Tom McCarthy, who is now represented in the US by top agent Melanie Jackson, is interviewed in Raincoast Books:
“To bowdlerise Yeats: when things fall apart, some revelation is at hand. When the world shatters and falls away, transcendence becomes a possibility. To a large extent, Men in Space is an allegory of failed transcendence, as is Remainder: this is what the two books really have in common deep down. Transcendence fails — but some radical transformation takes place. I wouldn’t call my disposition in them ‘optimistic’, and, to borrow a great line from Lacan, I never speak of freedom — but in both books disintegration induces dynamic and exhilarating states, sends people somewhere extreme: to the limits of the self, the world, the whole symbolic order. That’s where literature should take you, its proper territory.”
First posted: Wednesday, October 10th, 2007.
