Amitav Ghosh turned to legends to write a story large enough for climate change

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2021

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Trying to decrease your carbon footprint can be complicated. You use metal straws, recycle your paper, and bring your own grocery bags to the store, but everything you buy is part of a supply chain that's simply way out of your control. That lack of control is central to Amitav Ghosh's retelling of an ancient Bengali myth of a nature goddess setting calamity after calamity on a merchant who's only concerned with money. In today's interview, Ghosh tells NPR's Ari Shapiro that writing his 2019 novel Gun Island based on old legends allowed for a full response to the scope of climate change.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh.
0:05.7	The UN conference on climate change wraps up tomorrow, and I don't think they fixed climate change.
0:12.0	But if you listen to the Jane Goodall interview from last week, you know how important it is not to lose hope and fall into the doom and gloom of climate change, which is why we wanted to
0:23.0	play you this interview with Amitab Ghosh. He's got a new book out now called The Nutmeg's Curse
0:28.0	that does touch on climate change, but the one we're about to hear is from 2019. It's about his
0:33.4	book, Gun Island. In it, Goss uses an old Bengali myth to frame a story about climate change
0:40.4	and give it perspective. He told NPR's Ari Shapiro that he had to dig far back because he found
0:46.4	modern literature ill-equipped to talk about the big calamities of the day. When we have these
0:53.2	catastrophes unfolding around us, we don't seem to be able to even
0:57.1	imaginatively grapple with what's in front of us.
0:59.9	But myths are big enough to really capture the enormity of what's ahead.
1:04.9	Here's the interview.
1:06.2	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
1:11.1	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.
1:15.6	On our new show, Sources and Methods.
1:17.6	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,
1:21.4	helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
1:25.2	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:30.5	The author Amitav Ghosh often sets his books at the blurry boundary between land and water.
1:36.6	His latest novel stops in several of those places, from Mangrove Islands on the border of
1:40.5	India and Bangladesh to the canals of Venice, Italy. The book is called Gun Island.
1:46.3	It's a modern retelling of a Bengali myth that Amitav Ghosh grew up with.
	...

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