“leave chris morris alone!”
“What starts out as the ‘hook’ of Time’s Arrow – the conceit that you would have to reverse the flow of time in order to make sense of the atrocities of the Holocaust - develops into something more: a chance for an extended mediation on the journey from innocence to experience, the accumulation of guilt and narrowing of options, and the nature of time and the human condition.Recently books that do not fit the traditional definition of science fiction whose main focus is the re-ordering of time are beginning to become a bit of a genre in its own right on my bookshelf. I recently discovered Ilse Aichinger’s short story the “Mirror Story” (German: “Spiegelgeschichte”) in a compendium of German dual-language shorts. Mirror Story contains a similar reversal of cause and effect that requires us lovers to say farewell before they can meet, and perhaps because of the short story format brings some of the main themes of this conceit into sharper relief. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger used science fiction to explore the way we experience linear time non-linearly within the narratives of our lives. And the list goes on (I’m still not through cataloging my library… perhaps I’ll have to come up with a new genre tag and develop a comprehensive list.)While these are very different books, of widely differing styles, I really find myself enjoying this ‘genre’ and coming back for re-reading. I think there is something inherently fascinating about the forced perspective the flow of time imposes on our experience of reality, and that interiority of fiction makes it the only medium to challenge that perspective. However, I’ll admit that I just came off of a phase of being a bit obsessed with both fiction and non-fiction books about the nature of time, so perhaps later re-reads might change my opinion. Or maybe my fascination is just part of a larger post-Einstein zeitgeist… the Physics section of my bookshelf is groaning under the weight of recently published books speculating on the nature of time and motion, and surely they aren’t publishing all of those books just for me?”
“completely fascinated about it!!it really makes you wish never let it till you read all!!”
