Dec 3, 2014

SATIN ISLAND - Tom McCarthy

The challenge with this cover was to create a contrast against the monochrome cover of Tom’s last novel, C. The cover for Satin Island features a brightly coloured buffer which sits centrally against a white background. The spinning buffer was a perfect graphic symbol of the novel on which to spill, another recurring theme, thick black oil. To ensure that the oil oozing and dripping into puddles looked authentic, black treacle was poured over a large wooden letter O. The best bits were then transferred to the final visual.

Below Tom McCarthy talks about how this cover represents his book:

“Suzanne Dean has made a wonderful cover for this book. It captures two of its central strands: the goopy, flowing, shape-shifting materiality of oil, which stains snowy coastlines like ink polluting paper; and what I see as the ultimate symbol of contemporary existence: the buffering-sign. That circle that spins on your laptop, and the temporality that it imposes - a time of delay, of waiting, of anxiety, of incompleteness - sums up what it is to be alive today. It’s not even a question of digital technology, although it might manifest itself that way. It’s ultimately a theological situation: we assume that, behind the circle, there are endless streams of data being sent our way, pumped out by servers in Nevada or Uzbekistan or somewhere, like so many angels dancing on the pin-head of our wi-fi connection. And that re-assurance, in turn, gives us a mental place inside the universe, make us feel gathered up and saved. But what if it were just a spinning circle?”

Published in March 2015 by Jonathan Cape

 

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