The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
AMITAV GHOSH
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, and politics – to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.
The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and 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 and 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 and 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AMITAV GHOSH grew up in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Iran, and his work – both fiction and non-fiction – reflects his fascination with realms touched by the Indian Ocean. His work is distinguished by his mastery of complex narratives and an amplitude and pacing that recalls the great Victorian novels.
Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2008. He was also shortlisted, for his entire body of work, for the Man Booker International Prize 2015. He holds two lifetime achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2018, Ghosh became the first English-language writer to receive the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour, and in 2024, he was awarded the Laureate Erasmus Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
MORE INFORMATION
Imprint: Penguin Books
Published: 2016
ISBN: 978-0-143-42906-7
Format: Paperback
Pages: 275