The Threshold and the Ledger - by Tom McCarthy (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A timely exploration of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann by Booker-shortlisted author Tom McCarthy.

Since her untimely death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth century's most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms -- the eponymous threshold and ledger -- and takes off on a line of flight: through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare.

Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit- or boundary- state? A condition of ecstasy or ec-stasis, standing outside of oneself? With identity ruptured and surpassed, how and by whom might such experience be recorded?

Appearing on the eve of Bachmann's centenary year, McCarthy's book argues for the centrality of her vision to the very act of literature itself.

Review Quotes

"Compact yet thought provoking...To read Bachmann with McCarthy is to remain at the threshold, to refuse both sentimental identification and bureaucratic closure. ... [The Threshold and the Ledger] does not claim to unlock Bachmann. It does something more rewarding: it dwells with her, on the threshold, notebook open, attentive." --Ian Ellison, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Tom McCarthy supplies the kind of robust, free-ranging reading that [Bachmann] deserves... 'a slow unpacking' of two images in a poem, the threshold and the ledger, that still speak volumes, and that we still desperately need to understand." --Nic Cavell, Rain Taxi

"This is a daringly ambitious book that moves from plot summary and linguistic analysis to a panoramic view of the intersection between philosophy and literature. And yet, although the book is overflowing with new ideas and connections, ten on some pages, it isn't a difficult book to read. I read it in one sitting. It has the depth of Beckett's short book on Proust, Roland Barthes's S/Z, and Sartre's essay on literature. With them, McCarthy's book is a foundation text on what literature is and what it might become. It is an antidote to smug insularity and Little Englandism." -- Richard Clegg, Bookmunch

"McCarthy has crafted a crackling literary investigation that will captivate with its close readings...Readers will not only marvel at how the author reads but also at his ability to articulate that experience into something both erudite and accessible."--Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre, and radio. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award; his third, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. McCarthy has held Visiting Professorships at the Royal College of Art London, Columbia University New York and Städelschule Frankfurt. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen, and lives in Berlin.