The Guardian published a great profile of Tom McCarthy today. Topics include Freud, the avant-garde, archeology, and his forthcoming novel C. From the article, here’s McCarthy on his book’s setting:
“It’s the great period of emergent technology,” McCarthy explains. “The book is set between 1898 – when Marconi was doing some of his earliest experiments – and 1922, which is the year the BBC was founded, and also the great year of modernism: The Waste Land and Ulysses. I wanted C to be a kind of archaeology of literature. But I think all ‘proper’ literature always has been an archaeology of other literature. The task for contemporary literature is to deal with the legacy of modernism. I’m not trying to be modernist, but to navigate the wreckage of that project.”
The Guardian has also run a review of C. Biblioklept’s review runs tomorrow. It was a struggle to write–it’s always a struggle to review a book you absolutely love. You always end up sounding a bit too breathless.
Biblioklept 