Kalle Kniivilä reviewed What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
Looking back to our time
5 stars
A very interesting book that reflects our time from a future after a climate catastrophe and nuclear war. It is not the fictional future but our present that is in focus.
The perspective from a time when what is now threatening has already happened functions as a way of highlighting what we easily look away from, because the changes in our world are slow enough that we easily can ignore them, while they at the same time can appear unstoppable and therefore not worth our attention.
But it is not only the catastrophe looming in the future, or in the past, that makes the book interesting. The book is also full of thoughts about what we can actually know about the past and about other people in general – people in the past, in the future or in our own time.
The main character is a literary …
A very interesting book that reflects our time from a future after a climate catastrophe and nuclear war. It is not the fictional future but our present that is in focus.
The perspective from a time when what is now threatening has already happened functions as a way of highlighting what we easily look away from, because the changes in our world are slow enough that we easily can ignore them, while they at the same time can appear unstoppable and therefore not worth our attention.
But it is not only the catastrophe looming in the future, or in the past, that makes the book interesting. The book is also full of thoughts about what we can actually know about the past and about other people in general – people in the past, in the future or in our own time.
The main character is a literary scholar in the 2150s who studies our time and has unimaginable amounts of material from the internet and private messages that in his time can be easily deciphered. But it is impossible for him to decipher what people have never wanted to write down. Unless they did write it down anyway.