Author: Martin Amis

http://www.amazon.com/Times-Arrow-Martin-Amis/dp/0679735720/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236030232&sr=8-1

Published by Vintage International

I am continually fascinated by the concept of time. A friend once told me, “Time is a human invention to orient ourselves in the world.” What aspect of time, if any, is tangible? Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow unhinges the very base of reasoning and existence to capture memory, life, and the human condition from a pleasingly bizarre and unsettling angle, and opposite direction. By reversing life, he questions and explains it.

The novel begins with the end of a sad story. Doctor Tod T. Friendly lies in a cold, unfriendly medical bed, pondering the reality of his impending death. In odd suddenment his paralysis begins to reverse itself. He leaves the hospital and experiences his life backwards, undoing everything that has been done.

A duality is formed early on in Tod Friendly; he consciously realizes himself in two parts. There is the unquestionable self, making decisions that are difficult, and the narrator, who questions the bizarre sensibility of his actions.

The remarkable quality of Amis’ writing is the way he unravels the very fabric of happenings. When the doctor moves out of his fancy apartment to a much more quaint rural home, he misses the company of his last wife and struggles with getting to know her less. The comfortability of their love is unfamiliarized as they fall back out of love and touch. Conversations and arguments are played out entirely backwards line by line, so the reader can extract primary meaning and then read it from finish to start for contextual value. When he operates on victims, he packs in tumors, undoes deep stitches, creates hemorrhages, and mangles. He watches his flowers and vegetables shrink away to nothing, and recede back into the earth. He plucks the seeds from the ground, inserts them into paper bags, and reluctantly delivers them back to garden stores. Most impressively, the world becomes more innocent: “Clothes everywhere become more innocent. Everyone becomes more innocent, constantly forgetting. Central Park is cleaner but no safer. We are fewer.”

The apex of provocative thought is when the doctor changes his name and moves to Auschwitz, uncovering a mysterious part of himself that he was extremely nervous about exposing. He experiences the Holocaust backwards, and as genocide is undone, a new race is born. As innocence is restored to the narrator, so in turn is it granted to the world. The Holocaust is peculiarly and outstandingly painted for the reader as a complete reversal of humanity.

The beauty is in the minute unraveling of details, the undoing of small events in backwards arguments. It’s a short and easy read, a tale refreshingly told in only 165 pages. The flow is sinuous and progressive, simultaneously dreamlike and wide awake. A must-read for astronomers, thrift-store-shoppers, mathematicians, and liberal arts students.