nomadreader

The backstory: Satin Island  is on the 2015 Booker Prize longlist. The basics: I'll let the publisher describe this one for you: "U., a “corporate anthropologist,” is tasked with writing the Great Report, an all-encompassing ethnographic document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions, willing them to coalesce into symbols that can be translated into some kind of account that makes sense. As he begins to wonder if the Great Report might remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are startled awake by a dream of an apocalyptic cityscape." My thoughts: The cover of this novel is awesome. Many things are crossed out: a treatise, an essay, a report, a confession, and a manifesto. What remains: a novel. Maybe. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone paying attention that McCarthy has written a compelling, unconventional and demanding nove...

The backstory: C is on this year's Booker Prize shortlist. The basics: I'm not sure I've ever read a book so difficult to summarize. The book jacket does a decent job, however, so I'll use its description: " C follows the short, intense life of Serge Carrefax, a man who--as his name suggests--surges into the electric modernity of the early twentieth century, transfixed by the technologies that will obliterate him." My thoughts: C is a complicated, dense, self-referential novel. The overarching theme of the novel (I think) is transmission: the transmission of thoughts, feelings, ideas, words, messages and life itself. It's a difficult novel to evaluate. As I was reading it, I felt simultaneously smart for getting some of McCarthy's puns, symbols and allusions, but I couldn't help feeling I was barely scratching the surface of this novel's depth. By the end, I had a better grasp on the intention of the novel, and I imagine more layers...