Indian writer Amitav Ghosh is primarily known for his novels, such as The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004), but in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017) he tackles climate change through the lenses of history, politics, and literature. One of his main theses is that “serious” fiction has been thus far unwilling to engage with the climate catastrophe, and there is no other way for future generations to view this current generation as anything other than “deranged.”
The volume with its three sections of “Stories,” “History,” and “Politics,” grew out of a series of four lectures at the University of Chicago in 2015 as part of the Berlin Family Lectures series. Even before then, however, Ghosh was grappling with what was happening to the world. He told Bomb magazine, “Climate change became a matter of personal urgency for me while I was writing my 2005 novel The Hungry Tide. The novel is set in the Sundarbans, the great mangrove forest of the Bengal Delta. While working on the book I realized that this region was already being impacted by rising sea levels and a retreating coastline. In the years after that, even though I was occupied with a project of a different kind (the Ibis trilogy), I found myself becoming more and more preoccupied with climate change — no doubt because the impact was increasingly obvious. After I finished the trilogy, I felt a great need to put down my thoughts on environmental change and its bearing on my practice as a writer.”
When it was released in 2016, The Great Derangement received mostly positive reviews. The London Society of Economics reviewer said, “This admirable book is the latest testament to the limits of contemporary thought and language, to the frustration of human cognitive power over a world we thought we knew,” and Kirkus Reviews called it "A slim but certainly significant contribution to the climate crisis dialogue sure to provoke discussion and increased awareness about our imperiled planet." Publisher's Weekly liked the book even more than Kirkus Reviews, writing that "In this concise and utterly enlightening volume, Ghosh urges the public to find new artistic and political frameworks to understand and reduce the effects of human-caused climate change, sharing his own visionary perspective as a novelist, scholar, and citizen of our imperiled world."
