(no subject)

[skygiants]

Sometimes one is caught in a sort of vortex wherein one glumly feels like one really ought to read more about climate change, and yet one also does not wish to make oneself any more generally morose about the state of the world then one already ambiently is, but nonetheless one sees a review of Amitav Ghosh's book about climate change, and one does like Amitav Ghosh's writing generally and if one is going to read about climate change this does seem a reasonable way to do it, so one puts it on hold at the library, at which point it sits accusingly on the nightstand until the library starts increasingly less politely asking for it back --

Anyway. I've just finished The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a book compiled out of a collection of lectures in which Ghosh starts out by using the voice of literary criticism to talk about why modern authors have been bad at writing about climate change as a metaphor for why modern society is bad in general at thinking about climate change, and then circles around to delve into the role of imperialism and global trade in setting up contemporary climate injustice, using examples mostly drawn from the Indian subcontinent -- a narrative that in its broad strokes is not new to me but that Ghosh in particular is very good at telling in specifics and through particulars; his rich historical vision for connections and resonances and knock-on effects has been my favorite thing about his fiction.

The final section of the book is a critique of the politics/literature of personal moral agency rather than mass communal movement; this is a point at which I wonder how the book would have read to me in 2015, because this feels like more or less accepted wisdom to me now but I think six years ago was not so well entrenched an idea in leftist circles. Conversely, he also takes some time to be depressing about the possibility of public movements to effect any change whatsoever in current global politics, which actually conversely made me feel slightly less depressed because I do think climate activist movements have seen at least slightly more success over the last six years in pushing projects like divestment and closing oil pipelines than Ghosh would have anticipated at the time of writing.

At the end he sort of returns to the voice of literary criticism and uses it to compare/contrast the 2015 Paris Accords with the Pope's encyclical on climate change from the same period to voice a hope that mass religious movements may be able to kick-start greater and more effective shifts towards a genuinely sustainable human lifestyle than the techno-optimism voiced in the Paris Accords. While I believe that the Pope's encyclical is probably a better and more broaadly ethical piece of writing than the Paris Accords, this feels to me more like a desire to end the book by finding uplift somewhere than a true source of optimism.

I followed up the book by reading this review of it at the time it came out, which is both more eloquent than mine and makes me very much want to read the 1930s book about war with the newts.

Comments

[sovay]

I followed up the book by reading this review of it at the time it came out, which is both more eloquent than mine and makes me very much want to read the 1930s book about war with the newts.

I can vouch for the Čapek. Reading the Ghosh back across the last six years sounds really interesting.

[skygiants]

2015 feels simultaneously like 'not very long ago at all' and 'an entirely different epoch of history, almost impossible to mentally access now.'

[kore]

Yeah, and all the 9/11 memorial stuff today makes me realize I felt that way about 2000, or even 1999. It's a common 20th century complaint even (hi Alvin Toffler) but the 21st seems to have taken violent irreparable change to New levels.

[chestnut_pod]

Well, I feel all of this, and am probably going to start my own cycle of accusatory book-glaring with it…

[skygiants]

I'm actually very grateful for the competitive brain nonsense that means that sending an unread book back to the library feels like losing a battle, because that has been responsible for me getting around to finally reading so many books that I was otherwise avoiding ...

[kore]

Now I want that Karel Capek book!

I'm not sure the critique of modern "realist" novels not taking on climate change is so true anymore -- I know I've read at least several since 2015 but I'd have to look them up. I think Lauren Groff's Arcadia might qualify. But anyway, this book sounds really good!

[skygiants]

Yeah, six years is a long time over which the looming spectre of climate change has become I think MUCH more immediate, with ripples in the cultural landscape getting larger accordingly -- it would be really interesting to hear him talk about the book now, and whether he thinks anything has changed.

[happydork]

I saw a modern theatrical adaptation of War With The Newts a few years ago. At various times the newts were a metaphor for:
- automated processes within a capitalist system
- enslaved people
- freedom fighters
- climate change
- probably a bunch of other things, I was very tired at the time, and I think recovering from pneumonia?

[skygiants]

Those are some extremely multipurpose newts!

However, I must ask: were the news played by human actors in newt costumes; by abstract newt representations via theatrical effects; or by actual, stage-trained newts?

[happydork]

The newts were never seen! Sometimes they were "on stage" but obscured from view (eg newts inna box, newt being dissected covered by sheet, etc) but mostly they were off stage.

I would have loved the enthusiastically incoherent symbolism a lot more without the slavery metaphor, which was (a) gross to have the unseen, inhuman creatures be the enslaved people; (b) jarring when the same unseen, inhuman creatures also stood for climate change.

If nothing else, it was a very heartfelt production? You got the sense that everyone really believed in its depth and complexity.

[kore]

I just got both these! ....I'm hoping to entice myself into something other than rereading Pratchett, haha.

[skygiants]

Sometimes one just has to reread Pratchett for a while and there's nothing wrong with that >.> But I hope you enjoy both of these and find them worthwhile!

[caprices]

So it is worth reading? I couldn't get past the initial literary criticism. In his description of how Real Literature is failing to address climate change, he had some offhand comment about how sci-fi doesn't count because it is not Literature.

[skygiants]

I think it was, yeah! Though I took that comment differently than you did in general -- I read that as Ghosh saying that The Literary Establishment tends to discount sff and read/review it differently than it does quote-unquote serious literature, and meaning this as a critique of the boundaries of what's termed Literature rather than a critique of the genre itself.

[lirazel]

*gestures to the post* All of this!

This was my first time reading Ghosh and I really like his style/prose/the way his brain works. I think you're right about the book being less of-the-moment than it was and it's interesting to think about how we've simultaneously made no and some progress.

[skygiants]

I loved the first book in his trilogy about the Opium Wars and then got invested enough in the characters that I got mad at the second two books for not taking them where I wanted them to go, but I'd still strongly recommend the first book even though it's not really a standalone ... I keep meaning to read more of his fiction, too.

[lirazel]

I've been meaning to try his Opium Wars books, so I will keep that in mind when I do.