The Threshold and the Ledger

by Tom McCarthy

A riveting non-fiction book by Booker-shortlisted author Tom McCarthy.

Published just before the centenary year of one of the German-speaking world’s most extraordinary post-war writers, Tom McCarthy’s short book unpacks a single poem by Ingeborg Bachmann. Latching onto two of its central terms – the eponymous threshold and ledger – McCarthy takes off on a line of flight that carries the reader through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare.

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) may have spent her career in shadow of her lover Paul Celan; but since her untimely death her star has outshone even his. In recent years more and more Anglophone writers and readers have been switching on to her importance.

80 pages, Paperback

Published September 9, 2025

About the author

Tom McCarthy — “English fiction’s new laureate of disappointment” (Time Out, September 2007) — is a writer and artist. He was born in 1969 and lives in a tower-block in London. Tom grew up in Greenwich, south London, and studied English at New College, Oxford. After a couple of years in Prague in the early 1990s, he lived in Amsterdam as literary editor of the local Time Out, and later worked in British television as well as co-editing Mute magazine.

His debut novel Remainder was first published in November 2005 by Paris-based art press Metronome. After becoming a cult hit championed first by British webzines (it was 3:AM Magazine’s Book of the Year for 2005) and then by the literary press, Remainder was republished by Alma Books in the UK (2006) and Vintage in the US (2007). A French version is to be followed by editions in Japanese, Korean, Greek, Spanish and Croatian.

A work of literary criticism, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was released by Granta Books in June 2006. It also came out in France and an American edition is in the offing.

Tom’s second novel, Men in Space came out in 2007.

He has published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and Contemporary Magazine, as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press) and The Milgram Experiment (Jan van Eyck Press). His story, “Kool Thing, Or Why I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst” appeared in The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (Serpent’s Tail) in 2008.

His ongoing project the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through publications, proclamations, denunciations and live events, has been described by Untitled Magazine as ‘the most comprehensive total art work we have seen in years’ and by Art Monthly as ‘a platform for fantastically mobile thinking’. In 2003 the INS broke into the BBC website and inserted propaganda into its source-code. The following year, they set up a broadcasting unit at the ICA from which more than forty ‘agents’ generated non-stop poem-codes which were transmitted over FM radio in London and by internet to collaborating radio stations around the world.

Tom has also tutored and lectured at various institutions including the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins School of Art, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College and Southern California Institute of Architecture. He recently taught a course on ‘Catastrophe’ with Marko Daniel at the London Consortium.

Reviews

[Katia N]

This is a delightful, elegantly written essay. It could be easily read in one sitting and I would argue it is better to do it this way. (That is why it belongs to my virtual 'coffee-with-a-book' shelf). Like any quality essay, it shines with the ability of the author to connect different themes and literary sources while keeping focus on his subject. In addition, this process comes across as practically effortless for a person who reads it. This seeming lightness of touch combined with the depth of understanding of his chosen phenomena and literary works made it joyful reading experience for me. I suspect he has put a lot of effort for this work to seem that way.

The subjects of his investigation is mentioned in the title: 'the threshold' and 'the ledger'. He is trying to dwell on those phenomena in their relevance to life and art. His starting point is the close reading of a poem 'Salz und Brot' (Salt and Bread) by Ingebord Bachmann. The poem takes him into the journey of associations into such a variety of works like The Oresteia by Aeschylus (also its interpretation An Oresteia by Anne Carson), The Burrow by Kafka, Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin or movies by David Lynch.

The threshold in this essay is appeared to be quite an existential, profound concept: 'transformation, passage, wave action'(Benjamin). Or in the words of McCarthy's himself 'a space that when traversed or hovered over, makes poetry possible'. But the threshold also is the place of crisis; it can kill.

McCarthy illustrates this idea with Agamenon and Casandra who got murdered after stepping over the threshold into a bath. He argues that who have actually killed them is 'incidental: from a structural and symbolic point of view, it's the threshold itself that - like a tripwire mine or fly-killing electric zap-beam - brings about the couple's execution as they breech its line.'

This idea gave rise to his writing of a short play. Whatever I thought of the idea per se, I've certainly enjoyed how he expressed it in this essay combined with his view on a theatre going:

In fact, I'm so convinced of this that twenty years ago I wrote a version of the play in which the door-sill plays the lead role, standing alone on stage while Agamemnon's trip (in my version he stubs his toe and trips) across it is projected in super-slow, frame-per-second motion, as in Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho. That's all that happens. It's probably the work of mine with which I'm most content- not least as it achieved the (to me, since while I love reading drama I avoid like plague going to the theatre, especially the English theatre with its endless - and very un-Greek - adherence to dumb-ass doctrines of naturalism and 'authenticity; besides which I'm not sure if I or anybody else would actu ally want to sit through this considerable feat of being reviewed (in the London review of books) without being performed.

The last long sentence in this passage by itself should be read closely as it contains quite a bit to unpack but, at the same time, it appeals to my aesthetic sense sheerly by the originality how it is composed.

It is just one episode from an essay. So where is Bachmann in all of this? She is there. In fact my minor complaint is actually that he brings some of her biographical facts as if they might explain her work. I found it a bit reductionist even if occasionally plausible. Also with Malina, her most famous novel, I felt he has rushed through a little. But the analysis of 'Salt and Bread' poem is profound and thought-provoking.

Also he has left me hungry for works by Anne Carson and Simon Chritchley (as well as his own). And it is always a good sign.

[emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘—passion, in both its amorous and religious senses. No less than ‘Salt and Bread’, Malina is full of sacrificial motifs: crosses, thorns, white vestments. The narrator speaks of being nailed to a cross, and prophesies: ‘I shall fall three times before I can rise again’’

I reckon I'd be able to appreciate this better if I had read more of Bachmann's work/writing before going into this, but still an intensely interesting read nonetheless. Critchley's Mysticism is mentioned, slightly surprising, but enjoyed that bit since I do already like Critchley's writing anyway.

‘— polar opposites of one another – yet reciprocally counterbalancing. ‘I need my double existence,’ she writes, ‘my Ivanlife and my Malinafield, I cannot be where Ivan isn’t, just as I cannot return home when Malina isn’t there’; by the same logic, the contending book-versions are both mutually exclusive and intimately interlinked, each a kind of flipped or inverse copy of the other.

As Malina progresses, though, the logic and aesthetic of the second version get the upper hand. A febrile reprisal of the ballroom scene from War and Peace gives over to a conversation in which Malina tells her that ‘It isn’t war and peace … It’s war’—’

[bug · Rating 4 out of 5]

i wonder what tom mccarthy would think of the liminal worlds of experimental video games like LSD dream emulator

[The_J · Rating 1 out of 5]

So, Tom, the author, is so desperate for content that he decides to write an entire treatise on a Stanza of some Germaniphone world poet. IT comes across as a little desperate. But I loved this line: "Bachmann can only bring herself to render them in pastiche form." The whole experience was disappointing.