On Time and Water
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Eco-lit needs more attention, and devotees will be pleased to discover a new addition from the Icelandic author Andri Snaer Magnason, who writes with a Seussian mix of wonder, wit and gravitas ... immensely satisfying.”—New York Times
Longlisted for the 2022 National Translation Award • Finalist for the 2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize • A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021
Asked by a leading climate scientist why he wasn’t writing about the greatest crisis mankind has faced, Andri Snær Magnason, one of Iceland’s most beloved writers and public intellectuals, protested: he wasn’t a specialist, he said. It wasn’t his field. But the scientist persisted: “If you cannot understand our scientific findings and present them in an emotional, psychological, poetic or mythological context,” he told him, “then no one will really understand the issue, and the world will end.”
Based on interviews and advice from leading glacial, ocean, climate, and geographical scientists, and interwoven with personal, historical, and mythological stories, Magnason’s resulting response is a rich and compelling work of narrative nonfiction that illustrates the reality of climate change and offers hope in the face of an uncertain future. Moving from reflections on how one writes an obituary for a glacier to exhortation for a heightened understanding of human time and our obligations to one another, throughout history and across the globe, On Time and Water is both deeply personal and globally minded: a travel story, a world history, a desperate plea to live in harmony with future generations—and is unlike anything that has yet been published on the current climate emergency.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Icelandic writer Magnason (Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation) provides a literary look at the threat of climate change in this moving account. The only way to capture a problem as large as climate change in language, Magnason writes, "is to go past it, to the side, below it, into the past and the future, to be personal and also scientific and to use mythological language." Magnason focuses on water, as glaciers melt and ocean levels rise, and argues against numbers-heavy explanations (messages relying on the pH scale, for instance, fail to "incite fear" about ocean acidification). His quest to understand how best to communicate the crisis includes two conversations with the Dalai Lama, whose resilience he finds inspirational. Magnason also finds hope in his uncle, whose career preserving crocodile populations proves to the author that one person can meaningfully "nudge" the world. A postscript ends inconclusively, with Magnason wondering what will be learned from "how global inaction caused immense suffering during the COVID crisis." Still, Magnason's empathetic rendering of changes that "surpass most of the language and metaphors we use to navigate our reality" makes an impact. Climate-concerned readers will find much to consider.
