Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so.
His book serves as a Great writer\'s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time..
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 cultural forms.
But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a Great cost.
Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action.
In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications
Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.
This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres.
The extreme nature of today\'s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining.
How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability--at the level of literature, history, and politics--to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so
