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An Italian traveling to Naples has his ship commandeered by an Ottoman fleet and is taken as a slave. Incidental medical knowledge and some simply treated injuries lets him pass as a doctor, and he works his way into becoming a pasha’s favorite. His pleas for freedom are ignored, but he gets handed off as the personal slave of a man with whom he will work on important projects. The Italian finds his new master to be his double, but no one else seems to recognize the similarity. Their success at various projects brings them to the sultan’s attention, although the Italian’s refusal to renounce his Christianity means he remains in the background while his double gets the attention.

The tale seems commonplace; it begins with a note about a manuscript found in a box of forgotten documents. Pamuk turns the tale into an extended meditation on story telling and identity. At first the problem is physical, an apparently unremarkable resemblance. Eventually the pair exchange stories, orally and in writing, and the problem becomes deeper: is who you are what you do, or can you think your way to an identity? Pamuk has an answer, and loads the tale towards his preference, but then complicates matters by questioning the possibility of identify at all.

A never-named man receives grace from the sky. Well, actually, he receives severe head trauma from the sky; grace comes later in the form of £8.5 million from the guilty party. Between those two events he relearns many of the things knocked out of his head, such as how to walk and eat. Remainder shows how and what happens when he tries to recover the things physical therapy left out.

At first he's at sea, in possession of an unfamiliar persona and an unfathomable amount of money with no idea of his next step. The poles of his choices are sketched by two friends at an impromptu celebration of his recovery and good fortune; one friend suggests an unlimited debauch of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, the other suggests African philanthropy. He, however, makes a third choice. At another party he finds a crack in the bathroom wall. From that crack the rest of the story grows. It also establishes a more conventional part of the story: he's in a locked bathroom at a party, contemplating the crack, sketching it, trying to place it in his mind while ignoring the banging and pleas from the other side of the door.

McCarthy's writing is regular and orderly so that the story can be original and, at the end, violent. One of McCarthy's skills is keeping the reader from dwelling too long on the thought: he's acting like one of those malevolent seven-year-old boys in a Twilight Zone episode. But the mind still wants purchase on the story, so it scrambles off in other directions, perhaps to experimental novelists like Robert Coover or Peter Handke (knowing the story isn't necessary, the title will do: The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick), or maybe to Nicholson Baker's early novels, except Remainder is more fraught, and more solidly embedded in a literal metaphysics.

For extra fun after reading Remainder, watch the movie trailer. It's an excellent example of a movie, at least as represented by the trailer, completely misinterpreting a book even though McCarthy was involved with both. The movie also seems to be on YouTube.