A Time Outside This Time - Hardcover

Kumar, Amitava

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059331901X ISBN 13: 9780593319017

Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

A blistering novel about a writer’s creative response to the daily onslaught of fake news, memory, and the ways in which truth gives over to fiction
 
“An absorbing portrait of an inspired artist in the midst of our maddening cultural moment” —Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies

When Satya, a professor and author, attends a prestigious artists' retreat to write, he finds the pressures of the outside world won’t let up: the president rages online; a dangerous virus envelops the globe; and the twenty-four-hour news cycle throws fuel on every fire. For most of the retreat fellows, such stories are unbearable distractions, but for Satya, who sees them play out in both America and his native India, these Orwellian interruptions begin to crystallize into an idea for his new novel, Enemies of the People, about the lies we tell ourselves and one another. Satya scours his life for instances in which truth bends toward the imagined and misinformation is mistaken as fact.
 
Mixing Satya’s experiences—as a father, husband, and American immigrant—with newspaper clippings, the president’s tweets, and observations on famous works of art, A Time Outside This Time captures a feverish political moment with intelligence, beauty, and an eye for the uncanny. It is a brilliant interrogation on life in a post-truth era and an attempt to imagine a time outside this one.
 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

AMITAVA KUMAR is a writer and journalist. He was born in Ara, India, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty, and delicious mangoes. Kumar is the author of the novel Immigrant, Montana, as well as several other books of nonfiction and fiction. He lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he is Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College.

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CHAPTER 1

I’M WRITING A NOVEL,
BUT THERE IS THE NEWS

In a little bit, it will be cocktail hour. Our beautiful villa stands on a hill, the sloping ground covered with small olive trees and long lines of tall, angular cypresses; a mansion in the distance is said to be where George and Amal Clooney spend their summers.

I’m on the island for a cushy fellowship, working on a novel. In the week I have been here, this is what I’ve discovered: one sure way to stop visiting fellows and their spouses from talking to me is to answer them truthfully when they ask what it is I’m doing here. I give my answer and see the light die in their eyes. They nod and look elsewhere—the lake, for instance, which looks lovely at all hours, its color changing constantly. I don’t blame anyone. Would you want to talk to someone who says they are studying models of social acceptance? (I’m not lying when I say this; I’m just trying to avoid the seductive language of fiction.) What I mean in this utterance is simply that I’m thinking about who in our communities will accept lies and deception. As in all matters, all my projects seeded in guilt, I find myself culpable. But, on this issue, I have certain others in my sights.

If anyone presses, I tell them that my novel is based on an untrue story. In fact, it is based on the many untrue stories that surround us and threaten to destroy us. Often, our world comes to us as bad fiction. Toni Morrison read The New York Times every day with pen in hand, making corrections she felt necessary, deleting words or inserting them as she went along. I thought I could start with that idea, a novel about reading the news, but the pencil marks would be found everywhere, not only on the newspaper. Scientific experiments, for instance, or a writer’s memoir about writing, and, why not, our relationships and the way we live our everyday life. I’m writing a report from the world of #fakenews.

This evening, while holding my glass of chilled, locally sourced wine, I’d like to be able to tell my interlocutor that the question I’m really asking is this: Who among your neighbors will look the other way when a figure of authority comes to your door and puts a boot in your face?

I wonder what their eyes might do then.

I use what is called real life to craft my fiction. How is it different from fake news? Novelists with a great gift of imagination have invented situations, often quite simple and uncomplicated ones, that you can never rid from your mind: a family undertaking a long, tortuous journey with the corpse of a family member in a coffin to the dead woman’s hometown (William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying); two men on a train, each one wanting to kill someone, propose that they exchange murders and thereby have an alibi (Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train); a woman is on her way to buy flowers for a party she will host that night (Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway); a young man arriving in a city to collect his father’s ashes and going on a drug rampage that sends him into a nightmarish spiral (Edward St. Aubyn, Bad News). I, however, am unable to invent fictional situations, or maybe they don’t interest me that much. Real life, even ordinary life, is what fascinates me, the low road of journalistic observation.

During his last week in office in January 2017, President Barack Obama gave an interview to a book critic from The New York Times. Obama told the interviewer that his daughter Malia had read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and was captivated by the writer describing his goal of writing one true thing every day. (“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”) When I read the interview, Trump had been president for two days, and I think the idea for this book was born then.

I began keeping a daily journal, but instead of writing the truest sentence, I noted down a revealing lie. The U.S. president was lying every day but falsehoods I noted could be from anywhere in the world. Here’s one from my country of birth, India: In the days prior to his retirement from the Rajasthan High Court, Justice Mahesh Chandra Sharma said that the cow should be declared the national animal of India because hundreds of millions of gods and goddesses lived in that sacred animal. The cow is the only creature, the judge opined, that takes in oxygen and also emits oxygen. He also extolled the virtues of cow urine.

The other day a friend posted a few lines from a poem by the radical Hindi poet Gorakh Pandey on Facebook. He was aiming to describe the situation in India under Narendra Modi. I read the extract and that same morning sat down to translate it. In my writing journal, I noted in the margin that this extract could serve as my novel’s epigraph:

King said it is night,

Queen said it is night,

Minister said it is night,

Guard said it is night.

This happened right

This morning!

A book made up entirely of rumors. A compilation of fatal falsehoods. That’s what I first thought of as my raw material.

What is the opposite of a rumor?

A scientific fact, of course.

But once you start thinking of rumors as stories, which they are, it becomes clear that accounts offered by scientists about their experiments are also stories.

One researcher publishes a study showing that chimps will eat food given to them and not necessarily want to share it with other chimps, and therefore we should conclude that we are born selfish; a different researcher finds that chimps will help other chimps open a door even when they themselves cannot see the bananas strategically placed on the far side. Those inclined to engage in further storytelling go on to say something about the presence or absence of altruism across the species.

We are always telling stories. Because we deal only with stories, in literature, in history, or in science, the simple distinction between truth and lies is a naïve one. Any story ought to be surrounded with other questions. Whose story is it? What ends does it serve? Does it affirm or contradict other stories? My point is that we can change the way we consume stories. And, of course, the way we produce them.

But till that happens I want to ask scientists to clarify one thing.

On the BBC show Top Gear, a discussion about driverless cars led to conversation about an experiment that was supposedly about self-preservation. You can watch this episode on YouTube. Jeremy Clarkson, the show’s host, says that scientists conducted “an awful experiment” in which they put monkeys and their babies in a box and heated the floor. When the heat became unbearable, all the monkeys picked up their babies and held them in their arms. But when the floor got hotter, “till it was absolutely unbearable,” the monkeys put the babies down and stood on them.

I have a few questions.

The main one is: Did it really happen, this experiment?

Where and when?

These are perhaps silly questions. But they remind us that there are many ways to respond to a story. And I haven’t yet processed what the uproarious laughter of the studio audience meant when Clarkson was done telling his story about the monkey experiment.

I also want to pose a more important question: Did all the adult monkeys act in unison, picking up or putting down their babies as one body?

Were there those—or, for that matter, just one—that changed their minds?

Or hesitated just a bit, looking at the other monkeys, with bewildered gray-brown eyes? Or, if you allow me to be sentimental for half a second, did an adult monkey after standing on her baby for maybe a minute pick it up to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059331901X
• ISBN 13: 9780593319017
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 243
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar