Time's Arrow
by Martin Amis
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Book Summary Information
Author: Martin AmisEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1992-09-29
ISBN: 0679735720
Number of pages: 176
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Time's Arrow
Book Review: "And I within, who came at the wrong time..."
Summary: 5 Stars
At the moment of Dr Tod T. Friendly's death, a consciousness is born and then witnesses the doctor's entire life - lived backwards. The voice trails the doctor through his early retirement, his last years of work and degenerating relationships, then back through his heyday as a surgeon, his life in New York, various name changes, and then back via ship to postwar Europe. At first nothing seems to make sense for the narrating consciousness: people are talking and walking backwards; relationships begin with tearful meetings and slapped faces and end with coy moments in hospital corridors; mysterious, coded letters emerge from the flames of the fireplace; and the doctor and his colleagues work passionately at making healthy people sick, or wounding them and throwing them into ambulances to be taken back onto the streets. But finally, when we follow the good doctor back to his time at Auschwitz, life begins to make sense at last. There, he and his colleagues are doing something wonderful: they are creating the Jewish race. Pulling smoke and ashes from the sky, assembling the debris into human beings, bringing them to life with gas, letting them work their way into health, then uniting them with family members and sending them off by train to flourish in the towns and cities of Europe... What at first seems like a rather trivial exercise in literary game-playing - the conceit of narrating a life lived backwards - becomes, in fact, the device which enables Amis to deliver one of the most effective and affecting condemnations of the Holocaust without writing a single word against it. By showing it in reverse - by inverting its objectives, its sequence and its consequences - Amis renders the Nazi program in all its grotesque obscenity. The camps are plainly revealed as the sickening inversion, the opposite, of everything good in the world: love, decency, creativity, freedom. Many have noted that these places, these crimes, have an existential meaning beyond politics or shock or pity. They have become symbols of our own inturned nihilism. As Peter Handke has explained, the idea of the camps is so compelling for us because in them the whole of life's demonic undertow has found, at last, its specific image. Amis draws it clearly - he shows us how and why Handke's statement is true, and that makes this bold and striking novel essential reading.
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