Product Description

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Time's Arrow tells the story, backwards, of the life of Nazi war criminal, Doctor Tod T Friendly. He dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them and mangles his patients before he sends them home...Escaping from the body of the dying doctor who had worked in Nazi concentration camps, the doctor's consciousness begins living the doctor's life backwards, aware only that he is living the life of a horrible man at a horrible place in time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28077 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Daily Telegraph
Amis's most daring and ambitious novel

James Wood, Guardian
...a world of pathos and cruel hilarity-but the crux, the test of his vision, is what he does with Auschwitz

Financial Times
...devastatingly sustained black irony stands comparison with Swift's A Modest Proposal. It is, I think, Amis's finest achievement to date

Customer Reviews

Warning: This book will mess with your mind.
Writing life backwards is not original. Yet it is a mark of Martin Amis's subtle humour that he is able to say something truly fascinating about human nature. This is the story of Todd T. Friendly, former Nazi Medical Executioner and now all-round American nice-guy. By situating the narrator within Todd's body but not actually part of his mind, the narrator is able to take a step back from the action, to observe the absurdities of life, whether backwards or forwards. This book also plays with your consciousness, blurring your interaction with the world. Whenever I stopped reading, I found myself completely unsure which way round things should happen: should I get in or out of the bath next? How many books can alter the state of your mind, even for a few moments? Martin Amis is toying with your psyche, few author have the playful sense of humour to do this with such an apparently serious subject.

Powerful
One of the most interesting books I've ever read.

Constantly funny and appealing, and eventually devastating.

The way Amis handles Auschwitz is truly breath-taking, a ridiculously surreal way of looking at something that is all-too-real. By presenting it in this seemingly light-hearted manner, he increases the tragic effect.

A very important book that should be read.

Amis' brave attempt to tackle the Holocaust
In 'Time's Arrow', Amis' Booker Prize winning novel, he tells the story of a German participant in the Holocaust and his later life as an exile in America. Crucially, the action occurs in reverse, with the central character (a doctor who executed Jews in the gas chambers) jolting back to life and becoming progressively younger. Interestingly, the narrator of the story is trapped in the same body as the central character and can only watch helplessly, and often without full comprehension, as the events unfold.

Amis deserves full credit for his achievement, and although the conceit of running his story backwards occasionally feels a little forced, it does help the reader to adopt a different perspective on the events of the Holocaust and its consequences. Particularly ironic is the juxtaposition of a doctor first damaging and mutilating his patients (in his life in America) and then bringing them back to life (in the gas chambers of Auschwitz). I would recommend this novel highly - it is less autobiographical and cliched than many of Amis' other works, and is all the better for it.