The Digest: Books about Time

The Digest: Books about Time

In the midst of that miserable time of the year we tend to wish away, it’s perhaps healthy to consider the nature and value of time. Here’s a selection of cracking reads on the subject

Reviewed by Kate Slotover

The recent success of the Oscar-nominated film The Theory of Everything makes it a good moment to revisit Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (first published in 1988). As most people are aware, time has particular resonance for Hawking, who suffers from Motor Neurone disease. At time of diagnosis his life expectancy was put at just two years. Hawking is still living and working over 50 years later.

From a literary perspective, his book was just as much of a phenomenon. The initial small print run sold quickly, and the book was reprinted again and again, eventually selling over 9m copies in hardback. So what is it that’s so great about A Brief History of Time? It has a reputation as being a difficult read (so much so that it has been called the bestselling unread book in history), but if anything the opposite is true: Hawking writes with almost painfully self-conscious simplicity, using analogies and straightforward diagrams to explain difficult concepts.

His lively sense of humour is evident in occasional asides and there is an interesting philosophical undercurrent concerning the role that may have been played by God, a question that Hawking touches on at various points, lending what would otherwise be a study in pure rationality and logic a more human, spiritual touch. Most compellingly, within the covers of this slim volume lies something approaching an explanation for how the universe we inhabit came to be, what it consists of and how it functions and there’s something thrilling about tracking the thoughts of one of the few people on the planet capable not only of understanding but explaining it to the rest of us. In addition, it’s hard not to feel inspired given the personal difficulties Hawking had to overcome in order to write it. A tribute, then, not just to the evolving frontier of theoretical physics, but also to the human spirit.

Awe inspiring it may be, but an understanding of the infinite cosmos may not be what we need to best appreciate time as measured by the moments of our lives and the places we inhabit. In Ben Lerner’s novel 10.04 the narrator is a young man living in Brooklyn, New York. The story is woven together through a series of experiences and encounters. The narrator’s best friend, Alex, asks him to help her conceive a child; he learns at the same time he is suffering from a heart condition; he tutors a young Venezuelan boy – their shared project is on the Brontosaurus which turns out to have been a fictional dinosaur (I know, who knew?); meanwhile, the narrator works on developing a novel, passages from which are included – a nice metafictional touch.

The situations may be familiar – hospital waiting rooms, coffee shops and bars, gallery openings, family get-togethers - but Lerner’s interest lies less in facts than in possibilities: in future outcomes, in the overlap between reality and imagination. Occasionally the text switches from prose to poetry, enhancing the sense that everything, even language itself, is open to multiple forms of interpretation. This is a disconcerting novel; as with the imaginary dinosaur, it’s hard to know what to believe. But Lerner illustrates beautifully the capacity we all share as human beings to both experience and create our realities as we go along. Our ability to remember, to interpret and to invent is one of the things that defines us; this wry, clever, beautifully written novel is a moving meditation on that.

In Other People’s Countries Patrick McGuinness writes of a much-loved aunt, “The more I think of her, the less there is, blanking over like a photograph left in the sun, so I have to be careful, ration out what is left of her because soon there will only be a whiteness in my memory…” In this beguiling memoir, the author captures the memories he has left, centred around his family house in the small Belgian town he grew up in, Bouillon. To call the subject niche would be an understatement – even in its heyday, Bouillon seems to have been an obscure and isolated corner of the world – but McGuinness has a way of writing about a place so rich in emotional connotations for him, in a way that leads us to consider our own family houses, possessions, relationships and experiences.

The characters, mostly long-gone, such as the author’s grandmother Lucie, a dressmaker, are brought vividly back to life on the page, and the book is enjoyable simply on the level of its interesting and entertaining stories. But McGuinness, like Ben Lerner, is also a poet and there is a quiet, lyrical beauty to his writing that opens out the possibilities, enabling us to travel in time and experience McGuinness’s ‘house of memories’ in a vivid and immediate way.

How else might we travel in time? Richard McGuire takes the idea of considering place a step further with Here, a graphic novel celebrating the events that occur in the space of one room over hundreds of thousands of years. With images as his primary medium, McGuire uses windows within windows to depict different moments in time occurring in the same space, all with a small number in the corner telling us the year.

We see the space as it was in prehistoric times, in the distant past (the original Native American inhabitants of the site) and the recent past (moments that seem to be based on the author’s own family). We also glimpse a future when, worryingly, things seem to be under-water. There’s no story as such, but fragmentary mini-narratives are rewarding to puzzle out, and the book is an innovative and captivating way to consider the domestic spaces we inhabit and how they frame our lives. Plus, the book is beautifully packaged, with the clever design touch of the spine forming one corner of the room, making Here not only a good read but also a beautiful object with which to enhance your own space.