My bookshelf·Index No. 0154

Time’s Arrow

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The book runs backward. It opens with a man dying in America and moves the wrong way down his life, narrated by a consciousness riding inside him that can’t control anything and doesn’t understand what it sees. So doctors take healthy people and injure them. People pull food out of their mouths and put it back on plates. Money comes out of the till. Then the movement reaches Europe and the war, and the reversal turns a death camp into a place where the dead are assembled and given families and sent home. Amis makes you do the translation yourself, which is the entire point.

Time’s Arrow
By Martin Amis. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1992. 176 pages.