Tom McCarthy

Set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of communism,Men in Spacefollows 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: physical, political, emotional, and metaphysical. What emerges is a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration.

Men in Space

Daryl Houston

I didn't have high hopes for my response to this one when I first started, as I was immediately lost in a spaghetti of names I couldn't begin to pronounce or remember. But the book pretty quickly captured my attention, and I found it fascinating to read. It's not your standard linear or tidy narrative, but that tends to get bonus points from me. The book taught me things about art (like, process) and invited me to think about original vs. copied art, which is always fun. I could tell there was some fairly complex set of symbols running through the book, but I was doing a fairly quick read and so didn't try to track or understand them formally; they tended to be like visual gestures detached (for me) from any clear meaning but interesting as gestures with counterparts here and there in the book. I thought at times of Gaddis's The Recognitions, which I think is a clear influence, and I also thought of his Agape Agape, which with its double-signifying word (love and gap/lacuna/ellipsis) certainly seems to line up with some of what McCarthy is doing in this book (the word "agape" appears I believe a couple of times and the book is full of and perhaps even in some way predicated on ellipsis). The afterword is a nice read too, summarizing a few things I had vague impressions of but hadn't articulated and suggesting a few other things that hadn't occurred to me. McCarthy remains on my list of authors to keep tabs on.

Men in Space

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