The Making of Incarnation, Tom McCarthy
The Making of Incarnation, Tom McCarthy
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The Making of Incarnation
A novel

Author: Tom McCarthy

Narrator: Ben Onwukwe

Unabridged: 15 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/02/2021


Synopsis

From the author of Remainder, and two novels short-listed for the Booker Prize, C, and Satin Island, a widescreen odyssey through the medical labs, computer graphics studios, military research centers, and other dark zones where the frontiers of potential—to cure, kill, understand or entertain—are constantly tested and refined.

Bodies in motion. Birds, bees and bobsleighs. What is the force that moves the sun and other stars? Where’s our fucking airplane? What’s inside Box 808, and why does everybody want it?

Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Famous for producing solid light-tracks that captured the path of workers’ movements, Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data. But did she also, as her broken correspondence with a young Soviet physicist suggests, discover in her final days a “perfect” movement, one that would “change everything”?
 
An international hunt begins for the one box missing from her records, and we follow contemporary motion-capture consultant Mark Phocan, as well as his collaborators and shadowy antagonists, across geopolitical fault lines and through strata of personal and collective history. Meanwhile, work is under way on the blockbuster movie Incarnation, an epic space tragedy.
 
As McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil, of technological modernity to reveal the underlying symbolic structures of human experience, The Making of Incarnation weaves a set of stories one inside the other, rings within rings, a perpetual motion machine.
 

About The Author

TOM MCCARTHY's work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theater, and radio. His novel, C, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Walter Scott Prize, and the European Literature Prize; his fourth, Satin Island, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize by Yale University. McCarthy is also the author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, and Jellyfish. He lives in Berlin. 


Reviews

Goodreads review by Mark on October 08, 2021

I always enjoy Tom McCarthy's writing, but he can be so frustrating at times. The Making of Incarnation -- much like C and Satin Island -- seemed always on the tip of revelation; on touching, through small moments of human experience, a sense of something so large and all encompassing that it might......more

Goodreads review by Paul on October 16, 2021

I always find Tom Mccarthy's books interesting if not a little frustrating at times. This one has a science fiction plot embedded within it that although wittily described didn't seem to be directly related to the main plot. Once again McCarthy is concerned (as he was in Remainder) with simulations a......more

Goodreads review by Ian on January 16, 2022

What is it about Tom McCarthy novels that just wallop you with finely tuned, smart and wildly satisfying prose but then as they approach the realm of greatness they linger at the precipice never to reach their full culmination? It's an experience I've had now with the three novels of his I've read.......more

Goodreads review by Marc on October 15, 2021

Video review [URL not allowed]......more

Goodreads review by Marc on May 23, 2022

Tom McCarthy continues to be my favorite author that I would never recommend to anyone. His first new novel in six years keeps up his streak of producing stories that are light on most of the elements you'd expect to find in something labeled as fiction, including plot, characters, character develop......more