Men in Space
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The first novel by the Booker Prize finalist Tom McCarthy — author of Remainder and C — Men in Space is a clever entrée into the art world, and a look at the bohemian life that was Prague in the 1990s.
Set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of communism, Men in Space follows a cast of dissolute bohemians, political refugees, a football referee, a disorientated police agent and a stranded astronaut as they chase a stolen painting from Sofia to Prague and onward. The painting'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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Recalling Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, but with a stolen painting substituting for sex, McCarthy's early novel, set in 1990s Prague, follows a purloined religious icon as it passes through the lives of Anton, a Bulgarian football referee turned black marketer; Ivan, a Czech abstract artist turned forger; and his British roommate, Nick, an aspiring art critic and artists' model. Additional assorted hangers-on of Dutch, American, and ex-Yugoslav stripes constitute a teeming cross-section of Eastern European life in the wake of the Communist governments' collapse. Observing them all is a nameless police inspector covertly tracking the painting's movements. And above them all is the symbolic specter of a Russian cosmonaut stranded in space. And then there is the mystery behind the painting itself: what does its floating, enigmatic central figure represent? In his novel, much of which was written before his debut, Remainder, and published in the U.K. in 2007, McCarthy (C) raises more questions than he answers and creates more plot elements, including several deaths and double-crosses, than he resolves. But the author, who lived through this tumultuous historical period and wrote this book in Prague, makes tangible the heady rush of freedom; his bone-deep understanding gives this transformative period a visceral charge.
