C by Tom McCarthy
Terence famously once said, “Nullum est iam dictum, quod non dictum sit prius,” – if you don’t fluently speak a dead language (sorry, classics majors!), that roughly translates to “Nothing is now said that has not been said before.” In a world in which Girl Talk, the Scary Movie franchise and Tosh.0 can all happily coexist, it only seems right that the next medium to receive the remix treatment would be the book. C does just that, but to say that he does it justice would not be giving him nearly enough credit.
McCarthy tells the story of Serge in chunks that show us the most important parts of his life, leaving it up to the audience to fill in the parts in between. Serge doesn’t discover the love of his life and have children, cure cancer, make any large contribution to society or generally do anything grand and heroic one might expect of a protagonist. Instead, Serge is perfectly happy having casual sexual encounters, abusing drugs and fighting in WWI despite having little or no idea what he is even fighting for. At his best, Serge might even be considered an antagonist, yet his fate is the one we happily follow until the very end. Where one author might try to glorify characters or embellish language unnecessarily, McCarthy takes the reader deep into worlds, people and even the earth itself on a molecular level of fascination with uncanny ease.
In my mind, C is a remix of Citizen Kane and Delillo’s White Noise, and that in and of itself is a triumph of characterization, prose and story. Rock on, McCarthy.
The B side is always better (or so say those hipster audiophiles) – a few more titles to prove the point:
Eeeee Eee Eeee by Tao Lin
As weird as the title promises, Lin’s story seems less like a story and more like an attack on the structure of the novel as a whole. Andrew struggles through a maze of celebrity cameos, fast-food joints and English-speaking animals while dealing with his anti-establishment attitude and ex-girlfriend related angst.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith
While I personally found this particular remix too akin to fan fiction and not particularly resonant with the original text, Grahame-Smith’s book and the unfortunate number of books it appears to have spawned (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters? Really?) appears to be a hit, for better or for worse.
The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason
It appears I must apologize to classics majors again as I lavish praise upon a book that takes their beloved text, Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey and “adds” storylines we all may have thought about at one point in time while reading the original. Surely, Penelope didn’t wait around all those years without getting a little something on the side? And didn’t Athena totally have a crush on Odysseus? Mason’s vignettes are humorous without being campy and allow us yet another way of thinking of this seemingly bottomless text.
This was originally published in The Current, a weekly supplement to The Daily Northwestern.
