Martin Amis
Paperback | Pages: 165 pages Rating: 3.71 | 14255 Users | 1042 Reviews
Identify Books During 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) |
Commentary Supposing 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.Define Containing Books Time's Arrow
| Title | : | Time's Arrow |
| Author | : | Martin Amis |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 165 pages |
| Published | : | October 1992 by Vintage (first published September 26th 1991) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. Novels. Literature |
Rating Containing Books Time's Arrow
Ratings: 3.71 From 14255 Users | 1042 ReviewsPiece Containing Books Time's Arrow
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 workI can't say enough about this novel, though a quick glance at my friends' reviews reveals that they liked it but were not quite as blown away by it. I loved how Amis took a conceit (running the world backwards and witnessing it from a naive viewpoint that must make sense of backwards-living) and used it to make new something that had grown shopworn and overfamiliar: Literature about the Holocaust. The novel is howlingly funny, and just when you want it to gain in seriousness and gravity, it
"An old lady descends from the black branches of the fire escape every morning and wearily gathers it all up and clambers home with it in paper bags: the food left for her by the birds."Before I say what I think about this novel, I should acknowledge that this idea of traveling backwards in time is not one that comes from Amis. Several people have accused him of stealing it from Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five, in fact Amis himself acknowledges that inspiration in his afterward. A few years
When people move-- when they travel --they look where they've come from, not where they're going. Is this what the human beings always do? I have apparently read Martin Amis before. My goodreads review tells me I read his Money in 2016, but I had to read through my comments again to remember a single thing about it. I'm giving Time's Arrow a similarly middling rating, though I think this one will stay with me longer, if for no other reason than it required a decent amount of thought and effort
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
English Standard Version (©2001)For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.What is it with them, the human beings? I suppose they remember what they want to remember.-Times Arrow This is what I want to remember: that I bought this off a wheeled cart for two quarters. That in a bad economy, this was a great investment. Amis is genius in this book. Pure genius. His structure starts with the last rattling
"Time's Arrow" is a very fine and powerful novel by Amis who, for me, had a tough encore after reading his genius novel, "Money," of which stratospheric literary level "Time's Arrow" falls a smidge short. However, "Time's Arrow" is very well conceived, highly inventive, lyrically narrated and powerful in its dire themes ultimately relating to one man's poignant personal relationship to the Holocaust. Amis deploys with great skill the narrative device of telling one man's story backward in a
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