Satin Island is very much about the infinite regress of being a writer. U is meant to write the book which he can’t do and so he writes all this meandering stuff which is what you end up reading, and that’s kind of what I was doing too. I like to think there’s some kind of ideal book that should have been written and never will be, and this isn’t it. U describes the book at one point as the off-cuts of the real book, this beautiful report, that he should have written. You get this a lot in Thomas Bernhard’s novels. The narrator sits down to write the definitive book on Mendelssohn or Mozart and spends the whole book not doing that but instead getting his windows cleaned, or changing his study, or visiting a neighbour.

Tom McCarthy: »Tom McCarthy Writing the Existential Crisis«, in: 52 Insights, 21. Juli 2016.