The Great Derangement: Climate Change And The Unthinkable

Product Description

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so 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 & politics--to grasp the scale & violence of climate change The extreme nature of today's climate events Ghosh asserts make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking & imagining This is particularly true of serious literary fiction hundred-year storms & freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres 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 & counterintuitive elements Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics much like literature has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action But to limit fiction & politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost 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 His book serves as a great writer's summons to confront the most urgent task of our time