Tom McCarthy’s latest novel is The Making of Incarnation.
Our movements through the urban environment are recorded and archived by closed-circuit cameras, our location tracked by those miniature recording boxes we carry in our pockets, our iPhones. Online, every keystroke and click is registered, indexed and correlated with others we have made, so that future clicks may be predicted or even determined. We live, one could say, inside a giant black box.
By the end of the 1980s, two formerly arcane disciplines with roots in the French 1940s were readily available to British aspirants. One was post-structuralism, which not many years earlier...
For the final part of this novel’s first movement, our young hero, Serge Carrefax, travels to Kloděbrady’, a presumably Austro-Hungarian spa town, to take a cure. It’s 1913,...
Some people won’t read novels. I understand. I’m close to not wanting to read novels myself: they’re trying, and often seem the same. But one thing all fiction guarantees is...
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