Tom McCarthy’s Fiction: A Reading Diary

Abstract

In the following lines I provide a reading diary of all of McCarthy’s four novels, giving my impressions as the reading goes and offering a brief retrospective assessment at the end of the piece. By paying attention to the singularity of the text and the idioculture that emerges from it, I tentatively offer a progressive reading of each single novel, each reading striving to build up connections with the previous novels. This leads me to address a series of issues centring on the prevalence of fakes, matter, connection, and also on the alternative narrative means to raise the reader’s interest as he/she is confronted with the flatness of characters and the programmatic impossibility to sympathise with them.

Keywords

• McCarthy
• Men in Space
• Remainder
• C
• Satin Island
• connection