Tom McCarthy: Remainder

A very brave name for a novelist to choose, I would say, for their debut novel. But having just read about this quirky work (and the smart-thinking publisher Alma who is bringing it out in the UK) in the Saturday Guardian my list of books I-urgently-need-to-read has just grown again - botheration. When will I ever catch up???

There's a huge amount of stuff about McCarthy starting to grow up mushroom stylee on the net (a genuine word-of-mouth whatsit as opposed to the usual cynical marketing B&^*$%ks - here's a bit on spike magazine). The consensus seems to be a rather depressing one: how many more oddball books are failing to slip past the stranglehold of commercial publishing. It's sad - I saw a very lovely and well regarded marketing director of one of the big publishing houses the other day, and in the course of our conversation mentioned Jeremy Reed's fantastic 1960's odyssey Orange Sunshine - a docu-poetry exploration of that decade's icons and milestones - and she shook her head and said "it will never make any money, you know"... . I do hope she's wrong, but I rather wish it wasn't the point.

Still, making money does make the publishing proposition possible - I guess there just aren't enough billionaire philanthropists out there.

Anyway, Alma press should by now have received my amazon order for Remainder - and I shall see whether it works for me.

And as for Gunther Grass - in the Waffen SS at the age of 17 in 1944, I really don't think it undermines his writerly reputation as some comentators I heard on Radio 4 suggested today... nor does it turn him into the literary equivalent of Albert Speer. Having very belatedly risen to my own reading challenge, I have now read and not-exactly-enjoyed The Tin Drum but I would say it was fairly unambiguous as an anti-war tract.