Satin Island - Tom McCarthy

In this book cover, there are six subtitles : A Treatise, An Essay, An Report , A Confession, A Manifesto and  A Novel -all crossed out except  A Novel. Reading the books gives the same feeling- its a mixture of all and nothing - a novel. There is repetition. There is interlinking. There is networking.

The protagonist of this story ask the reader to call him as "U", he is a anthropologist , who seeks meaning and connection for everything. He is working for a corporate which makes huge money by selling high concept solutions to businesses around the world. His job is to "unpick the fibre of culture (ours)". He says “Structures of kinship; systems of ­exchange, barter and gift; symbolic operations lurking on the flip side of the habitual and the banal: Identifying these, prizing them out and holding them up, kicking and wriggling, to the light - that’s my racket”. His company is just awarded the Koob-Sassen project. The company is run by Peyman. Peyman asks U to write the Grand Report. He thinks the report "has to be conceived of as in a perpetual state of passage, not arrival-not at, but between.".

“Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe.” 

 But the narrator struggles to prepare the necessary details for the report. He was distracted by various conspiracy theories surrounding parachute deaths, oil spills and his occasional sexual relationship with Madison.The story of Madison also dramatic, arrested and tortured for planning protest against G8 conference. What happened after the raid was told in detail. But U never heard of that incident as Madison says "After that (9/11), all news was blown out of the water: no one was interested in what had gone on in Genoa, or anywhere else." Another important distraction was his friend Petr, who dies of cancer.

“Incomprehensible is no better than banal – it’s just its flip-side.” 

When he decided to start the report he wanted to clean the table first."One day, I’d told myself, I’ll need to clean it properly and thoroughly, transform it into a tabula rasa upon which I might compose a great, momentous work. I’d been right: that day was now. I cleaned it, then I dried it with a tea towel." As he procrastinates, his views on the Great Report too changes.At one point he thinks that the "Great Report" has already been written. Its like a writer stuck up with no idea about the next story since everything is written already Sometimes later, he thought of sabotaging the whole project.

“To the anthropologist, there’s no such thing as a singular episode, a singular phenomenon – only a set of variations on generic ones; the more generic, therefore, the more pure, the closer to an un-variegated or unscrambled archetype.”

The novel takes it name from the dream of the narrator .He dreams of a island which is exact opposite of the great cities "this island was the exact opposite, the inverse — the other place, the feeder, filterer, overflow-manager, the dirty, secreted-away appendix without which the body-proper couldn’t function; yet it seemed, in its very degradation, more weirdly opulent than the capital it served."  The island resembles Staten Island, initially he decided to go there but after reaching the ferry point he decided not to - a typical characteristic feature of the narrator. " To go to Staten Island—actually go there—would have been profoundly meaningless. What would it, in reality, have solved, or resolved? Nothing. What tangible nesting space would I have discovered there, and for what concrete purpose? None. Not to go there was, of course, profoundly meaningless as well. And so I found myself, as I waded back through the relentless stream of people, struggling just to stay in the same place, suspended between two types of meaninglessness. Did I choose the right one? I don’t know."

The writing is tedious but the same time enjoyable. One can read the book in few hours but end up thinking about it for a long time. Each page says something. The observing skills of the author is exquisite . The author did not give you any resolution on the subjects but gives you joy in reading it. Definitely a good book even though confusing at times.