I read this for ATY 2019 topic 18: A book related to one of the elements on the periodic table of elements. Here's the GR synopsis: Opening in England at the turn of the twentieth century, C is the story of a boy named Serge Carrefax, whose father spends his time experimenting with wireless communication while running a school for deaf children. Serge grows up amid the noise and silence with his brilliant but troubled older sister, Sophie: an intense sibling relationship that stays with him as he heads off into an equally troubled larger world.
After a fling with a nurse at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator for reconnaissance planes. When his plane is shot down, Serge is taken to a German prison camp, from which he escapes. Back in London, he’s recruited for a mission to Cairo on behalf of the shadowy Empire Wireless Chain. All of which eventually carries Serge to a fitful — and perhaps fateful — climax at the bottom of an Egyptian tomb ...
C was nominated for the 2010 Booker Prize but I'm afraid that I can't, for the life of me, understand why. It's rather like reading an incomplete mathematical or logical puzzle - intellectually clever, but not very satisfying. It was in short, a hard slog, and despite Zadie Smith hailing McCarthy's earlier novel, Remainder, as 'one of the great English novels of the past ten years', I am not tempted to read anything more by this author.
Opening in England at the turn of the twentieth century, C is the story of a boy named Serge Carrefax, whose father spends his time experimenting with wireless communication while running a school for deaf children. Serge grows up amid the noise and silence with his brilliant but troubled older sister, Sophie: an intense sibling relationship that stays with him as he heads off into an equally troubled larger world.
After a fling with a nurse at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator for reconnaissance planes. When his plane is shot down, Serge is taken to a German prison camp, from which he escapes. Back in London, he’s recruited for a mission to Cairo on behalf of the shadowy Empire Wireless Chain. All of which eventually carries Serge to a fitful — and perhaps fateful — climax at the bottom of an Egyptian tomb ...
C was nominated for the 2010 Booker Prize but I'm afraid that I can't, for the life of me, understand why. It's rather like reading an incomplete mathematical or logical puzzle - intellectually clever, but not very satisfying. It was in short, a hard slog, and despite Zadie Smith hailing McCarthy's earlier novel, Remainder, as 'one of the great English novels of the past ten years', I am not tempted to read anything more by this author.