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Tom McCarthy (born 1969) is an English novelist and artist.

Life and work
Tom McCarthy is a writer and conceptual artist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He is the author of the novels Remainder, Men in Space, and C, as well as the nonfiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature. McCarthy also serves as the General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-guarde network.

Born in 1969, McCarthy grew up in Greenwich, south London, and was educated at Dulwich College and later New College, Oxford, where he studied English literature. He lived in Prague, Berlin and Amsterdam in the early nineties before settling back in his native London.

McCarthy's debut novel Remainder, initially overlooked by UK trade publishers, was first published in 2005 by the small Paris-based art publisher Metronome Press and distributed exclusively through gallery and museum shops. After receiving widespread critical attention in the literary and mainstream presses, the novel was re-published in a much larger UK print-run by Alma Books (2006), and in the US by Vintage (2007).

In addition to his three novels, McCarthy has also published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, Artforum and The New York Times, as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press), The Milgram Experiment (Jan van Eyck Press) and The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth (Serpent’s Tail).

An international symposium on McCarthy’s work is planned for July 2011 at Birkbeck, University of London, with the papers to be published a year later by Glyphi Books.

Art and The International Necronautical Society (INS)
Since 1999 McCarthy has operated as 'General Secretary' of a 'semi-fictitious organisation' called the International Necronautical Society (INS) "devoted to mind-bending projects that would do for death what the Surrealists had done for sex".

With no formal training in the visual arts, McCarthy stated that he became an artist by accident after he handed out his International Necronautical Society manifestos at a mock art fair organized by artist Gavin Turk. He claimed that although his first love is literature, "art has one advantage in that it provides an active of becoming-active. You can actually do the thing rather than just represent it."

Remainder
Remainder tells the story of an unnamed hero traumatized by an accident which “involved something falling from the sky”. Eight and a half million pounds richer due to a compensation settlement but hopelessly estranged from the world around him, Remainder’s protagonist spends his time and money obsessively reconstructing and re-enacting vaguely remembered scenes and situations from his past, such as a large building with piano music in the distance, the familiar smells and sounds of liver frying and spluttering, or lethargic cats lounging on roofs until they tumble off them. These re-enactments are driven by a need to inhabit the world "authentically" rather than in the "second-hand" manner that his traumatic situation has bequeathed him. When the recreation of mundane events fails to quench this thirst for authenticity, he starts re-enacting more and more violent events, including shoot-outs and a bank heist.

Remainder has since been translated into nine languages, and a film adaptation is in production with Film4 Productions/Tiger Lilly, to be directed by Omer Fast from a script by John Hodge.

Men in Space
Set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of Communism, Men in Space follows a cast of dissolute Bohemians, political refugees, football referees, deaf police agents, assassins and stranded astronauts as they chase a stolen icon painting from Sofia to Prague and beyond. The icon's melancholy orbit is reflected in the various characters' ellipses and near-misses as they career vertiginously through all kinds of space, be it physical, political, emotional or metaphysical. McCarthy uses these settings to present a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration.

C
Opening in England at the turn of the twentieth century, C is the story of a boy named Serge Carrefax, whose father spends his time experimenting with wireless communication while running a school for deaf children. Serge grows up amid the noise and silence with his brilliant but troubled older sister, Sophie: an intense sibling relationship that stays with him as he heads off into an equally troubled larger world. After a fling with a nurse at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator for reconnaissance planes. When his plane is shot down, Serge is taken to a German prison camp, from which he escapes. Back in London, he’s recruited for a mission to Cairo on behalf of the shadowy Empire Wireless Chain. All of which eventually carries Serge to a fitful—and perhaps fateful—climax at the bottom of an Egyptian tomb. ..

McCarthy has described this novel in previous interviews as dealing with technology and mourning. The book was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

Tintin and the Secret of Literature
Released 2006, Tintin and the Secret of Literature attempted a reading of Hergé's Tintin books through the prism of structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory. McCarthy commented "Granta asked if I wanted to write a book on Freud or Derrida or someone like that, and I said: 'Well, if I write about Hergé I can write about Freud, Derrida and whole bunch of other people, plus it'll be much more fun.' It was received well for the most part. There were one or two hilarious English reviews in which you could virtually see the reviewer's veins bursting with little-England rage at the book's continental bent."

Screenplays
McCarthy wrote the script for Johan Grimonprez's feature film Double Take (2009). The script consists of a short story, loosely based on Borges's 'August 25, 1983', in which Hitchcock meets his double on the set of one of his films. The film won the Black Pearl award (MEIFF, Abu Dhabi).

Repetition and Duplication
One of the main themes pervading McCarthy’s work is that of repetition and duplication. The novelist himself has discussed the importance of this subject in an interview. The repetition in Remainder takes the form of re-enactments of events carried out by the wealthy post-traumatic hero in a process that some critics (such as Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books ) have seen as allegory for art itself. In Men in Space it takes the form of duplication of an artwork, and a set of patterns repeating over several centuries. In McCarthy’s art projects it has taken the form of repeating sets of messages over radio in the style of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée. Boyd Tonkin, in his Independent profile on McCarthy, picks up on the notion that literature itself is a series of repetitions and duplications.

Failed Transcendence
Several critics have noted the centrality of failed transcendence to McCarthy's work, particularly when discussing Men in Space. McCarthy himself has used this term in interviews to describe the collapse of the idealist project in philosophy, art and literature. The notion of failed transcendence also forms a central tenet of 'The New York Declaration on Inauthenticity', an INS talk delivered in the style of a propaganda statement by McCarthy and the philosopher Simon Critchley in 2007 in the Drawing Center, New York.

Matter
In relation to failed transcendence, the notion of matter seems to play a central role in McCarthy’s work. Remainder's hero is obsessed with “surplus matter”: the residues and traces of events. In his INS publication 'Navigation Was Always a Difficult Art', McCarthy discusses figures such as Dorian Gray, whose image becomes material (so much so that it rots), the work of Francis Ponge (which is preoccupied with the materiality of messy objects such as oranges and oysters), and most importantly the fat, blubbery whale of Moby Dick, who frustrates Ahab's idealistic attempt at self-projection. In a discussion with the artist Margarita Gluzberg, held in 2001 in London's Austrian Cultural Forum, McCarthy cites Georges Bataille's description of matter as “that non-logical difference that represents in relation to the economy of the universe what crime represents in relation to the economy of the law”. In a lecture delivered to the International James Joyce Symposium in 2004 in Dublin, McCarthy again cites Bataille, drawing on his notion of “base materialism” to throw light on the scatological sensibility displayed in Joyce's novels.

Transmission
Another recurring theme in McCarthy’s work is that of transmission. The detective in Men in Space clearly embodies this concern: he is a radio surveillance operative who starts out boasting he “can always get a strong signal”, but ends up losing the signal and then becoming deaf, cut off from all communication. In one interview, McCarthy has discussed this character’s similarity to Francis Ford Coppola's Harry Caul in The Conversation. Transmission is also central to Cocteau's Orphée, around which McCarthy created an art project at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2004, which consisted of forty assistants cutting up text, projecting it onto the walls and then re-assembling it into cryptic messages which were transmitted around London and the world by FM and internet. This project was indebted to William S. Burroughs's notions of viral media and to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's notions of the "crypt", a space both of burial and encryption. The art-piece Black Box, originally displayed in Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 2008, also involved constant radio transmissions. McCarthy has insisted that radio technology can be regarded as a metaphor for writing, comparing T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" to a radio programme.

Remainder
In 2008 Remainder won the fourth annual Believer Book Award and Zadie Smith, wrote in the New York Review of Books, that it was "one of the great English novels of the last ten years", suggesting it showed a future path that the novel "might, with difficulty, follow".

The London Review of Books called it "a very good novel indeed" and The Independent claimed that "its minatory brilliance calls for classic status". On its American publication the New York Times dedicated the front cover of its book section to the novel, calling the book "a work of novelistic philosophy, as disturbing as it is funny".

Tintin and the Secret of Literature
McCarthy’s volume of criticism divided reviewers, with some critics reacting adversely to the book's unabashed celebration of divisive literary figures such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. Killian Fox in The Observer praised "its author's obsessive approach, his breathtaking grasp of the oeuvre and the sheer exuberance with which he tackles his subject". However, in The Guardian, Kathryn Hughes criticized its methodology and style: "McCarthy's text has that pleased-with-itself smirk that was so characteristic of the early 90s, when journalists started purloining critical theory from the academy, liking the way it made them feel clever".

Men in Space
Upon its UK publication, Men in Space was highly praised by critics. The Guardian applauded McCarthy for writing with "devastating charm and lucidity” and Frieze Magazine billed the book as “a compelling and imaginative philosophical novel.” The Observer announced that "McCarthy is fast revealing himself as a master craftsman who is steering the contemporary novel towards exciting territories."

C
McCarthy’s third novel was met with primarily positive critical reactions. In the New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Egan praised C as “a tour-de-force,” saying it “fuses a Pynchonesque revelry in sign and codes with the lush psychedelics of William Burroughs to create an intellectually provocative novel that unfurls like a brooding, phosphorescent dream.” It has also been called “an avant-garde masterpiece” (Los Angeles Times), “genuinely exciting to read” (Slate), and “the remix the novel has been crying out for” (Sunday Times).

Some reviewers, however, were a bit galled by the book. Leo Robson, in the New Statesman described C as “full of familiar delights and familiar tedium.”