C (2010)

The protagonist of Tom McCarthy's experimental new work is named Serge, which is appropriate for a book so crackling with all things electric. Serge's life — and his obsessions with telegraphy and Morse code — reads like W. Somerset Maugham tweaked to a frenetic and distorted frequency. C is also a novel about connections. Not just telegraphic transmissions, but the broader, inarticulable linkages between these electric flows and everything from insect colonies and bloodstreams to the vast flux of human civilization. A–

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