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It was year before I found out my entire department was being cut (to get rid of just one senior manager or so it seemed at the time – I now realize it was because they were confident the world would forget their callousness and that someone else would pick up the work but it wouldn’t be on their dime), but I have no real idea what was going on in my life from the vantage point of this complicated and distant present.
But I was obviously reading Tom McCarthy’s third novel as here it is, waiting to be reviewed (and in good company too it seems). This too features some forgetfulness, but wrought of blunt force trauma (rather than a state of nothing remarkable happening) after our unnamed and decidedly odd narrator gets bonked on the bonce by something which fell from the sky. A very lucky boy, however, he not only survived but also received a substantial pay-out by some guilty and negligent party, a settlement which takes him somewhat by surprise, so much so that, in a state of re-learning motor control after awakening from the subsequent coma, he wrenches the phone from the wall.
He stumbles along, feeling very detached and struggling with his fragmented memories, making up encounters with homeless people and not being very truthful about the amount of money he received, when he suddenly has a moment of clarity, an incredibly strong memory of a flat in which he once lived, and this is the trigger for what follows – an obsession with recreating his life before the accident and reordering his world to fit the fleeting but powerful memories he can recall. These include a piano player, a janitor, the colour of the rooftops, and as it turns out, an awful lot of black cats who occasionally fall to their deaths of the aforementioned red rooftops into the courtyard five or six stories below.
At this point I am immediately reminded of the superb Charlie Kaufman movie, Synecdoche, New York in which a New York theatre director stages a ridiculously ambitious staging of a theatrical project attempting to represent the banality of (his) failing existence, after receiving a substantial fellowship award, and in which he casts an actor as himself who goes on to recreate his own version of the production within the production, and which very quickly and repeatedly blur the lines between the theatrical situation and the director’s “real” (i.e. at his level of directorial control) world.
I urge you to find and watch this at your earliest convenience. And then watch Anomalisa.
In both situations, the production quickly outgrows the strictures of the original, and in both situations, readers’ suspension of disbelief is challenged but not stretched beyond breaking – less so in Kaufman’s film than in McCarthy’s novel, granted. But whereas Kaufman’s world grows ever inwards almost to a point of singularity, McCarthy’s narrator is obsessed with repetition, as if with sufficient re-runs he can excavate the truth of his life before the accident from the muddy silt of his damaged memory.
But of course, his tenuous grip on the realities of life outside his project slip as of course they must. He ends up planning a real-life bank heist and drive-by shooting. And he ends up quite literally in mid-air at the climax. This book is about nothing if not the unreliability of fiction, the unreasonableness of readers expecting things to make sense.
As fun as it sounds, and is, to a degree, to read, it ends up feeling very unsatisfactory. In a world where Christopher Nolans and Charlie Kaufmans do such entertaining and enjoyable work in the area of memory and mind, I found McCarthy's oft-praised novel underwhelming.
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It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off
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