It's not often I go into a novel thinking there's a high chance that I'm going to absolutely hate it, only to be completely surprised by just how much I liked it. Well, that's the case with Time's Arrow. I tend to find, although not always, problems with Holocaust fiction, tending to stick to non-fiction, and part of me thought this would turn out to be nothing more than a piece of artsy nonsense. A self-indulgent literary gimmick. But I'd be wrong - I thought it was a work of sheer brilliance. ...

-يمكنك ان تبدأ بالسطر الأخير اولا لتحصل علي نفس المراجعة بشكل مختلف نوعا ما-محمد العربيالي 25 ابريل 2016من 24 ابريل 2016النهاية---.ويظل الغلاف لعبد الرحمن الصواف لتلك الطبعة العربية هو أفضل ما حدث بهذه النسخة العربية.لكن لم استمتع علي الاطلاق بأسلوب المؤلف الثقيل في الحكي وليس الترجمة واسلوب المترجم فحسب.برغم من ان الفكرة ممتازة جدا...فالبطل ،أوديلو ايا كان اسمه يري ان العالم يسير الان بلا منطق، يري الدنيا ماشية بظهرها..وبعيدا عن سخطه الدائم الثقيل فإنك يجب أن تعترف انه محق.الأطباء...العاهرات..ا...

We can never change our past. No matter how bad we were, no matter how good we were -- time, the man-made structure that decides what we do in our lives, how often we celebrate occasions, when we are born, when we die, what people think about us after we die, does not discriminate.The concept behind Amis's 'Time's Arrow' is gimmicky at its core, but works only by the intelligence and craftiness of its author.When reading this, you see the outlook from a man with a possible multiple personality s...

In his Afterword Amis pays tribute to a paragraph by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five where a character watches a backwards-run film of the American planes scooping up bombs from Dresden and miraculously repairing the ruined city, before the bombs are sent back to a factory where all the dangerous contents of their cylinders are separated into harmless minerals. Amis here uses Vonnegut's ingenious tactic of running everything backwards to investigate the holocaust and the men who carried it...

“They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.” ― Martin Amis, Time's ArrowI liked the prose and liked the execution, but there was still something a bit off. A tooth is missing in time's reverse cog making this Amis story rock rather than roll in reverse. I enjoyed the narrative told backward; extracting the real meaning while reading the meaning back to front is a funky brai...

BE KIND, REWIND Se io leggessi Finnegan’s Wake col caffè del mattino, Proust dal dentista e Herta Müller in bagno, forse avrei trovato questo libro ‘semplice’ - e magari anche 'immediato' e 'diretto'.Così non è e così non è stato: è un’opera che m’è sembrata ostica, molto faticosa da portare avanti e sono contento d’essermene liberato.Forse non sarei neppure arrivato in fondo, se dopo qualche pagina non avessi avuto l’illuminazione di saltare alla postfazione dove la citazione di Primo Levi ha a...

She can't help it if her best isn't very good, but she's done it. She's ploddingly typed out her half-assedly apropos review, then clicked on the stars -- three of them, yellow and cartoony, her blithe summation of an author's painstakingly wrought offering to twentieth-century literature. He'll probably spend years writing then researching this thing, which she's already rated like it's an eBay-seller transaction, and reviewed with all the thoughtfulness and care of an Adderall-snorting thirtee...

The non-U USPA short book that is one long gimmick: clever as a writing exercise, but not worth publishing or reading. Once the novelty of a backwards story has worn off, there is little point to it and I lost interest (though I did finish it). And it's not even that original: Kurt Vonnegut had the same idea as a brief scene in "Slaughterhouse Five" (see my review HERE) as did Borges in the short story A Weary Man’s Utopia, which is in "The Book of Sand" (see my review HERE), and probably Fitzge...

Second reading. Just brilliant. See my review of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five for my theory that Time's Arrow was inspired, at least in part, by a sequence in that earlier novel in which the protagonist watches a war film running backwards. Highly recommended.

English Standard Version (©2001)For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.“What is it with them, the human beings? I suppose they remember what they want to remember.”-Time’s Arrow This is what I want to remember: that I bought this off a wheeled cart for two quarters. That in a bad economy, this was a great investment. Amis is genius in this book. Pure genius. His structure starts with the last rattling ...