Details Books Toward Time's Arrow
| Original Title: | Time’s Arrow |
| ISBN: | 0679735720 (ISBN13: 9780679735724) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Odilo Unverdorben, Reverend Nicholas Kreditor |
| Literary Awards: | Booker Prize Nominee (1991) |
Martin Amis
Paperback | Pages: 165 pages Rating: 3.71 | 14255 Users | 1042 Reviews
Commentary In Favor Of Books Time's Arrow
In his Afterword Amis pays tribute to a paragraph by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five where a character watches a backwards-run film of the American planes scooping up bombs from Dresden and miraculously repairing the ruined city, before the bombs are sent back to a factory where all the dangerous contents of their cylinders are separated into harmless minerals. Amis here uses Vonnegut's ingenious tactic of running everything backwards to investigate the holocaust and the men who carried it out. You might say Amis's narrator suffers from two conditions which regularly afflict casualties of war and perpetrators of unspeakable acts - dissociative amnesia and split personality disorder. The novel begins with an ageing doctor in New York stumbling backwards from a heart attack. The doctor is the host of our bewildered narrator who discovering no inner life in the doctor only has his dreams to provide clues for what's in store for him. The backwards drift of the narrative, ingeniously sustained, provides lots of fabulous comedy. Churchgoers pocketing money from the collection box; garbage crews strewing rubbish all over the city's pristine streets; pigeons spitting out crumbs for a forsaken individual who takes them home and reconstitutes them into slices of bread. It's a novel that keeps your mind very active in attempts to re-evaluate so many casual things we do every day. Sexual relationships seen backwards also provide some laughs together with the odd disarming insight. I would have liked to have read this not knowing we're eventually going to find ourselves in Auschwitz (the publishers chose clumsily to give away this twist in the blurb no doubt for commercial reasons.) Of course, we now know our doctor is going to heal the Jews and reunite them with their families. It sometimes makes for an uncomfortable reading experience being made to laugh at what happened at Auschwitz but what it does do very powerfully is evoke the idealistic insanity greasing the wheels of the chilling efficiency of the Nazi killing machine. Certainly one thing it does is dump a pie in the face of every loony holocaust denier. I recently read The Sense of an Ending which, broadly speaking, was about remorse. Remorse, one might say, is a dead end. The end of the line. The chilling grey day after Judgement day. Martin Amis here shows us the lengths the human brain will go to avoid remorse. 4+ stars.
Present About Books Time's Arrow
| Title | : | Time's Arrow |
| Author | : | Martin Amis |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 165 pages |
| Published | : | October 1992 by Vintage (first published September 26th 1991) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. Novels. Literature |
Rating About Books Time's Arrow
Ratings: 3.71 From 14255 Users | 1042 ReviewsAssessment About Books Time's Arrow
If an author were to narrate my experience reading this novel in reverse, they would depict me getting progressively less and less frustrated with the book, until the very moment I finally put it down.Normally when I sense that a writer is going to pull a stunt with the entire conceit of his or her novel, I end up with a slow disdainful Billy Idol-style grimace developing on my face before thudding against the glass ceiling of disgust and shutting the book for good.Don't do it, Martin. You don't have to dazzle us with a technical feat like this. You're too good for that. And it's called "trying too hard..."Still, Martin must've been kicking around novel ideas when, probably a little buzzed,
It's not often I go into a novel thinking there's a high chance that I'm going to absolutely hate it, only to be completely surprised by just how much I liked it. Well, that's the case with Time's Arrow. I tend to find, although not always, problems with Holocaust fiction, tending to stick to non-fiction, and part of me thought this would turn out to be nothing more than a piece of artsy nonsense. A self-indulgent literary gimmick. And about such a serious topic as well. But it worked for me.The
A frustrating experience. See, I'd had Martin Amis hyped to me as one of the funniest writers of the whole goddamn 20th century; a classmate of mine referred to The Rachel Papers as the funniest book he'd read besides Infinite Jest, and anyone who knows me knows an Infinite Jest comparison is going to pique my interest. Well, Amis' style of humor may have worked for him, and maybe it's different in the Rachel Papers (being Amis' first novel, it's entirely possible), but it didn't really work
I thought this was exceptional. A book that you can read in a day, that challenges the brain into thinking backwards. Throw in the holocaust, suffering and a general bleakness coupled with horror and it's a book worthy of your time. Some people have complained that the words didn't effect them emotionally, but the narrator is the consciousness of a Nazi war criminal raised in pre-war Germany - a dead man in a dead time entering a dead zone. Perhaps there is no emotion, but if there was, it would
Life never really makes a lot of sense at the best of times. All of the philosophical ponderings on the eternal question of 'Why are we here?' haven't been able to come up with anything more convincing than 'Because'. Some people may wave other explanations such as 'The ineffable plan of God', which obviously, being ineffable means that it's not going to cut it as an explanation if it can't be explained then it might as well not exist. Even if it did, which is another eternal question to some
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