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Book Report Times Arrow

Book Review: Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis Did it hurt when you fell from heaven? Life is no bowl of cherries. Sometimes you can't explain everything. You just can't, and Martin Amis knows this. Time's Arrow is a book on the holocaust. There is nothing new about its material, and it makes no attempt at explaining anything. So why bother reading (or writing) it? What separates this book from your average "holocaust book" is that this really will, as it says on the backcover, present you with a "different" perspective. Time's Arrow is not your typical holocaust book. It does more than just make your head think - it takes you through the whole ordeal backwards.The story begins on the main character's deathbed, and through him the author explores how life would appear, how it would feel and what sense it would seem to make if it were like a film running backwards - if time's arrow were to reverse its direction and allow us to watch history unfold itself, line by line, gesture by gesture, until we are sucked back into our mothers' wombs. Hence construction becomes destruction, healing is wounding, age is youth, future turns into history and so on. As you can imagine, things can get rather confusing (luckily, Amis keeps the words in dialogues in the normal order).The story is told in the first-person and third-person, first-person being the innocent narrator who sees things backwards and third-person the doctor whose body the narrator is for some unknown reason trapped in. Bar the fact that it is in reverse, the plot is simple: The narrator wakes up from his deathbed and discovers that he is living his life backwards. He finds out that he is a doctor, living in small-town America. His name is Tod Friendly. He gets younger and comes out of retirement, breaking up with his old lovers before meeting them in intimate embraces. All the while it becomes clearer and clearer that there is some great secret in his future (or past), and...

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