Time's Arrow

by Martin Amis

Overview

In Time's Arrow the doctor Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home. And all the while Tod's life races backward toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense.

"The narrative moves with irresistible momentum.... [Amis is] a daring, exacting writer willing to defy the odds in pursuit of his art."—Newsday

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307777775
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/06/2011
Series:	Vintage International
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	100,243
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

MARTIN AMIS is the author of 15 novels—among them Zone of Interest, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information, and Night Train—along with the memoir Experience, the novelized self-portrait Inside Story, two collections of stories, and seven nonfiction books. He died in 2023.

Hometown:

Oxford, England

Date of Birth:

August 25, 1949

Place of Birth:

Oxford, England

Education:

B.A., Exeter College, Oxford

Editorial Reviews

. . .an inverted time scheme has been used before. . . .But whereas [other] stories moved from the disillusionment of time present back to the idealism and hopefulness of time pastMr. Amis' story moves from phony innocence to a past of unrelieved horror. . . .it's a risky narrative strategy. . . the top-heavy jokey part of the book overshadows its somber conclusionblunting its larger moral ambitions. —The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

Splendid . . . bold . . . gripping from start to finish.

Los Angeles Times

For decades, writers have been striving to comprehend the Holocaust, and while its horror remains indelible, readers may wonder if there is another way of going over this relentlessly examined ground. In this swift, incisive little book, Amis succeeds in rendering the shock of the Holocaust wholly new by traveling backward in time. At the end of his life, the German-born American doctor Tod T. Friendly suffers a paralysis from which emerges ``the soul he should have had.'' This innocent soul follows ``time's arrow'' back through Tod's stay in America and his flight to Germany, finally arriving at the concentration camp where Friendly, as Odilo Unverdorben, served as a doctor of death. Trying to discover ``when the world is going to make sense,'' the confused if patient soul watches as the doctor injures the healed, revives Jews who have been gassed, and grows closer to his estranged wife. It concludes, ``We all know by now that violence creates, here on earth . . . it heals and mends.'' Amis's device, which at first seems merely a clever conceit, is handled so skillfully that living backwards becomes not only natural but a perfect metaphor for the Nazis' perverted logic. If he can't finally probe to the bottom of a mind that embraces atrocities, Amis has nevertheless written a thought-provoking, compelling book. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/91.--Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal''

Library Journal

. . .an inverted time scheme has been used before. . . .But whereas [other] stories moved from the disillusionment of time present back to the idealism and hopefulness of time past, Mr. Amis' story moves from phony innocence to a past of unrelieved horror. . . .it's a risky narrative strategy. . . the top-heavy jokey part of the book overshadows its somber conclusion, blunting its larger moral ambitions. -- The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

"[A] novel that seems to have been written with the term 'tour de force' in mind. . . . A brilliant job." —Village Voice Literary Supplement

"A breakthrough . . . etched with acid irony and trickery . . . To submit to [Amis's] comic tweaking and tickling is to abet the inevitable logic of his assault on our senses. . . .  Time's Arrow, his tautest and sleekest novel yet, is also his most wide-angled and farsighted. . . . A hard look at our dark age through glittering alien eyes." —Boston Phoenix Literary Section

"A brilliantly imaginative feat." —Mirabella

"Audacious, utterly poised and almost moving . . . the book's devastatingly sustained black irony stands comparison with Swift's A Modest Proposal. It is . . . Amis's finest achievement to date." —Financial Times

"Amis can write prose that is spikily, nervously elegant, full of urgency and surprise." —New York

"Prodigious cleverness. . . . A clever book." —Vogue

"Extraordinary—Ironic inversion is essentially a comic device, but its trickery here yields results that are rigorously grave." ―Independent on Sunday

"An icy, hard read - Amis is at his intriguing, powerful and heedful best." —Time Out

"Amis's most daring and ambitious novel." ―Daily Telegraph

From the Publisher