For decades Ghosh has been telling us exquisite stories of unlikely human connection across geographical and historical boundaries. In The Great Derangement he goes a step further and sets us amidst the great collectivity of a living and dying planet. This intensely lyrical work from a visionary writer at his best calls for a restitution of the sacredin its most inclusive formso that we can face the climate crisis of our times with our finest remaining resources.”
The exciting and frightening thing about Ghosh’s argument is how he traces the novel’s narrow compass back to popular and influential scientific ideasideas that championed uniform and gradual processes over cataclysms and catastrophes. One big complaint about science that it kills wonderis the same criticism Ghosh levels at the novel: that it bequeaths us ‘a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.’ Lawfulness in biology is rather like realism in fiction: it is a convention so useful that we forget that it is a convention. But, if anthropogenic climate change and the gathering sixth mass extinction event have taught us anything, it is that the world is wilder than the laws we are used to would predict. Indeed, if the world really were in a novelor even in a book of popular scienceno one would believe it.”
In this elegant book, Ghosh explains how literary fiction came to avoid depicting the uncanny, the nonhuman, the improbable, and the aggregate. His exploration of the relationship between British imperialism and Asia’s carbon economy shows that our constructions of history are as deranged as our literature. In short, we are in denial. . . . Ghosh finds hope in art’s tendency to envision possibilities, as well as in the activism of religious communities.”
Ghosh’s latest book, The Great Derangement , is a j’accuse issued against all those literary writers who abdicated their social responsibility by being indifferent to the climate crisisby far the greatest predicament facing humanity. . . . As The Great Derangement emphasises throughout, the crisis of language is at the heart of every human predicament. And now, if our writers are not leading the way, we’re more than doomed.”
Sunday Guardian Live (New Delhi)
Ghosh is one of the most important living writers writing in English.
Los Angeles Review of Books
A stupendous return to non-fiction. . . . Ghosh charts our progress, our cultures, history, politics, and its environmental fallout, as delicately and firmly as a Buddhist monk resolutely scattering coloured sand to create a mandala . Pixel by pixel, in distant corners of a canvas, he builds his arguments. Through the three sections of The Great Derangement , he carves a picture out of seemingly disparate global and local events and trends. And when you step back, slowly, inch by inch, a grander story is revealedour story. We get to see a picture so grotesque and distorted that it is impossible to look away. And we look on, transfixed by a singular conclusionclimate change is on us.”
Captivating. . . .The lightness and agility of Ghosh’s writing succeeds in keeping all the urgency and the shadows of something we cannot really look at: the destiny of mankind.”
“The Great Derangement . . . begins with a simple questionwhy have the arts (literature and fiction in particular) been unable and unwilling to grapple with the greatest crisis facing the planet, anthropogenic climate change?and runs in thrillingly unpredictable directions with it. . . . The Great Derangement bristles with trenchant and dense ideas, expressed with exemplary lucidity and finesse. At a time when the idea of the engagé intellectual is not just unfashionable, but in full-blown retreat, here is a book that triumphantly announces its return.”
"Ghosh... [argues] that the blind pursuit of economic growth is a derangement in need of fundamental reform."
With the deftness of a master storyteller and the powerful vision of a keen political observer, Ghosh traces the complex ways that globalization, empire, and the bourgeois novel are entangled with the history of carbon and our contemporary climate crisis. A thrilling, often brilliant work of synthesis and imagination, The Great Derangement is essential reading for anyone trying to understand what the Anthropocene means for our human future.”
A short but broad-ranging and consistently stimulating indictment of our era of the ‘great derangement.’ . . . The Great Derangement is a bracing reminder that there is no more vital task for writers and artists than to clear the intellectual dead wood of a vulgarly boosterish age and create space for apocalyptic thinking - which may at least delay, if not avert, the catastrophes ahead.”
Resistance to the grim realities of climate change is so widespread that the crisis barely figures in literary fiction, notes writer Amitav Ghosh. Branding our era of denial and inertia the Great Derangement, Ghosh looks in turn at literature, history and politics to examine this failure, noting that extreme events such as 2012’s Hurricane Sandy are so freakish that they seem inexpressible. The solution, he argues, lies in collective action as well as scientific and governmental involvement and in a resurgence in our imaginative capacity to envision human existence anew.”
The exciting and frightening thing about Ghosh’s argument is how he traces the novel’s narrow compass back to popular and influential scientific ideasideas that championed uniform and gradual processes over cataclysms and catastrophes. One big complaint about science that it kills wonderis the same criticism Ghosh levels at the novel: that it bequeaths us ‘a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.’ Lawfulness in biology is rather like realism in fiction: it is a convention so useful that we forget that it is a convention. But, if anthropogenic climate change and the gathering sixth mass extinction event have taught us anything, it is that the world is wilder than the laws we are used to would predict. Indeed, if the world really were in a novelor even in a book of popular scienceno one would believe it.”
★ 08/01/2016 In his first work of long-form nonfiction in over 20 years, celebrated novelist Ghosh (Flood of Fire) addresses “perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture”: how can writers, scholars, and policy makers combat the collective inability to grasp the dangers of today’s climate crisis? Ghosh’s choice of genre is hardly incidental; among the chief sources of the “imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis,” he argues, is the resistance of modern linguistic and narrative traditions—particularly the 20th-century novel—to events so cataclysmic and heretofore improbable that they exceed the purview of serious literary fiction. Ghosh ascribes this “Great Derangement” not only to modernity’s emphasis on this “calculus of probability” but also to notions of empire, capitalism, and democratic freedom. Asia in particular is “conceptually critical to every aspect of global warming,” Ghosh attests, outlining the continent’s role in engendering, conceptualizing, and mitigating ecological disasters in language that both thoroughly convinces the reader and runs refreshingly counter to prevailing Eurocentric climate discourse. In this concise and utterly enlightening volume, Ghosh urges the public to find new artistic and political frameworks to understand and reduce the effects of human-caused climate change, sharing his own visionary perspective as a novelist, scholar, and citizen of our imperiled world. (Oct.)
Ghosh has written brilliant fiction, impactful essays. But this work on climate change is the most transformational and powerful piece of writing to come from his pen. The Great Derangement is a book on our burning planet for those who are burning it and are being burnt with it. Ghosh gives us, in scalding anguish, a masterpiece that reflects the Buddha's Adittapariyaya Sutta or ‘The Fire Sermon’ that T S Eliot so plangently re-affirmed in ‘The Waste Land.’ We have here a book that seeks to chastise, challenge, and change our brain's clogged circuitry.”
Resistance to the grim realities of climate change is so widespread that the crisis barely figures in literary fiction, notes writer Amitav Ghosh. Branding our era of denial and inertia the Great Derangement, Ghosh looks in turn at literature, history and politics to examine this failure, noting that extreme events such as 2012’s Hurricane Sandy are so freakish that they seem inexpressible. The solution, he argues, lies in collective action as well as scientific and governmental involvement and in a resurgence in our imaginative capacity to envision human existence anew.”
Ghosh’s analysis of the ‘era of climate change’ is fascinating, erudite, and unflinching. The Great Derangement is a profoundly original book that spares no one.
On very rare occasions, a writer marshals such searing insight and storytelling skill that even a well trodden subject is blown wide open. New connections are made, new futures appear. Ghosh is that kind of writer, and this is that kind of book.
"Don’t be deterred by this book’s academic appearance. Ghosh, an award-winning novelist, takes a fascinating look at how literature and history (as well as politics) have sidestepped or grossly simplified the scale and urgency of climate change. By doing so, we have been conditioned to doubt stories that feel too apocalyptic. The climate crisis, as Ghosh explains, is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination."
Ghosh, who has previously broached environmental questions in fiction (The Hungry Tide , the Ibis trilogy, and elsewhere), here steps back from the role of storyteller to analyze modern literature, history, and politics. His purpose is to show that all three cultural modes share assumptions that render climate change unthinkable, occluding our view of its dangers rather than aiding our understanding. . . . To tackle climate change, we would need not only to overcome climate denialism and our reliance on fossil fuels, but also our commitment to moral uplift. The radical restructuring of global power requires more than a good conscience and respect for individuals. From this perspective, the humanities and human sciences confront their greatest challenge armed only with rusting tools forged for another age. ‘The climate crisis is,’ as Ghosh writes, ‘also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.’”
Times Literary Supplement
…Ghosh argues that at the very time it is becoming clear that the situation is “in every sense a collective predicament”, we find ourselves living in the age of the individual. The Great Derangement is a reminder that there are no more vital tasks for writers, artists and politicians than to confront the existential environmental crisis we face and imagine new ways of living.
For a long time, we have been talking about climate change as a scientific question. In this magnificent book, Ghosh changes the conversation, moving it out of the narrow corridors of science and into the wide precincts of culture, politics, and power. Climate change, he argues, is the result of a set of interrelated histories that promoted and sustained our collective dependence on fossil fuels, and it is a kind of derangement to say we want a different world but act in a way that ensures the continuance of the present one. A clarion call not just to act on climate, but to think about it in a wholly new way.
On very rare occasions, a writer marshals such searing insight and storytelling skill that even a well trodden subject is blown wide open. New connections are made, new futures appear. Ghosh is that kind of writer, and this is that kind of book.
Ghosh, an Indian novelist, examines climate change through the lenses of stories, histories, and politics in this nonfiction audiobook. Shridhar Solanki’s deliberate English-accented narration takes the listener through Ghosh’s theories on why climate change has not been more prominent in fiction and the arts, what is behind the worsening crisis, and what must be done to deal with it. Ghosh includes some fascinating accounts of catastrophes that have already happened and others that await the world if the political will to take action is not found. Solanki’s slower pace is appropriate. Ghosh’s erudite and fairly difficult work is not for the person just looking for a good listen while driving to the grocery store. This audiobook requires time and attention. G.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
FEBRUARY 2020 - AudioFile
2016-08-03 Fair warning on the perils of ignoring climate change.In this erudite, cautionary treatise, novelist Ghosh (Flood of Fire, 2015, etc.) questions why, even in the face of mounting proof, much of the general public remains unfazed by increasing environmental disruption and disintegration. He recalls, as a child, hearing a tale from the mid-1850s about the “ecological refugees” from his Bangladesh homeland being displaced after the Padma River suddenly changed direction, wiping out villages and their inhabitants. As that story and those he shares in the book’s first section prove, the planet’s natural elements, which many of us take for granted, “can come to life with sudden and deadly violence.” Originally begun as a set of four lectures at the University of Chicago in 2015, the book lays out the reasons for and ramifications of climate crisis denialism through three distinct yet interrelated sections: stories related to “global warming’s resistance to the arts” coupled with the history and the serpentine politics surrounding our shared environmental responsibility. Interestingly, Ghosh shares tales of “people who are waylaid by unpredictable events” and then references literature’s oversight and casual disregard for unpredictable, “improbable” weather phenomena. As he writes, “to introduce such happenings into a novel is in fact to court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence.” Just as eloquently, the author incorporates a historical discussion into his hypothesis, spotlighting Asia’s swiftly expanding industrialization as “conceptually critical to every aspect of global warming,” as well as the multifaceted aspects of capitalism, colonization, the “carbon-intensive economy,” and the corporatization of climate change. In direct, streamlined prose, Ghosh nimbly assesses the calculated placement of ecological blame, from politicians and world leaders to artists and writers, upon whose shoulders the “existential danger” of climate erosion potentially rests. A slim but certainly significant contribution to the climate crisis dialogue sure to provoke discussion and increased awareness about our imperiled planet.