A Time Outside This Time
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- ¥2,200
発行者による作品情報
From the acclaimed author of Immigrant, Montana, a one-of-a-kind novel about fake news, memory, and the ways in which truth can be not only stranger than fiction, but a fiction of its own.
When a writer named Satya attends a prestigious artist retreat, he finds the pressures of the outside world won't let up: President Trump rages online; a dangerous virus envelopes the globe; and the 24-hour news cycle throws fuel on every fire. For most of the retreat fellows, such stories are unbearable distractions; but for Satya, these Orwellian interruptions begin to crystalize into an idea for his new novel, Enemies of the People, about the lies we tell ourselves and each other. Satya scours his life for moments where truth bends toward the imagined, and misinformation is mistaken as fact.
Sifting through newspaper clippings, the President's tweets, childhood memories from India, and moments as an immigrant, a husband, father, and teacher, A Time Outside This Time captures our feverish political moment with intelligence, beauty, and an eye for the uncanny. It is a brilliant meditation on life in a post-truth era. In the midst of the global pandemic, stretching on indefinitely, this piercing novel flawlessly captures the sentiment on everyone's mind of how impossible it can feel to remember, or to imagine, a time outside of this one.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kumar (Immigrant, Montana) delivers a mostly engaging polemic about the role of fiction in a post-truth world. As Indian American novelist-journalist Satya works on a novel about fake news at a residency on an Italian island in early 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic (along with feverish rumors and fabrications) begins to spread across the globe. The novel will be about "models of social acceptance," as Satya drily narrates. Satya turns to obvious sources for guidance and material: George Orwell's 1984 and Donald Trump's tweets. While still on the island and later at home with his family in Maryland, he records boyhood memories from India, muses on the slippery relationship between journalist and subject, compiles news clippings, tells the story of a police raid on an Indian guerilla leader, reflects on police brutality and mob violence, and writes flash fictions. Scattered throughout are engaging summaries of psychological experiments—of varying validity—which are supplied to him by his wife, Vaani, a psychologist studying alpha male rhesus macaques. There are some moments of grandiosity ("What can one write to save a life?"), but it sizzles when it gets to Satya's attempts to deploy, or resist, the "seductive language" and "hectic plots" of fiction amid pervasive mistruths. Overall, this experiment pays off.
