The Great Derangement - Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Amitav Ghosh

University Of Chicago Press

2016

196 páginas

6h 32m

ISBN-13: 9780226323039

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.

Resenhas (1)

4 (Muito bom)

Well done, finally

This is the third Ghosh book that I read this year, and let me say, finally! I guess his true potential lies in lectures, not novels. His points are very basic, but interesting and easy to read. He explores mainly the Asian pov in climate change (as a victim and as a culprit).
The book is divided into three sections: Stories, History and Politics. In each of them he analyses how climate change came to be and how these areas are dealing with it. Spoiler alert: they're not, and that's exaclty what he is criticizing in this book. He basically says that we are all deranged because we chose to ignore climate change willingly. And the worst part is that we know what is happening, what is going to happen, and we still do not act on it. I mean, no individual actions, obviously, but collective actions, laws, agreements, policies.
He also focuses a lot on how literature has ignored this issue for decades, not portraying what is actually happening to the world - which is another symptom of this collective derangement we are all suffering from.

It's a quick read, however dense and full of references. Not too difficult, tho. If you're interested in the climate crisis, the environment, you should read it!