Name: Satin Island
Rating: 3.647058823529412 (17 reviews)
ISBN: 9780307593955

Tom McCarthy

Struck by a realization that the public's access to the truth seems obscured, a corporate ethnographer is tasked with writing an era-summarizing report that is challenged by his obsessions and overwhelming quantities of data. By the award-winning author of C. 30,000 first printing.

Satin Island

Dave Perkins

Really loved the random spiralling thought patterns and reflections... more a book of poetry than a novel though.

A novel for our times, from the Booker-shortlisted 'master craftsman who is steering the contemporary novel towards exciting new territories' (Observer). Meet U. -- a talented and uneasy figure currently pimping his skills to an elite consultancy in contemporary London. His employers advise everyone from big businesses to governments, and, to this end, expect their 'corporate anthropologist' to help decode and manipulate the world around them -- all the more so now that a giant, epoch-defining project is in the offing. Instead, U. spends his days procrastinating, meandering through endless buffer-zones of information and becoming obsessed by the images with which the world bombards him on a daily basis: oil spills, African traffic jams, roller-blade processions, zombie parades. Is there, U. wonders, a secret logic holding all these images together -- a codex that, once cracked, will unlock the master-meaning of our age? Might it have something to do with South Pacific Cargo Cults, or the dead parachutists in the news? Perhaps; perhaps not. As U. oscillates between the visionary and the vague, brilliance and bullshit, Satin Island emerges, an impassioned and exquisite novel for our disjointed times.

Gary Homewood

A fashionably jaded cultural studies thesis, simultaneously satirising and in thrall to a media saturated, vapid late capitalism, reworking the themes of Ballard, Self, or an Adam Curtis documentary. Erudite and knowingly clever, refuting its own critique, then resorting to jarringly well worn cultural memes. An essay that desperately pivots to a novel in the last quarter, with a recounted episode like an early Paul Auster and a weirdly empty description of a Staten Island ferry field trip. Despite all that, it tries harder, and has more compelling and exciting ideas than anything else I've read in ages. Read it.

Satin Island

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