world, including Tate Britain and London's Institute of Contemporary Arts , Moderna Museet Stockholm, Drawing Center New York, Artworks Berlin, Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund and Substation Gallery Singapore.

Art Monthly described the INS as "a group of wayward writers and licorice-rasping parodists", The Australien as "obscure". In 2003, the INS hacked the BBC's website and added propaganda to its source code. The following year, a broadcast unit was established at the Institute for Contemporary Arts. More than forty assistants consistently generated “poem codes” that were broadcast via FM radio in London and via the Internet to collaborating radio stations around the world. In 2008, a more mechanical version of this work was exhibited at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, with a flight data recorder sending a stream of similar messages.

After McCarthy and INS chief philosopher Simon Critchley read the "INS Declaration on Inauthenticity" at the New York Drawing Center, critic Peter Schwenger in Triple Canopy speculated that the two men who had appeared in the gallery were not Critchley and McCarthy. They took this claim as a suggestion and in fact replaced themselves with actors when they read the statement a year later at Tate Britain .

When they were invited to present the declaration a third time, as part of the Athens Biennale in 2009, they announced that it would henceforth be outsourced to any institution that wanted it, and commissioned a Greek translation, which was subsequently done by Greek actors was read in Athens.

Installations / visual art

McCarthy also created independent works of art. In 2005 he exhibited the multimedia installation Greenwich Degree Zero at The Western Front Gallery in Vancouver , which was created in collaboration with the artist Rod Dickinson. It pays homage to Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel The Secret Agent and describes the burning down of the Greenwich Observatory. The installation was acquired for the permanent collection of the Arts Council England.

In 2006 McCarthy worked with the French artist Loris Gréaud and created an “ontic helpline” for a fictional “thanatological company” - a black phone that confronted callers with an endless loop of pre-recorded messages.

The phone was shown in the FiAC collection in Paris and purchased from gallery owners / collectors Solene Guillier and Nathalie Boutin.

McCarthy wrote the screenplay for Johan Grimonprez 's feature film Double Take (2009). The script consists of a short story loosely based on "August 25, 1983" by Borges , in which Hitchcock meets his double on the set of one of his films. The film won the Black Pearl Award (MEIFF, Abu Dhabi) in 2009.

McCarthy has also taught at a variety of institutions including the Architectural Association , Central Saint Martins School of Art , Royal College of Art , London Consortium and Columbia University .

subjects

In a 2007 interview, McCarthy described repetition and duplication as one of the main themes that runs through his work. In Remainder, the repetition takes the form of re-enactments (re-enactments) of events carried out by the traumatized protagonist who has become wealthy. This process has been viewed by some critics (such as Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books ) as an allegory for art itself.

In Men in Space it takes the form of a reproduction of a work of art and a pattern that runs through the centuries. In McCarthy's artistic projects, it takes the form of repetitive sets of radio messages, a homage to Jean Cocteau's Orphée . Boyd Tonkin writes in his Independent article about McCarthy that McCarthy believed that literature itself is a series of repetitions and reproductions.

At least one critic has associated McCarthy's work with "failed transcendence," and McCarthy has used the term in interviews to describe the collapse of the idealistic project in philosophy, art, and literature. Failed transcendence is a central tenet of the New York Declaration on Inauthenticity , a speech that was given in the style of a propaganda declaration by McCarthy and the philosopher Critchley in 2007 at the Drawing Center in New York. In an interview with the artist Margarita Gluzberg (2001 at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London ), McCarthy quotes Georges Bataille's description of matter as “the non-logical difference which, in relation to the economy of the universe, represents what crime represents in relation to the economy of law "(" That non-logical difference that represents in relation to the economy of the universe what crime represents in relation to the economy of the law ").

In a lecture at the International James Joyce Symposium 2004 in Dublin , McCarthy again quoted Bataille and resorted to the notion of “basic materialism” to illuminate the scatological (fecal, obscene) sentiment in Joyce's novels. The remote communication monitoring agent in Men in Space initially brags that he can “always get a strong signal” but ends up losing the signal and becoming deaf, excluded from all communication. In an interview, McCarthy spoke about the character's resemblance to Francis Ford Coppola's Harry Caul in The Conversation .

McCarthy carried out an art project around Cocteau's Orphée at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 2004 . Forty assistants cut texts, projected them onto the walls and reassembled them into cryptic messages that were broadcast across London and the world via radio and the Internet. This project is based on William S. Burroughs' idea of "viral media" and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's understanding of "crypt", a space for burial and encryption. The artwork Black Box was originally shown at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2008 . Continuous radio messages were also integrated. McCarthy insisted that wireless technology as a metaphor can be seen for writing, where he "The Waste Land" by TS Eliot compared with a radio program.

Works

• Navigation Was Always a Difficult Art , London 2002.
• Calling All Agents , London 2003.
• Remainder , Paris 2005.
  • German: 8 1/2 million . Diaphanes , Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-03734-187-2 .
• Tintin and the Secret of Literature , London 2006.
  • German: Tim & Struppi and the secret of literature . Blumenbar , Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-936738-61-2 .
• Men in Space , London 2007.
• C . Vintage, London 2010.
  • German: K . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt , Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-421-04489-1 .
• Official Notices / International Necronautical Society / represented by Tom McCarthy; Simon Critchley . Diaphanes, Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-03734-160-5 .
• Satin Island , London / New York 2015. ISBN 0-307-59395-9 .
  • German: Satin Island. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt , Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-421-04718-2 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Tom McCarthy in the catalog of the German National Library
• International Necronautical Society
• Everything is fake , DIE ZEIT from August 10, 2009
• The novel is dead, long live the novel! , NZZ from December 5, 2009
• Possibilities and limits of communication , Berner Zeitung, August 2, 2012

supporting documents

1. ↑ Tom McCarthy | The Days of Yore. In: thedaysofyore.com. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
2. ↑ BOMB Magazine - Tom McCarthy by Frederic Tuten. In: bombmagazine.org. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
3. ↑ the complete review - all rights reserved: Remainder - Tom McCarthy. In: www.complete-review.com. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
4. ^ Zadie Smith: Two Paths for the Novel. In: The New York Review of Books. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
5. ^ Abendzeitung, Germany: Münchner Kammerspiele: What Matthias Lilienthal is planning in his second season. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
6. ↑ Tom McCarthy's top 10 European modernists . In: The Guardian . May 7, 2007, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed September 19, 2016]).
7. ↑ Killian Fox: Blistering barnacles! He's a literary icon . In: The Guardian . July 15, 2006, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed September 19, 2016]).
8. ↑ Kathryn Hughes: Boy oh boy detective . In: The Guardian . July 15, 2006, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed September 19, 2016]).
9. ↑ Mike Interviews: Tom McCarthy Part 1 of 3. In: www.viewfromheremagazine.com. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
10. ↑ Tom McCarthy, Men in space ( Ανθρωποι στο διαστημα ) (Athens: Papyros, 2008). ISBN 978-960-6715-60-0 ; Les Cosmonautes au paradis (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2009). ISBN 978-2-01-237406-5
11. ↑ Man Booker Prize: the shortlist. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
12. ^ Shortlist of the Goldsmiths Prize 2015 , accessed October 22, 2015.
13. ↑ Interview by Ben Johncock: Tom McCarthy: My desktop . In: The Guardian . November 24, 2011, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed September 19, 2016]).
14. ^ Peter Carey could be a three-time booker winner. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
15. ↑ Stephen Burn: 'Men in Space,' Tom McCarthy's Complex Novel . In: The New York Times . February 24, 2012, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed September 19, 2016]).
16. ^ Walter Scott historical fiction shortlist announced . In: BBC News . April 1, 2011 ( bbc.com [accessed September 19, 2016]).
17. ↑ the complete review - all rights reserved: C - Tom McCarthy. In: www.complete-review.com. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
18. ↑ Tom McCarthy: Satin Island. DVA publishing house . ISBN 978-3-421-04718-2 ( randomhouse.de [accessed September 19, 2016]).
19. ^ International Necronautical Society. Retrieved September 9, 2019 . 
20. ^ Lost in the orbits of spies and mobsters. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
21. ^ Interview with Tom McCarthy - The White Review. Retrieved September 19, 2016 (American English). 
22. ^ Tom McCarthy «Interview« ReadySteadyBook - for literature ... In: www.readysteadybook.com. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
23. ^ The Necronautical Society - INS in the Press. In: www.necronauts.org. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
24. ^ Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
25. ↑ Moderna Museet: Tom McCarthy om Black Box. May 30, 2008, accessed September 19, 2016 . 
26. ↑ ^{a b} Triple Canopy - The State of Inauthenticity by Peter Schwenger. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
27. ^ Tate Triennial 2009 Prologue 4: Borders: Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy: Tate Declaration on Inauthenticity | Tate. In: www.tate.org.uk. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
28. ↑ Athens Biennale: 2nd Athens Biennale 2009 HEAVEN. Archived from the original on July 25, 2011 ; Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
29. ↑ ROD DICKINSON - ARTIST. In: www.roddickinson.net. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
30. ^ Johan Grimonprez: Double Take. January 13, 2010, accessed September 19, 2016 . 
31. ↑ Joyce Carol Oates: Read We Forget. In: The New York Review of Books. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
32. ^ The Necronautical Society - INS Events. In: www.necronauts.org. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
33. ^ INM: Tom McCarthy: How he became one of the brightest new prospects in British fiction - Features, Books. The Independent, archived from the original on July 30, 2010 ; Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
34. ↑ Lee Rourke: He's floating in a most peculiar way . In: The Guardian . September 9, 2007, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed September 19, 2016]).
35. ↑ Men in Space. In: Jonathan Derbyshire. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
36. ^ Tom McCarthy, Part Two (BSS # 155) | The Bat Segundo Show & Follow Your Ears. In: www.edrants.com. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
37. ^ The Necronautical Society - INS interviews. In: www.necronauts.org. Retrieved September 19, 2016 . 
38. ↑ WebCite query result. In: www.webcitation.org. Retrieved September 19, 2016 .