Amitava Kumar’s A Time Outside This Time reads less like a novel and more like a validation of all the fears, anger and disbelief one has ...
Amitava Kumar’s A Time Outside This Time reads less like a novel and more like a validation of all the fears, anger and disbelief one has been living with for the past few years, in the face of the worrying rise of a global right wing extremism, an ever expansive intolerance of the “other”, and the unrelenting nightmare of a virus that brought all humankind to its knees. It reads less like a novel than a mediation on the collective trauma of a world plunging into despair.
It reads less like a novel and more like a collective sigh of relief at having found a community that is struggling with the same concerns, the same challenges and is desperately trying to hold on to the tenuous hope that things will change, that there will be a time outside of this dreadful time.
Lies and perceptions
Written as a first-person account, the narrative starts at a writing fellowship amidst a motley crew of researchers from various disciplines, in glamorous European environs, a villa on an island, in close proximity to “where George and Amal Clooney spend their summers.” Its temporal location seems to be early 2020, right before the virus started its devastating death march.
The narrator, a journalist/fiction and non-fiction...
