Notes from a Coma - Softcover

McCormack, Mike

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616952326 ISBN 13: 9781616952327

Publisher: Soho Press, 2013

Synopsis

Mike McCormack's new novel Solar Bones is longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.

About Notes from a Coma

JJ O’ Malley, adopted from a Romanian orphanage by a single father in the west of Ireland, grows up a permanent outsider, and yet he finds his place in the community. At least until his world is shaken by the death of his best friend, and he volunteers for the “Somnos Project,” an experimental program testing deep coma as a potential option in the EU penal system.
 
In a prison ship docked in Killary Harbour, JJ is hooked up to monitoring devices that feed out to the Internet, and he and his fellow guinea pigs become global celebrities. A beautifully rendered look at small-town Irish life, and a far-reaching investigation of politics, neuroscience, global communications, and the ethics of incarceration, Notes from a Coma is a major work from one of the world’s bravest and most unusual novelists.

About this title

About the Author

Mike McCormack has published a collection of short stories, Getting It In the Head, and a novel, Crowe's Requiem. In 1996, McCormack was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. In 1998, Getting it in the Head was voted a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. A story from the collection, "The Terms," was adapted into an award-winning short film.

Reviews

McCormack’s well-received collection of satirical short stories Getting It In the Head (1998) heralded the arrival of a major talent in Irish fiction. His latest novel, already short-listed for the Irish Book of the Year Award, steps into a parallel dystopian European Union in recounting the fate of a Romanian orphan adopted by an unmarried farmer from county Mayo. Having grown up as an outsider in a rural Irish community as JJ O’Malley, his life is punctuated by a series of misfortunes culminating in his becoming an unwitting volunteer in an eerie experiment hatched by the EU’s penal system. Instead of putting prisoners behind bars, the Somnos Project keeps them perpetually sedated in a virtual coma, hooked up to life support. As the world monitors their brainwave patterns on the Internet, JJ is annointed as a media darling. Using multiple narrators and continuous footnotes that present a documentary-style view of the skewed society he depicts, McCormack slyly and brilliantly satirizes, among many other things, our fixations with celebrity and high-priced medical technology. --Carl Hays

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Rescued from the squalor of a Romanian orphanage, and adopted by the rural community of west Mayo, J. J. O'Malley should have grown up happy. The boy has no gift for it, though, and his new life has a brutal way of giving him plenty to be unhappy about. After a sudden tragedy, J. J. suffers a catastrophic mental breakdown. Unable to live with himself, he volunteers for an improbable government project which has been set up to explore the possibility of using deep coma as a future option within the EU penal system. When his coma goes online the nation turns to watch, and J. J. is quickly elevated to the status of cultural icon. Sex symbol, existential hero, T-shirt philosopher─his public profile now threatens to obscure the man himself behind a swirl of media profiles, online polls, and EEG tracings.
 
Five narrators─his father, neighbour, teacher, public representative, and sweetheart─tell us the true story of his life and try to give some clue as to why he is the way he is now: floating in a maintained coma on a prison ship off the west coast of Ireland. Brilliantly imagined and artfully constructed─merging science fiction with an affectionate portrait of small town Ireland─Notes from a Coma is both the story of a man cursed with guilt and genius and a compassionate examination of how our identities are safeguarded and held in trust by those who love us.

Edition details

• Publisher: Soho Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1616952326
• ISBN 13: 9781616952327
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208