Description
Based on four lectures Dr Ghosh wrote and delivered in 2015 at the invitation of the Berlin Family Lectures program at the University of Chicago, with the stipulation that a book be published as a nonfiction book by the University of Chicago Press, this book will resonate with all those readers perplexed by the Anthrocene period we find ourselves in and why so few cli-fi novels have yet been published. This answers that question in a way that only Amitav Ghosh could do. It's brilliant, it's stimulating and it's thought-provoking. Dr Ghosh mentions a wide range of climate themed novels and is very aware of the new cli-fi genre. He mentions many books -- cli-fi, science, classics, even Titah Ekti Nadir Naam. But his main target, in terms of literature and climate change, is mainstream literary fiction, which he feels still shies away from grappling with global warming themes and plots. To find out why, and to learn Dr Ghosh's prescription for creating the conditions in mainstream literary circles for more cli-fi novels in India and the West, read this cri de coeur from a prophet of literary possibilities in the future. Novelists can get off their tuches and encompass climate themes head on, if they are encouraged and supported to do so. Amitavji suggests a cure for what ails us. --By A Customer on 12 July 2016Great book in our time. We feel horror to think the probable massive consequences of climate change on the world. He makes us aware to be serious enough in this regard. If we do not prepare ourselves our existence might be ceased to exist. It is a must read for every serious reader. The inimitable style of Ghosh is really captivating. --By Kashinanth Upadhyaya on 22 July 2016I have always enjoyed his writing. His quest to describe the human condition in consonance with the immaterial, the mineral and the 'other' is remarkable. Even more so, when you consider the lucidity of his vision and expression. Our derangement has been captured within this book, and with it the primary fear of his, that the future will look back to us with disdain can be laid to rest. This book will be a beacon of awesome brilliance describing our apathy to our own world, and the crookedness of the path we seem to be sticking to with an unhinged avarice towards a deeply uncertain future. This will be that crumb that will lead them back to the time when there was one who saw through our guise for development and found the folly at its core. Within the context of his work's genealogy and without, this book is, for me, one of the best that i have ever read. --By Smith on 25 August 2016 Amitav Ghosh is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose books include 'The Circle of Reason', 'The Shadow Lines', 'In an Antique Land', 'Dancing in Cambodia', 'The Calcutta Chromosome', 'The Glass Palace', 'The Hungry Tide and the Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies', 'River of Smoke' and 'Flood of Fire'.
Features & Highlights
- Are we deranged? One of India s greatest writers, Amitav Ghosh, argues that future generations may well think so. How else can we explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In this groundbreaking return to non-fiction, Ghosh examines our inability at the level of literature, history and politics to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today s climate events makes them peculiarly resistant to the contemporary imagination. In fiction, hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel and are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications. Ghosh suggests that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit culture and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all forms. The Great Derangement serves as a brilliant writer s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.
