The Future Future
A Novel
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Short-listed for the Goldsmiths Prize
Finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
A wild story of female friendship, language, and power, from France to colonial America to the moon, from 1775 to this very moment: a historical novel like no other.
It’s the eighteenth century, and Celine is in trouble. Her husband is mostly absent. Her parents are elsewhere. And meanwhile men are inventing stories about her—about her affairs, her sexuality, her orgies and addictions. All these stories are lies, but the public loves them and spreads them like a virus. Celine can only watch as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten in society.
This is a world of decadence and saturation, of lavish parties and private salons, of tulle and satin and sex and violence. It’s also one ruled by men—high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, crimes against women, and, above all, language. To survive, Celine and her friends must band together in search of justice, truth, and beauty.
Fantastical, funny, and blindingly bright, Adam Thirlwell’s The Future Future follows one woman on an urgently contemporary quest to clear her name and change the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thirlwell (Lurid & Cute) delivers an enigmatic novel of ideas set largely in revolutionary France with excursions into the future. After Celine, 19, is maligned in a series of pornographic pamphlets, she reinvents herself by founding a literary salon. The pages that follow trace Celine's travels through the decades, across the Atlantic to the nascent United States, and even, for one particularly disorienting interlude, to the moon in the year 2251. This is only the most obvious form of time travel Thirlwell's narrative employs, however; throughout, the use of anachronistic language (Celine's husband is a "fascist" and her clothing is "punk"; the narrator compares education to taking over a "disused gas station") creates the sensation of being unmoored from time. The narrative voice is reserved and analytical, at odds with the whimsy of the linguistic choices. The almost sterile tone, combined with the characters' repeated musings about what, exactly, the point is, may have readers echoing such sentiments. Thirlwell offers moments of insight, particularly when touching on the persistence of misogyny throughout history and the intersections of gender and language, but these are obscured by a narrative that feels both aimless and almost deliberately opaque. This strange outing provokes and frustrates in equal measure.
