The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Berlin Family Lectures) - Hardcover

Amitav Ghosh is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and  Flood of Fire.

“Ghosh, who has previously broached environmental questions in fiction (The Hungry Tide, the Ibis trilogy, and elsewhere), here steps back from the role of storyteller to analyze modern literature, history, and politics. His purpose is to show that all three cultural modes share assumptions that render climate change unthinkable, occluding our view of its dangers rather than aiding our understanding. . . . To tackle climate change, we would need not only to overcome climate denialism and our reliance on fossil fuels, but also our commitment to moral uplift. The radical restructuring of global power requires more than a good conscience and respect for individuals. From this perspective, the humanities and human sciences confront their greatest challenge armed only with rusting tools forged for another age. ‘The climate crisis is,’ as Ghosh writes, ‘also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.’”
  (Times Literary Supplement)

“Ghosh is one of the most important living writers writing in English.” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

“A short but broad-ranging and consistently stimulating indictment of our era of the ‘great derangement.’ . . . The Great Derangement is a bracing reminder that there is no more vital task for writers and artists than to clear the intellectual dead wood of a vulgarly boosterish age and create space for apocalyptic thinking – which may at least delay, if not avert, the catastrophes ahead.”
  (Guardian)

“In his first work of long-form nonfiction in over 20 years, celebrated novelist Ghosh ‘perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture’: how can writers, scholars, and policy makers combat the collective inability to grasp the dangers of today’s climate crisis? Ghosh’s choice of genre is hardly incidental; among the chief sources of the ‘imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis,’ he argues, is the resistance of modern linguistic and narrative traditions—particularly the 20th-century novel—to events so cataclysmic and heretofore improbable that they exceed the purview of serious literary fiction. . . . In this concise and utterly enlightening volume, Ghosh urges the public to find new artistic and political frameworks to understand and reduce the effects of human-caused climate change, sharing his own visionary perspective as a novelist, scholar, and citizen of our imperiled world.”
  (Publishers Weekly)

“The exciting and frightening thing about Ghosh’s argument is how he traces the novel’s narrow compass back to popular and influential scientific ideas—ideas that championed uniform and gradual processes over cataclysms and catastrophes. One big complaint about science —that it kills wonder—is the same criticism Ghosh levels at the novel: that it bequeaths us ‘a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.’ Lawfulness in biology is rather like realism in fiction: it is a convention so useful that we forget that it is a convention. But, if anthropogenic climate change and the gathering sixth mass extinction event have taught us anything, it is that the world is wilder than the laws we are used to would predict. Indeed, if the world really were in a novel—or even in a book of popular science—no one would believe it.”
  (New Scientist)

“The Great Derangement . . . begins with a simple question—why have the arts (literature and fiction in particular) been unable and unwilling to grapple with the greatest crisis facing the planet, anthropogenic climate change?—and runs in thrillingly unpredictable directions with it.  . . . The Great Derangement bristles with trenchant and dense ideas, expressed with exemplary lucidity and finesse. At a time when the idea of the engagé intellectual is not just unfashionable, but in full-blown retreat, here is a book that triumphantly ­announces its return.”
  (New Statesman)

“In this elegant book, Ghosh explains how literary fiction came to avoid depicting the uncanny, the nonhuman, the improbable, and the aggregate. His exploration of the relationship between British imperialism and Asia’s carbon economy shows that our constructions of history are as deranged as our literature. In short, we are in denial. . . . Ghosh finds hope in art’s tendency to envision possibilities, as well as in the activism of religious communities.”
  (Christian Century)

“Resistance to the grim realities of climate change is so widespread that the crisis barely figures in literary fiction, notes writer Amitav Ghosh. Branding our era of denial and inertia the Great Derangement, Ghosh looks in turn at literature, history and politics to examine this failure, noting that extreme events such as 2012’s Hurricane Sandy are so freakish that they seem inexpressible. The solution, he argues, lies in collective action as well as scientific and governmental involvement — and in a resurgence in our imaginative capacity to envision human existence anew.”
  (Nature)

“One of its central themes is that writers, artists and filmmakers, including himself, have largely ignored climate change—‘the great derangement’ of the title— simply because it seems too far-fetched and terrifying. But does it really make a difference if authors write about climate change? ‘Making a difference isn’t the point; the point is to examine the meaning of the arts. If we believe that the arts are meant to look ahead, open doors, then how is this huge issue of our time, absent from the arts? It’s like death, no one wants to talk about it.’”
  (Guardian)

“Ghosh’s latest book, The Great Derangement, is a j’accuse issued against all those literary writers who abdicated their social responsibility by being indifferent to the climate crisis—by far the greatest predicament facing humanity. . . . As The Great Derangement emphasises throughout, the crisis of language is at the heart of every human predicament. And now, if our writers are not leading the way, we’re more than doomed.”
  (Sunday Guardian Live (New Delhi))