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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101334.Remainder?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Remainder" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171477621m/101334.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101334.Remainder?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Remainder</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/30757.Tom_McCarthy">Tom McCarthy</a><br/><br/>
  <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/13011702?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
  rating: 2 of 5 stars<br/>    I was inclined, due to a blurb on the jacket describing the book as a work of "existential horror", to read it as an allegory. I'm pretty sure that this was what the author was going for. In my opinion though, the author fell into every trap that makes writing that sort of book difficult. 
<br/>    The main character is a sort of "man without qualities" which is a result of his condition (an accident in which something falls from the sky onto him and places him in a comatose state, which he wakes from with a case of amnesia), but makes him come across as very dull and unsympathetic. I don't feel that a character that is supposed to represent the basic existential condition of the human individual has to come across this way, and it prevented me from any attempt at empathy with the character even though I understood that his experience was supposed to represent my own on some level. The protagonist finds himself extremely rich as the result of a settlement and becomes obsessed with recreating scenes that he has vague memories of in a quest to force into existence settings that will make him feel "real." This seemed to be a metaphor for tendency people have to use memory as a way to distort reality by placing undue significance on arbitrary points in time, but the author failed to do this in a way that would allow the plot(in as much as there was one) to develop in a compelling way. The character uses his money to create an entire apartment building, an experience he had at an auto shop and other scenes, going about it in a way that isn't plausible in any realistic sense and didn't have any value for me other than as a fairly heavy-handed metaphor for how fleeting experiences are as points in constantly fluid time. 
<br/>    As the book progresses the character becomes more and more obsessive and morally bankrupt, but there is never any kind of psychological/ sociological/ political subtext that makes sense of this behavior. 
<br/>    I suppose this is one of those books that is supposed to "mess with the mind" of the reader, and to create the sort of disorientation that is parallel to that which is occurring in the mind of the main character. To me though, it was just a fairly dull story about a petty, jerky kind of guy who for no particular reason becomes completely amoral as a side effect of his obsessive quest to recreate a vague memory he has of being in an apartment with the smell of chicken liver in the air, which he does for no particular reason other than a "tingling" sensation he gets when he is in the recreation. Heavy, man...if that's your idea of a good book. 
<br/>    
  <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/807303?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Cyrus's review
rating:

I was inclined, due to a blurb on the jacket describing the book as a work of "existential horror", to read it as an allegory. I'm pretty sure that this was what the author was going for. In my opinion though, the author fell into every trap that makes writing that sort of book difficult.
The main character is a sort of "man without qualities" which is a result of his condition (an accident in which something falls from the sky onto him and places him in a comatose state, which he wakes from with a case of amnesia), but makes him come across as very dull and unsympathetic. I don't feel that a character that is supposed to represent the basic existential condition of the human individual has to come across this way, and it prevented me from any attempt at empathy with the character even though I understood that his experience was supposed to represent my own on some level. The protagonist finds himself extremely rich as the result of a settlement and become...more I was inclined, due to a blurb on the jacket describing the book as a work of "existential horror", to read it as an allegory. I'm pretty sure that this was what the author was going for. In my opinion though, the author fell into every trap that makes writing that sort of book difficult.
The main character is a sort of "man without qualities" which is a result of his condition (an accident in which something falls from the sky onto him and places him in a comatose state, which he wakes from with a case of amnesia), but makes him come across as very dull and unsympathetic. I don't feel that a character that is supposed to represent the basic existential condition of the human individual has to come across this way, and it prevented me from any attempt at empathy with the character even though I understood that his experience was supposed to represent my own on some level. The protagonist finds himself extremely rich as the result of a settlement and becomes obsessed with recreating scenes that he has vague memories of in a quest to force into existence settings that will make him feel "real." This seemed to be a metaphor for tendency people have to use memory as a way to distort reality by placing undue significance on arbitrary points in time, but the author failed to do this in a way that would allow the plot(in as much as there was one) to develop in a compelling way. The character uses his money to create an entire apartment building, an experience he had at an auto shop and other scenes, going about it in a way that isn't plausible in any realistic sense and didn't have any value for me other than as a fairly heavy-handed metaphor for how fleeting experiences are as points in constantly fluid time.
As the book progresses the character becomes more and more obsessive and morally bankrupt, but there is never any kind of psychological/ sociological/ political subtext that makes sense of this behavior.
I suppose this is one of those books that is supposed to "mess with the mind" of the reader, and to create the sort of disorientation that is parallel to that which is occurring in the mind of the main character. To me though, it was just a fairly dull story about a petty, jerky kind of guy who for no particular reason becomes completely amoral as a side effect of his obsessive quest to recreate a vague memory he has of being in an apartment with the smell of chicken liver in the air, which he does for no particular reason other than a "tingling" sensation he gets when he is in the recreation. Heavy, man...if that's your idea of a good book.
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