Which Books Do You Feel Experiment Well With Time/Chronology? (1/17/21)

[Marc]

This could be anything from jumping back and forth in time, narrating in reverse (from the end to the beginning), or any other temporal "experiment" you choose to define... What books do you feel experiment well with, or best leverage, time/chronology?

[Shelby]

N0S4A2 and The Bone Clocks come to mind.

[Neil]

Emily St John Mandel is a master of jumping to and fro over a main event to show before and after. Station Eleven is her most famous.

[Robert]

Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks does time travel well. Same with Evie Wyld’s the bass rock

[LindaJ^]

Just finished Utopia Avenue and it jumps back and forth in time with each of the four main characters. It's done quite well without being split, as is common, into different narratives/characters in different chapters.

[Whitney]

Great topic, I love books that do a good job messing with time lines, looking forward to picking up some more recommendations. The best are those that manage to change your entire view of once timeline with a revelation in another.

The one that comes to mind as doing this absolutely brilliantly, (and unfortunately it's a minor spoiler to even say so), is The Fifth Season.

[Bretnie]

Whitney wrote: "Great topic, I love books that do a good job messing with time lines, looking forward to picking up some more recommendations. The best are those that manage to change your entire view of once time..."

Whitney, The Fifth Season was the first that popped into my head too! Really brilliantly done!

[Whitney]

Bretnie wrote: "Whitney wrote: "Great topic, I love books that do a good job messing with time lines, looking forward to picking up some more recommendations. The best are those that manage to change your entire v..."

Definitely a hard one to top!

[Tamara]

A few that come to my mind:

The Still Point by Amy Sackville. She weaves together two threads one hundred years apart linked together by the same family. She skips in and out of the threads, punctuating them with the occasional dream narrative.

I really loved Border Districts by Gerald Murnane for a lot of reasons, one of which is the way he charts the landscape of his mind throughout the decades by using image-events as triggers to jump from the present to the past and back again.

Colum McCann does an interesting thing with chronology in Apeirogon. It consists of 1001 vignettes focusing on the Palestine-Israel conflict. The 1001 vignettes or chapters vary in length from one sentence to several pages. The sections are numbered from 1 to 500, a middle section numbered 1001, followed by sections that reverse the numbering by beginning with 500 and concluding with section 1. The motion is circular and ends where it began with the wording of the final sentence varying slightly from the very first sentence.

[Barbara]

Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must Be the Place does a nice job of jumping back and forth in time among several characters.

[Vesna]

There are two parallel stories in entirely different time periods centered around 2 people working on the same dictionary, very originally rendered in The Liar's Dictionary. I agree about Apeirogon and there was also a very interesting shifting interplay between time and space in Love and Other Thought Experiments and The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree.

[Sam]

I think Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," and Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," are good examples. From last year, Riku Onda's The Aosawa Murders worked. But IMO, Virginia Woolf is the master of experimenting with time, doing so uniquely in several different novels.

[H Anthony]

Along a slightly different tangent, two books that I think use time to their advantage in a really interesting way are Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13 - where the cyclical nature of rural life is absolutely central to the book - and Chris Bachelder's Abbott Awaits, where every chapter is a day over 3 months while the main character awaits the birth of his second child. The latter is really under-read, I think. I love it.

Just generally, I'm sometimes struck by how amazing literature is for being able to use a few words to jump hundreds or thousands of years forwards or back, from one paragraph, or one sentence to the next. I mean, that's obvious, isn't it, but still a facet of the written word that other mediums can't replicate so simply.

[Lark]

Time's Arrow by Martin Amis.

[Lily]

Sam wrote: "...But IMO, Virginia Woolf is the master of experimenting with time, doing so uniquely in several different novels...."

Oh, my, Sam! You remind me of Orlando , which probably would not have come to mind without your prompt! And, To the Lighthouse is one I still probably need to reread to grasp all she did with the passage of time in that one! Now, you entice me both to think about her other stories and to consider which of hers I still would like to read, whether for her use of time or otherwise!

The book that came to mind immediately for me with this prompt was The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish. I personally am not particularly fond of multiple time lines, but Kadish paralleled an English plague story, ala a fictional daughter of Shakespeare interacting with Spinoza, with a modern literary researchers' fight, with a skill rather like that of A.S. Byatt's Possession. (It was one of the selections of my f2f book club in 2018.)

Not so much mixing time as being scrupulous about observing it and recording its passage year after year, Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor left an indelible impression on me for its fastidious observations of time overlaying the suspense of the (non?) plot. The criticism that first made me aware of reading carefully to observe how the author uses time was an article in the Norton edition for Emily Brontë's Weathering Heights . It laid out the calendars et al this literary researcher/critic believed she used for her complicated plotting/story telling.

Of course, when talking about time and story telling, let me mention Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet . The "same" story always subject to the prism of time and space.

[Hugh]

One of Evie Wyld's novels - I think it was All the Birds, Singing, has two alternating narrative strands with the same protagonist, one told forwards in conventional chronological order and the other getting earlier each time, so they are both moving further away from the common starting point each time.

[Nadine in California]

Kate Atkinson's Life After Life was my ultimate time-bending book.

[Bretnie]

Nadine wrote: "Kate Atkinson's Life After Life was my ultimate time-bending book."

Oh gosh yes!

[Jenny]

I really enjoyed The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. It’s a timey-wimey murder mystery and I could not put it down. Turton is a really good writer. Although it may be a bit too “genre” for some, I would strongly recommend it.

[Marc]

David Mitchell was one of the first examples that popped into my mind as he frequently experiments with jumps in time throughout more than a few of his books. Also, already mentioned above, Time's Arrow, is another book that immediately springs to mind (a friend made me read this a couple decades ago, but insisted I first read London Fields so I didn't think Amis was just all about gimmicks---for the record, I didn't find Time's Arrow gimimicky).

Most recently, I'd say the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy deals with time in incredibly effective, fascinating, and entertaining ways. Liu manages to tell an incredibly nuanced and intricate story over several hundreds years and almost effortlessly jump back and forth while weaving things together seamlessly.