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marc129 's review for:
Time's Arrow: or, The Nature of the Offence
by Martin Amis
Well, what can be said about this short but intense novel that hasn’t already been said? It’s an obvious statement that it’s a strange reading experience. Already at page 3 the author describes the confusion that grips the narrator (“Wait a minute. Why am I walking backward into the house? What is the – what is the sequence of this journey I’m on? What are its rules? Why are the birds singing so strangely? Where am I heading?”), and that perfectly illustrates the confusion that the reader experiences. When you start reading the book, you know that it tells the story of a life in reverse order, but to experience it sentence by sentence, page by page as a reader is another matter.
I don’t know about you, but I experienced quite a few mood swings: I found Amis’s procedure quite nice and ingenious at first, and enjoyed the constant game of deciphering (by reversing the order) what Amis described. But after a while this continuous effort started to bother me and I even found it banal, edging boring. Until I realized that what was described was anything but banal: the main character is a German Nazi doctor, Odilo Unverdorben, - the name alone – who was active in the Holocaust industry and was able to escape to America afterwards (I am now telling it in the ‘wrong/right’ order). Indeed, anything but banal, which is why you often only realize after a while how horrible what you have just read is, while just before you were smiling at the irony of what Amis describes (Jews walking out healthy and well after ‘treatment’ in the gas chamber, for example). If anything meets the definition of the word ‘mindfuck’ (pardon my French), then this is it.
But is this a successful book? I dare not answer that with an unequivocal yes or no. Ingenious and sometimes downright hilarious, certainly. But also excessively intense, and therefore at times even long-winded. If you are into meta-layers, then you have to give Amis credit for beautifully showing how constructed storytelling in general is, or how treacherous it is to simply describe actions, separated from their meaning. Or: how the eternal ethical-philosophical theme of free will is very much tied to the direction of time, and therefore loses its meaning when that direction is changed (or simply reversed). Well done, Mr. Amis. However, I cannot say that I enjoyed reading this book very much: it was hard work, sometimes got on my nerves, and the existential relevance (which is always important to me) seemed far-fetched. Finally: this is an experimental novel par excellence. But I do wonder whether Amis, following J.L. Borges a bit, would not have been better off limiting himself to a novella?
I don’t know about you, but I experienced quite a few mood swings: I found Amis’s procedure quite nice and ingenious at first, and enjoyed the constant game of deciphering (by reversing the order) what Amis described. But after a while this continuous effort started to bother me and I even found it banal, edging boring. Until I realized that what was described was anything but banal: the main character is a German Nazi doctor, Odilo Unverdorben, - the name alone – who was active in the Holocaust industry and was able to escape to America afterwards (I am now telling it in the ‘wrong/right’ order). Indeed, anything but banal, which is why you often only realize after a while how horrible what you have just read is, while just before you were smiling at the irony of what Amis describes (Jews walking out healthy and well after ‘treatment’ in the gas chamber, for example). If anything meets the definition of the word ‘mindfuck’ (pardon my French), then this is it.
But is this a successful book? I dare not answer that with an unequivocal yes or no. Ingenious and sometimes downright hilarious, certainly. But also excessively intense, and therefore at times even long-winded. If you are into meta-layers, then you have to give Amis credit for beautifully showing how constructed storytelling in general is, or how treacherous it is to simply describe actions, separated from their meaning. Or: how the eternal ethical-philosophical theme of free will is very much tied to the direction of time, and therefore loses its meaning when that direction is changed (or simply reversed). Well done, Mr. Amis. However, I cannot say that I enjoyed reading this book very much: it was hard work, sometimes got on my nerves, and the existential relevance (which is always important to me) seemed far-fetched. Finally: this is an experimental novel par excellence. But I do wonder whether Amis, following J.L. Borges a bit, would not have been better off limiting himself to a novella?