Name: Satin Island
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.

"When we first meet U., the narrator of SATIN ISLAND, he is sitting in the airport at Turin, caught in a delay caused by a rogue airplane. Like everyone else in the waiting area, he is sifting through airport pages on his laptop, and then through news sites, social pages, corridors of trivia...until he happens to stumble on information about an image on a famous shroud in Turin. The image itself isn't even visible on the shroud; it only emerged when some amateur photographer looked at the negative of a shot he'd taken and saw the figure--Christ's body supine after crucifixion. Only in the negative: the negative became a positive. A few decades later when the shroud was radiocarbon dated, it turned out to come from no later than the mid-thirteenth century. But that didn't trouble the believers. Things like that never do. A "corporate ethnographer," U. is tasked with writing the Great Report. Yet at every turn, U. finds himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in a buffer zone and wandering through a crowd of apparitions. Meanwhile, Madison, the woman he is seeing, becomes increasingly elusive, much like the particulars in the case of the recent, highly-publicized parachutist's death, with which U. is obsessed. He also develops a perverse interest in oil spills, spending great amounts of time watching loops of clean up videos. As U. begins to wonder if perhaps the Great Report will remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are reawakened by an ominous dream of an apocalyptic cityscape. SATIN ISLAND is a novel that captures the way we experience the world today, our efforts to find meaning, to stay awake, and discern the narratives we think of as our lives"--

Satin Island

Reviews

Highlights