Thursday, September 7, 2017

Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis

    Time's Arrow is a total mindfuck. It felt like a gimmick at first. A story told in reverse, from the perspective of someone's conscience trapped inside the head of a man living his life backwards. A trick to gather interest rather than substance, right? Wrong. As I kept reading, I got the sense that there was something more to this reverse time business. Eerily, I began to realize that actions seen in reverse that are considered bad by us would be perceived as "good" by them. And vice versa for good actions looking like bad ones. The narrator has no idea that Auschwitz was a diabolical operation. Instead, he sees it as the very opposite, of "angels being brought down from heaven"; the Jews, God's chosen people, liberated from death by the gas chambers. I'm not sure I'll recover from this existential crisis! 

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