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Oct 22, 2011

Lorenzo rated it:

I read this book while I was living in Oslo on 2005.
Then, for some reason I forgot to add it to my booklist.

It might have been amnesia.
After all in those five months I spent in old Christiania my attention was diverted by many things. I recall the London bombings, hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, the Norwegian parliamentary elections, the Indonesian national day, my struggle with bokmaal pronounciation and two or three juvenile infatuations with unaware girls.

W More...

10 comments like (5 people liked it)

Feb 07, 2011

Jen rated it:

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. H More...

4 comments like (14 people liked it)

Jan 21, 2008

Beverly rated it:

It continues to amaze me how those who claim to be fans of Martin Amis haven't heard of or read Time's Arrow. This book is a masterpiece in experimental fiction. He literally, methodically, writes the story backwards as his character experiences time going backwards. I don't know of any other author who has attempted and succeeded in doing this. It's been a while since I read it, but what I remember was the uncanny sense that I was experiencing time backwards as I read it. I began questioning w More...

0 comments like (9 people liked it)

May 19, 2007

Michael rated it:

I can't say enough about this novel, though a quick glance at my friends' reviews reveals that they liked it but were not quite as blown away by it. I loved how Amis took a conceit (running the world backwards and witnessing it from a naive viewpoint that must make sense of backwards-living) and used it to make new something that had grown shopworn and overfamiliar: Literature about the Holocaust. The novel is howlingly funny, and just when you want it to gain in seriousness and gravity, it does More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 21, 2011

Jessica rated it:

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 More...

3 comments like (16 people liked it)

Sep 07, 2011

Chris rated it:

After reading the first page of this book and realising that Amis was actually going to write a novel with time moving backwards I thought he must have some brilliant notion that required and would more than excuse the use of such an gimmicky device. I was willing to overlook all the technical and conceptual failings and inconsistencies in execution, on grounds of artistic licence, with the faith that the payoff would be so clever, insightful and illuminating theses trivial concerns would pale i More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 20, 2008

George rated it:

The premise of this book is well-recorded in earlier reviews: We start with the death of a doctor named Tod Friendly, and then move backwards through his life (much life hitting the Rewind button on a VCR while the tape was still playing). In reverse, the doctors take healthy patients and leave them sick and injured, while love affairs begin with arguments and end with shy flirtation. The key here is the defining period of Tod's life, towards which we are carried, our suspicions growing along th More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jul 31, 2007

Katherine rated it:

What a truly unique story. It starts at death and runs backwards through birth, but even that has a twist. The narrator of the story is a separate voice inside the main character, who is unaware of this omnipresent observer. The voice is impotent and incapable of controlling the body or thoughts of the main character in anyway, it can't even alert the main character to its presence, but yet it persists as an watcher who does not realize the world is running backwards. It just thinks that life ma More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 11, 2011

Allycks rated it:

Normally when I sense that a writer is going to pull a stunt with the entire conceit of his or her novel, I end up with a slow disdainful Billy Idol-style grimace developing on my face before thudding against the glass ceiling of disgust and shutting the book for good.

Don't do it, Martin. You don't have to dazzle us with a technical feat like this. You're too good for that. And it's called "trying too hard..."

Still, Martin must've been kicking around novel id More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Apr 12, 2011

Casey rated it:

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2 comments like

Apr 01, 2011

Steve rated it:

A novel with an innovative idea which falters at times in its execution. The concept concerns the life of a man. This life is presented to us by a conscious element of the man which sees the life in reverse. We begin the novel by finding the man has bad dreams which appear to presage something in the "future." We eventually find that these dreams are a result of the man having spent his young manhood as a concentration camp doctor. The conscience, of course, does not understand th More...

0 comments like

Mar 27, 2011

Joey rated it:

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0 comments like

Feb 22, 2011

James rated it:

Oh. I guess it's over. Well, check that one off.

Wow, very little description of his childhood at all, except for the stereotypical pre-Nazi animal torturing history. And no explanation about why our ghostly narrator is living in his head...

Nice to see him as a young man...

Finally the book is picking up. The descriptions of collecting Jews & Auschwitz are equal parts gripping and horrifying. Now I see why he wrote this book. Too bad I had to wade through half t More...

2 comments like

Dec 20, 2010

Mark rated it:

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0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 02, 2010

John rated it:

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1 comment like

May 09, 2010

Jafar rated it:

Not much of a plot, but a really great idea for a novel combined with some great writing. The consciousness of a dying doctor, Tom Friendly, starts living his life backward as soon as he dies. This is not just telling the story of his life backward. Tom’s consciousness experiences his life with time literally reversed. Eating means throwing up food and putting it back on the plate. Constipation is quite a bizarre situation. Tom breaks up with his lovers, then is with them, then seduces them, the More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 22, 2010

Matt rated it:

Funny, yes. Using a "second consciousness," Amis basically has you, the reader, wake up in an old man's head after (or before) he's kicked the bucket working in his garden.

What proceeds (ahem) is a reverse-account of everything that's happened in this guy's life. If you don't read the back of the book, any of these reviews, the wiki page, or any of the like, then we'll keep Tom T. Friendly's secret out of the review.

But what is great about this novel is that i More...

0 comments like

Mar 10, 2010

Adrienne rated it:

What an interesting book! It takes place backwards, told by an unreliable (!!) narrator who effectively lives inside the head of the main character (Tod). Even though the narrator is unaware of Tod's thoughts, he still can process sensory information and see some of Tod's dreams. The book begins with Tod's death, and continues backwards in time. This backwards nature of the story makes the interpretation of events very different than what one would normally think: for example, relationships begi More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 14, 2009

jordan rated it:

It is perhaps Martin Amis greatest misfortune that in decade plus since he wrote Time's Arrow telling tales backwards has become so in vogue. Following the film Memento, movies and novels both have grasped on to the device, sometimes using it well where it fits, more often just relying on it to make a story seem more clever than it is. Yet few tales better suit the backwards telling of a tale than Time's Arrow, which begins at the death of an American doctor, Todd Friendly, where an errant spiri More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 02, 2009

SallyJo rated it:

Wow. Hardest.Book.Ever to read. Chronicles a life, but in reverse. Do not think "Benjamin Buttons" - far, far from it. Everything is moving backwards, as seen by a secondary "person" who is pretty much just along for the ride, trapped in the body and without control of actions or access to the characters thoughts. And when I say everyting is moving backwards, I mean everything. Eating. Elimination. Relationships. Sound wierd? Oh, yeah. Yet captivating. The life being More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 12, 2009

Stephen rated it:

Okay, this book is perversely clever, even brilliant in a quirky sort of way. Time, in "Time's Arrow," moves backwards. It begins with the narrator's death, and the action runs in reverse until he enters his mother's womb at the end and disappears. Other novels are equally perversely clever. Georges Perec, for example, wrote a 300-page novel in French without using a single "e." And Adair's English translation manages to do the same in English! How could a man or a woma More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 06, 2009

James rated it:

Martin Amis is a genius. This is a brilliant, unique book. You may say, ‘oh this is just American hyperbole’. Which may appear doubly inappropriate when applied to a British author - an author of whom the British might bestow the moniker ‘good’, or dare I say it, ‘very good’. I jest, this book was nominated for the Booker Award. The Brits love this guy, and rightly so.

I would rank this book as one of the top ten books I have read. I would love to discuss it, but I think it would be a More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 25, 2009

Jennifer rated it:

I confess that I read this book quite a while ago (probably 10+ years ago), so the details are a little hazy. But the idea of the book stayed with me after all this time--so it must have made an impression on me (and books that make an impression or worth reading!). I remembered that I liked the book because the author chose to tell a life story backwards--starting at the end and moving toward birth. I remember being intrigued by this idea so I bought it. When preparing to write this little desc More...

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Aug 11, 2011

Rachel rated it:

This is a MAD book. Time is running backwards in the narrator's life. He becomes conscious - after what? I don't know - and watches the whole of someone's life being played out... In reverse.

When he eats, food comes out of his mouth and onto the cutlery. When he drinks, he dribbles into a glass until it isfull. You get the picture? You will do - we get a run through of all bodily functions which is really quite marvellously noticed in its detail.

The life he (the narrator) is More...

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Jan 25, 2011

Dan rated it:

This is a tough one to rate and review because it has me twisted all over the place! So, I'm going to divide it into three different things.

First, as a piece of experimental fiction it is fantastic, 5stars. Telling the story backwards blows your mind, and keeps you straining and spinning and imagining. Amis is so good at it, even, that you sometimes don't get a joke or clever idea until well after the first time it's come up. The man has mad skillz.

Second, as part of Amis' More...

3 comments like

Feb 12, 2011

Mike rated it:

I liked this novel, which has the central conceit of planting a conciousness in a man's head as he dies and then follows "time's arrow" backwards, so that we experience the man's life in reverse. It's a pretty interesting little novelistic experiment, although like a lot of novelistic experiments, it doesn't really give itself the chance to be a really great book. It's just... interesting. My major complaint with this one has nothing to do with the book itself, but with its back cover, More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Jon rated it:

I read about this book a few months ago and thought, I need to read that. It is, admittedly, built largely around a gimmick, and it was the gimmick that appealed to me. But Amos makes the gimmick work. The gimmick is this: the novel is told in reverse. By reverse, I do not mean that we get scenes in reverse order, as in the film Momento. Rather, take the story "Benjamin Button" but place the whole thing into reverse order rather than just the title character. Everyone is getting younge More...

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Apr 24, 2011

switterbug (Betsey) rated it:

In a reverse spin of the unreliable narrator, Martin Amis pays homage to Kurt Vonneygut and Isaac Bashevis Singer in his story that opens to a reverse chronology of events, jarring the reader and allowing us to see humanity as the reverse of amorality and immorality. This technique of reversing age was used as a terrible gimmick in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (corrupted from F. Scott Fitzgerald and exploited for Hollywood), but in Amis' morality tale, it was employed as a perspective tha More...

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Nov 27, 2010

Katherine rated it:

"The good life, at least, is better than the bad life. It features windsurfing, for example..." (4).
“This substantial citizen, this old doctor—and his slobbering calves”(40).
“I have noticed in the past, of course, that most conversations would make much better sense if you ran them backward. But with this man-woman stuff, you could run them any way you liked—and still get no further forward” (51).
“America swipes by the winds, cattle, timber, wheat, offerings from a yo More...

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Jan 16, 2011

Cailin rated it:

Not only is Time’s Arrow told backwards, the narrator is a bodiless, placeless voice who inhabits the main character’s body without any influence or access to mind and memory. Somehow this voice recognizes that relationships, which unfold (or fold) in reverse, make no sense. His understanding of cause-and-effect is intact but of course these rules are also backwards. At first it was difficult getting into, (especially as bedside reading) but after a while it works like gestalt: lk sntncs wth n v More...

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