Your reaction to Amitava Kumar’s discursive third novel may depend on the political situation in the country you live in. A Time Outside This Time is a novel of Donald Trump’s America in which Satya, its writer-narrator, discusses the problems of fake news, rightwing populism and racism.
Reading it in the UK, I felt both relief that Trump has been out of office for almost a year and dread at knowing that I still live under a government that stokes division. As ever, the context in which we read fiction is as important as that of its composition.
The novel opens in early 2020; Satya is at an artists’ retreat in Italy, working on a book about our times, provisionally titled Enemies of the People. When he’s not mingling with other residents at cocktail hour, he’s at his desk grappling with questions about the nature of storytelling and how writers should resist authoritarianism: “Because we deal only with stories, in literature, in history, or in science, the simple distinction between truth and lies is a naïve one,” he writes in his notebook.
Kumar’s novel has little plot but it is tightly structured, with Satya’s days in Italy intercut with stories, essays and observations from his notebook, as well as his memories of growing up in India, where he worked as a journalist (Kumar is himself a prolific journalist and has published several works of non-fiction). Satya moved to the US in the 1990s but returned to India to research articles, witnessing corruption, violence against Muslims and the rise of Hindu nationalism that swept Narendra Modi to power.
One of the most affecting passages concerns Farooq, a young man from Pakistan who was arrested on suspicion of terrorism after 9/11, before working for US intelligence. Satya recalls befriending him, writing a long article about him and lending him money: “I had also behaved like the FBI, which had produced some cash for Farooq and forced him to play a role in their narrative.”
Eventually, the pandemic forces Satya to leave Italy and return to America to be with his wife and daughter. In upstate New York, he washes his hands and teaches his literature students via Zoom while Black Lives Matter protests unfold following the murder of George Floyd. Kumar captures the atmosphere — simultaneously flat and momentous — of that period in the summer of 2020.
Satya quotes Philip Roth on the challenges facing novelists who write about current events: “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents . . . ” The character’s solution is to break down the generic boundaries between fiction and journalism: “Am I right in thinking that by bringing news into literature we make sure that daily news doesn’t die a daily death?”
The answer for Kumar is “yes” in a novel that argues, by resisting both disinformation and the dogma of facts — and convinces me — that writing and reading fiction is the best way to make sense of our times.
A Time Outside This Time by Amitava Kumar, Picador £14.99, 272 pages
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café
A Time Outside This Time — when reality outpaces fiction
Pinoy Variant