An unnamed man suffers a significant injury when something falls on his head. The exact nature of the accident is unclear. The terms of the compensation settlement do not allow the victim to talk about it, but they do make him wealthy. The man then describes his recovery, the relearning of skills that most people take for granted. Something like picking up a carrot demands forensic attention to the movements involved. The man becomes obsessed with details, spending his settlement wealth in staging precise re-enactments of arbitrary events in his life.

This is an odd book, but it does a good job in showing how much oddness hides in behaviours accepted as normal. Obsessive re-enactments might seem creepy, but they are not so different to practising the movements of a sport over and over until they become smooth and automatic. There is a contradiction here – you rehearse movements repeatedly, really think, and focus on each constituent part, with the aim of making those parts flow together, unthinking, unconscious, and natural.

You could also compare the man’s re-enactment rituals with the experience of reading a novel. Do you read a novel to think about its nuances, or to relax and have a break from thinking? People do both, often with the same books.

Remainder takes such contradictions to extremes, engaging with details so precisely that they stop meaning anything. Things reduced to their essentials are kind of value free – like the maths of curves, just a lot of numbers, the same numbers, however, guiding missiles as they curve to their target.

I asked myself whether Remainder wants its reader to think, or to have a break from thinking. Mainly the former I would say. It’s fairly hard work. I can see why author Tom McCarthy had trouble finding a publisher back in 2005. But there is also a fascinating hypnotic quality that carries you along. This is a very interesting read, which might get you thinking, at the same time as sending you into a bit of a fever dream