What do you think?
Rate this book
The Future Future: A Novel
A madcap story of female friendship, language, and power, from France to colonial America to the moon, from 1775 to this very moment, a historical novel like no other.
It's the eighteenth century, and Celine is in trouble. Her husband is mostly absent, fighting and fraternizing with foreign diplomats. Her parents are elsewhere. And a man, somewhere, is telling stories about her—about her affairs, her sexuality, her mad orgies and addictions and assignations. The stories aren’t true, but everyone loves them, spreading them like a terrible plague. Celine watches as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten and wrong and naughty in the world.
This is a world of decadence, saturation, and rot, of lavish parties and private salons, of purified guava and raki, of tulle and satin and sex and violence. This is a world ruled by men who are high on genocide, colonial expansion, forest redevelopment, political theory, violence against women, and, above all, language.
As France hurtles toward revolution and the planet whirls around the sun, Celine and her friends—the beautiful, stern Marta; the young Marie Antoinette—band together against evil and the tides of history in search of justice, truth, and beauty.
Adam Thirlwell’s The Future Future is set in 1775 and in the present moment; in Europe and America and on the high seas and, briefly, on the moon. Wildly inventive, hilarious, supermodern, and blindingly bright, it follows one woman on a quest to clear her name and change the world.
It's the eighteenth century, and Celine is in trouble. Her husband is mostly absent, fighting and fraternizing with foreign diplomats. Her parents are elsewhere. And a man, somewhere, is telling stories about her—about her affairs, her sexuality, her mad orgies and addictions and assignations. The stories aren’t true, but everyone loves them, spreading them like a terrible plague. Celine watches as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten and wrong and naughty in the world.
This is a world of decadence, saturation, and rot, of lavish parties and private salons, of purified guava and raki, of tulle and satin and sex and violence. This is a world ruled by men who are high on genocide, colonial expansion, forest redevelopment, political theory, violence against women, and, above all, language.
As France hurtles toward revolution and the planet whirls around the sun, Celine and her friends—the beautiful, stern Marta; the young Marie Antoinette—band together against evil and the tides of history in search of justice, truth, and beauty.
Adam Thirlwell’s The Future Future is set in 1775 and in the present moment; in Europe and America and on the high seas and, briefly, on the moon. Wildly inventive, hilarious, supermodern, and blindingly bright, it follows one woman on a quest to clear her name and change the world.
352 pages, Paperback
Published October 15, 2024
83 people are currently reading
5969 people want to read
About the author
Adam Thirlwell
36 books91 followersAdam Thirlwell was born in 1978 and grew up in North London. He is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and assistant editor of Areté magazine.
His first novel, 'Politics', a love story with digressions, was published in 2003, and his second book, 'Miss Herbert: A Book of Novels, Romances & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes', in 2007. 'Miss Herbert' won a 2008 Somerset Maugham Award. His third novel is 'The Escape' (2009).
In 2003, Adam Thirlwell was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British novelists'. He lives in Oxford.
His first novel, 'Politics', a love story with digressions, was published in 2003, and his second book, 'Miss Herbert: A Book of Novels, Romances & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes', in 2007. 'Miss Herbert' won a 2008 Somerset Maugham Award. His third novel is 'The Escape' (2009).
In 2003, Adam Thirlwell was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British novelists'. He lives in Oxford.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 98 reviews
Read
December 16, 2023I hadn't read far into The Future Future before the repetition of the word Future in the title made me think of a future tense in French grammar called the Future Anterior. It is used for things that will already have happened in the future by the time something else, which has not yet happened, will happen—in the Future Future, as it were.
Isn't that grammatical concept a little like a time warp when you think about it, a past action in the present of the future—as if the past, present, and future were rolled together like dried tobacco leaves.
The characters in this book, set in France in the late 1700s, smoke tobacco a lot. Their tobacco is shipped to Europe from British and French colonies in north America, which is perfectly credible for the time period, except that the terms the author uses to describe smoking, or indeed drinking or taking other stimulants, or sending messages to people, or speculating on land deals, or destroying the environment, make it seem as if the narrative is taking place in our times even though the build-up and playing-out of the French and American Revolutions are the actual present time of the story.
And because the author, Adam Thirlwell, is warping our perception of time with his contemporary terminology and references, it becomes clear that the way society operated in the Enlightenment* era is not that different to the way we operate today. There was a proliferation of information, there was celebrity stalking, there was outing of people in the media, there were shadowy background figures manipulating people's thoughts.
And Thirlwell even managed to make Napoleon, who enters the story towards the end, remind me of Donald Trump.
How is this person still alive? he was saying. Can someone help me out here?
No one knew if he was joking or not.
The 'person' Napoleon is talking about is a 'celebrity' called Celine who is the main character in the book (it's a third person narrative from her point of view). Celine's salons are famous before the revolution—until her messages are hacked and she gets trolled so badly in the media about her sex life that she has to flee, first to a forest deep in the French countryside, then across the ocean to North America where she hides out during the worst of the French revolution years, reinventing herself several times in the process. She felt very weird and very wired. She is so wired at times that Time itself becomes a very porous concept. She explores the future in dreams and even visits the moon.
Gustave Doré's version of visiting the moon from his Illustrations for Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso"
Celine also begins to write stories during this period, while simultaneously contemplating from a distance in both time and space the Celine she used to be in France, her little hologram or double.
Writing is a big theme in this book. It's argued that it contributes to building a better society, but that it can also destroy reputations in the blink of an eye, as Celine experienced. However, it turns out that writing itself can also be destroyed. Books did it all. Books created opinion, books brought enlightenment down into all classes of society, books destroyed fanaticism, and overthrew the prejudices that had subjugated everyone. But now books were over.
Censorship is very present in Celine's France, and Adam Thirlwell investigates it through the story of Beaumarchais, a real-life playwright and diplomat, who happens to be one of Celine's friends before her reputation gets destroyed. The real Beaumarchais had great difficulty getting his plays performed in the 1770's and 1780s as they were seen to be critical of the Monarchy. Thirlwell points out that Beaumarchais didn't fare much better under the revolutionary regime—which was even more thorough about controlling information than the Monarchy had been:
It was the most advanced system for information gathering that had so far been invented. Inside every file were memos and forms and registers containing reports on spy networks, dissident factory workers, people's sexual lives...
Celine's sex life is an important layer of the book, her relationships with several men and women rhythming the narrative. But, after her daughter Saratoga, the most important relationship Celine has is with herself. She talks to herself a lot and hears a voice answering—the voice can come from anywhere, an object, a tree, or a monument. These conversations help her understand the world, and she even explores the universe beyond our world in the company of this voice. Some of the conversations could be straight out of Alice in Wonderland:
—But how? Celine said.
—How what? said the soup.
—How that? she said,—what you said?
—I mean, said the soup, – how anything?
As I was reading Adam Thirlwell's book, I was also asking myself, But how?
How was he making an historical novel read like science fiction?
How was he making his eighteenth century cast of characters appear like participants in a reality tv show?
How did he keep me reading though sometimes I felt I was falling through time and space?
He'd probably answer, How anything?
…………………………………………
I chose to read this book right after Samuel Richardson's Pamela because I heard it was about a young eighteen-century woman who liked to write letters just as Pamela did. The two books had zero parallels apart from the messages/letters, and the fact that they were sometimes read by people they were not intended for.
This book had much more in common with the book I read before Pamela: Kate Brigg's This Little Art about language and the art of translating it.
While she's in America, Celine, now speaking beginner English, has conversations with some Iroquois people who act as interpreters between their own people and the English-speaking colonisers.
Here are some of her thoughts on the experience:
She found them very easy to talk to. She stood there, and they talked...
...it was very funny, talking to them, in her accent, which they replied to in their own accent—all of them communicating in an adopted language. It was as if this language became something new and exciting to speak, and the second language could be something much more elastic than a first language, so that, in fact, the people who thought they spoke this language fluently, because it was the only language they knew, didn't use it with the same exuberance or flare.
What a fine argument for multilingualism!
…………………………
Celine reminded me of Virginia Woolf's Orlando character in the way she seemed to slip through time and meet so many historical figures on the way. And at one point, when she's thinking about the way her dresses hamper her movement, I was reminded of a thought Woolf gave Orlando: The man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders...
…………………………
*The Enlightenment era was called Les lumières in French, the era of light (meaning understanding). The book often reminded of that notion, and also of contemporary light shows which are called Son et Lumières in France. Adam Thirlwell often describes the sky as light-filled and full of psychedelic colours so that, together with all the strange happenings in the narrative, this book felt like a mini Son et Lumières.
Isn't that grammatical concept a little like a time warp when you think about it, a past action in the present of the future—as if the past, present, and future were rolled together like dried tobacco leaves.
The characters in this book, set in France in the late 1700s, smoke tobacco a lot. Their tobacco is shipped to Europe from British and French colonies in north America, which is perfectly credible for the time period, except that the terms the author uses to describe smoking, or indeed drinking or taking other stimulants, or sending messages to people, or speculating on land deals, or destroying the environment, make it seem as if the narrative is taking place in our times even though the build-up and playing-out of the French and American Revolutions are the actual present time of the story.
And because the author, Adam Thirlwell, is warping our perception of time with his contemporary terminology and references, it becomes clear that the way society operated in the Enlightenment* era is not that different to the way we operate today. There was a proliferation of information, there was celebrity stalking, there was outing of people in the media, there were shadowy background figures manipulating people's thoughts.
And Thirlwell even managed to make Napoleon, who enters the story towards the end, remind me of Donald Trump.
How is this person still alive? he was saying. Can someone help me out here?
No one knew if he was joking or not.
The 'person' Napoleon is talking about is a 'celebrity' called Celine who is the main character in the book (it's a third person narrative from her point of view). Celine's salons are famous before the revolution—until her messages are hacked and she gets trolled so badly in the media about her sex life that she has to flee, first to a forest deep in the French countryside, then across the ocean to North America where she hides out during the worst of the French revolution years, reinventing herself several times in the process. She felt very weird and very wired. She is so wired at times that Time itself becomes a very porous concept. She explores the future in dreams and even visits the moon.
Gustave Doré's version of visiting the moon from his Illustrations for Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso"
Celine also begins to write stories during this period, while simultaneously contemplating from a distance in both time and space the Celine she used to be in France, her little hologram or double.
Writing is a big theme in this book. It's argued that it contributes to building a better society, but that it can also destroy reputations in the blink of an eye, as Celine experienced. However, it turns out that writing itself can also be destroyed. Books did it all. Books created opinion, books brought enlightenment down into all classes of society, books destroyed fanaticism, and overthrew the prejudices that had subjugated everyone. But now books were over.
Censorship is very present in Celine's France, and Adam Thirlwell investigates it through the story of Beaumarchais, a real-life playwright and diplomat, who happens to be one of Celine's friends before her reputation gets destroyed. The real Beaumarchais had great difficulty getting his plays performed in the 1770's and 1780s as they were seen to be critical of the Monarchy. Thirlwell points out that Beaumarchais didn't fare much better under the revolutionary regime—which was even more thorough about controlling information than the Monarchy had been:
It was the most advanced system for information gathering that had so far been invented. Inside every file were memos and forms and registers containing reports on spy networks, dissident factory workers, people's sexual lives...
Celine's sex life is an important layer of the book, her relationships with several men and women rhythming the narrative. But, after her daughter Saratoga, the most important relationship Celine has is with herself. She talks to herself a lot and hears a voice answering—the voice can come from anywhere, an object, a tree, or a monument. These conversations help her understand the world, and she even explores the universe beyond our world in the company of this voice. Some of the conversations could be straight out of Alice in Wonderland:
—But how? Celine said.
—How what? said the soup.
—How that? she said,—what you said?
—I mean, said the soup, – how anything?
As I was reading Adam Thirlwell's book, I was also asking myself, But how?
How was he making an historical novel read like science fiction?
How was he making his eighteenth century cast of characters appear like participants in a reality tv show?
How did he keep me reading though sometimes I felt I was falling through time and space?
He'd probably answer, How anything?
…………………………………………
I chose to read this book right after Samuel Richardson's Pamela because I heard it was about a young eighteen-century woman who liked to write letters just as Pamela did. The two books had zero parallels apart from the messages/letters, and the fact that they were sometimes read by people they were not intended for.
This book had much more in common with the book I read before Pamela: Kate Brigg's This Little Art about language and the art of translating it.
While she's in America, Celine, now speaking beginner English, has conversations with some Iroquois people who act as interpreters between their own people and the English-speaking colonisers.
Here are some of her thoughts on the experience:
She found them very easy to talk to. She stood there, and they talked...
...it was very funny, talking to them, in her accent, which they replied to in their own accent—all of them communicating in an adopted language. It was as if this language became something new and exciting to speak, and the second language could be something much more elastic than a first language, so that, in fact, the people who thought they spoke this language fluently, because it was the only language they knew, didn't use it with the same exuberance or flare.
What a fine argument for multilingualism!
…………………………
Celine reminded me of Virginia Woolf's Orlando character in the way she seemed to slip through time and meet so many historical figures on the way. And at one point, when she's thinking about the way her dresses hamper her movement, I was reminded of a thought Woolf gave Orlando: The man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders...
…………………………
*The Enlightenment era was called Les lumières in French, the era of light (meaning understanding). The book often reminded of that notion, and also of contemporary light shows which are called Son et Lumières in France. Adam Thirlwell often describes the sky as light-filled and full of psychedelic colours so that, together with all the strange happenings in the narrative, this book felt like a mini Son et Lumières.
February 11, 2024
I have not read any novels by Adam Thirlwell before. For ages, I planed to read his The Delighted States which is still on my shelf unopened; and this novel has jumped the queue. But now i hope it won’t be long until I've got to that book.
“The Future Future” is labeled a historical novel. However, it is far from what is normally categorised in this way. It is certainly inspired by a real episode predating the French revolution. But other than that it is quite a bit “wilder” than what this genre is known for. This book is shamelessly anachronistic in its language, sometimes demonstratively and absurdly counterfactual and "quirky" in a good sense of the word. It does not limit itself to the past. It even contains a cameo trip to the moon (a nod to Jules Verne?). I suspect it would puzzle the lovers the genre. In fact i’ve read this book back to back with Man-Eating Typewriter where the actions take place in the late 60s of the previous century. Both novel deal with history and an ability to envisage an utopia, the future to some extent; both are the works of experimental fiction. However, I caught myself thinking that “the Typewriter” was more focused on reflecting the atmosphere of its period compared to this one.
If I would attempt to categorise it, I would call it “systems novel with a light touch”. Systems novels are normally associated with the works attempting to connect seemingly unconnected phenomena, times or places and reveal new patterns in the complex reality. I think that what Thirlwell is doing here: the scope of the novel is a globe; the timeframe: the future in the same way as the past, but arguably the most it is about the present; interconnectedness is the essence of the book. However, the “light touch” is because while talking about challenging ideas, Thirlwell, does not overburden the book with the scientific jargon or eager to demonstrate the evidence his potentially extensive research.
In fact, the writing style of the novel is almost conversational. I was thinking: "that is how you would tell a story to a precocious child". And that helps him to get to the core of the ideas he cares about without unnecessary destructions. The writing seems almost deceptively simple, but in reality it is just very lucid, clear; and a pleasure to read.
The novel is written from a female perspective. This is by itself is a rarity in our times when a male author dares to write purely from the female point of view. From the first pages, we are introduced to Celine, a very young lady of means in the 18th century Paris. The majority of ideas and observations in the book are presented through her eyes. We also meet with a number of her friends, some of them are real historical figures. I was pleased that the time frame of the novel was not narrowly defined. But at minimum, it was spanning Celine’s lifetime. A lot of recent experimental fiction i’ve read takes a form of an interior monologue lasting a day or so. This is not one of them. And it was refreshing to read a novel still attempting an individual subjectivity, but keeping a wide time span as well.
As it sometimes happens, the best description of this novel’s ambition is actually within the text:
“Beaumarchais was telling her all the time that he wanted a different kind of writing. All the scripts and novels he was seeing were the same. There must be more to life, said the cats and dogs of every village in every story – all of them keen to get to the neighbouring village, in which there would just be other cats and dogs lamenting that there must be more to life. It needed a bigger perspective. For instance, said Beaumarchais, he still did not understand how the universe began. There was no space and then there was space. Did this not seem a logical impossibility? And until a work could include this, he was not sure it was worth writing at all.”
This novel indeed attempts a big scale of questions. Again, I find it refreshing in the current literary scene and worth encouraging. It even includes an attempt at suggesting a cosmology of universe, even if more poetic than convincing. By the way, the aforementioned Beaumarchais was very real 18th century dramatist and a diplomate or a fixer of some standing.
The starting premise of this novel stems from Thirlwell’s observation that “graphomania” has penetrated all layers of contemporary society. His views are summarised in his article in the Guardian. According to him, everyone is a “writer” now. It is a “universal syndrome”. But the language that is dominating public sphere is of a very peculiar kind: it “is designed to provoke the most luridly moral emotions, such as contempt or self-congratulation.” It leads to polarisation and inability to have a minimal discussion. The language has been weaponised in many cases.
Thirlwell notes the historical parallel: the 18th century pre-Revolutionary France. Something similar was taking place there. They did not have our technology, but apparently they’ve managed just fine to face a similar problem. Coincidently, his impression is confirmed by another article I was reading that quoted Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris writing in 1789:
“Everyone wants to be an author or reader. Even the coachman reads the latest work on his perch. Every person down to domestic servants and water carriers is involved in the debating,”
Some example of this radical writing were directed against the upper class women basically slurring and revealing the fictional “secrets” of their sexual life. Celine, Thirlwell’s protagonist is one of these women. But they have found the way of resisting using language. They did not use the same kind of hate speech and slur though. They did not try to denounce their tormentors directly or reject the accusations. Instead they’ve created separate networks of communications and played with the forms of linguistic expressions that were not “violent and brutal” but “tender media for the production of pleasure and more friendship”. In short, according to Thirlwell, they resisted with different types of discourse and linguistic forms. With hindsight, maybe they were not mega-successful, i have to add. But at least they’ve acted.
Thirlwell’s diagnosis of the modern malady might not be not very original. But his historical parallel and the idea of resistance is interesting. It seems, that this novel might constitute an act of such linguistic resistance for our times.
Inevitably considering her situation, Celine experiences are related to language. She is trying to understand what is the link between this world created by language and the real one: “At any moment, it turned out, the old world could disappear entirely and become little digital strings of symbols, vanishing into the white air”.
She, and Thirlwell through her, poses even wider philosophical question: what is our experience of the world before it turns out in a linguistic expression or communication? She is not very impressed:
“It’s really terrible how language modifies the world, she was thinking. So much of what’s important in a life happens incredibly rarely, sometimes only once, and therefore it’s distressing how quickly language has to take it over, our experience, and make it neater and more regular and less abstractly splurged.”
It made me think: can we at all convey this unique experience without words? Is art, music, gesture occasionally is a better expressive medium?
On the other hand, it has reminded me of Joan Didion’s The White Album where she talks about human tendency to make a smooth narrative out of sequential but potentially unrelated events. This is especially acute in the cases when such narratives help to justify one’s action, or the lack of it, or it helps to avoid facing certain facts. Famous: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, more specifically: to keep going as per usual, but to justify to ourselves why; to make ourselves look better in our own eyes; to obtain some meaning and move on. Didion expands:
“We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
“Especially if we are writers”. But everyone is a writer in Celine’s world, and in ours as well, according to Thirlwell. Celine further observes “everyone wrote to each other every day, as if an experience were not an experience until it had acquired its own image in words”.
Still with all this writing, we hardly possess a suitable language to imagine the future. Not what happens in a month or a day but “alien and incommunicable future, future” as one character calls it in the novel.
It might be a scary thing considering what we know about our present. Probably it was a scary stuff for Celine as well. But it does not have to be. Maybe this is another message Thirlwell wants to convey. Maybe by trying hard at imagining better future we would make it nearer or at least have a word in shaping it. Celine certainly does try. And though I did not find her imaginings and her Moon’s dream, very original or very convincing I enjoyed her trying.
Recently, a review by the one of my friends here on GR has drawn my attention to a phenomenon called “ontological turn in anthropology”. I've never heard of it before and i was intrigued. It turned out to be quite complex theory to define in a few worlds. But it is worth trying, bear with me.
Traditionally, the anthropologists assume that there is a single object of study (ontologically - the natural world) but every group (of people) has got a different perspective on this single world. These perspectives were traditionally called “culture”. So cultural differences in this traditional view assume that there is such a phenomenon as “common humanity”, the integral part of this natural world. However, now there is a significant support for an anthropological theory that there is no such thing like the single natural world. According to this theory, there are many natural worlds instead.
So as far as i understand this, a culture as perspective on one world is too narrow and won’t help us here. Instead, we need to endeavour to reconceptualise the object of our study, perhaps, another natural world, on its own terms. It might sound like just a play of words. But it is not apparently.
This article Ontological turn provides a fabulous example how to grapple with this:
“If you imagine multiculturalism in diagrammatic form as a circle of viewpoints from differing perspectives onto the same central object, multinaturalism would look the same, only the labels would be inverted: one central viewpoint onto multiple different objects. The point is perhaps best encapsulated in an anecdote from Levi-Strauss: when the Spanish were debating, at a series of now-infamous debates at Valladolid in the sixteenth century, whether or not Amerindians were human on the basis of whether or not they possessed souls, the inhabitants of the Antilles were drowning captured Spanish soldiers in order to answer the very same question, only their concern was whether or not the Spanish had bodies like them, or if they were ghosts.”
In summary, traditional thinking was: many worldviews (or cultures), only one world. “The ontological turn, instead, proposes that worlds, as well as worldviews, may vary.” (a quote from the same article).
It takes time to get one’s head around this. But I've decided to talk about it here as i’ve noticed that some writers seemingly incorporate those ideas into their work. I think i can feel the presence of this theory in this novel. It seems, Thirlwell probes this idea and attempts to reveal the presence of those different “natural worlds” in various conceptual settings. For example, this passage:
The third legend of Toussaint was that he was simply monstrous. All of them were legends about a person who was ignored, or unknown, by what was assumed to be the world. ...A legend is a story about the way no world ever realises that it’s surrounded by another world, until it is too late.
There are many such attempts to imagine these “other worlds” in the novel: the unknown ones, the imaginary ones or sadly - the destroyed by colonialism in different forms and irrevocably disappeared ones as a result. At one point, Celine interacts with the indigenous tribes in America; in another - she is on the Moon.
Incidentally, Toussaint L’Ouverture, another historical personage appearing in the novel, was a former slave who has lead the Haitian revolution in the 18th century.
In anthropology, the “ontological turn” attracts both strong proponents and strong critics. I am not in the position to judge the robustness of the theory, but it certainly forms the basis for interesting thought-provoking literature.
Another tendency i’ve noticed, possibly under the influence of anthropology as well, that some writers are trying to write of human history in the context of much bigger narrative: the natural history, the power, the impermanency and complexity of it. For example, in this book: “All history including the history of words it turned out was really natural history.”
In his last two novels, Carlos Fonseca, another talented contemporary writer, addresses a similar theme. For example, in Natural History, a character plans to write “a novel about the history of fire: a novel where fire was the true protagonist, a novel that would start with the chemical equation of combustion and then spread over all the continents and all the ages, a novel that would cross history like a field in flames.”
In this book, Thirlwell picks up forrest in a similar role. A forrest grows and matures with Celine. In the forrest she first hears “the voices” that to become the key elements of Thirlwell’s cosmology in this novel: “The universe is a collection of voices that can echo each other and talk.” Forrest is also where (or how) the novel ends. In my view, Thirlwell has achieved something quite special here. He has managed to make a protagonist our of this forrest without visibly anthropomorphising it.
Generally, it seems the “ontological turn” has spilled of anthropology and started to percolate a wider discourse. Respectively, another implication of this brings usinevitably back to language, or rather to the limits of human understanding of another human. In the same article i brought up above, there is a following illustration:
“If your interlocutor tells you that the tree she is pointing to is in fact a spirit, do you, for example, describe this as a belief? You might, but to your interlocutor it is not of course any such thing: to her, it is a fact.”
It reminded me a wonderful piece of fiction I’ve read recently Study for Obedience. In that novel, a protagonist faced the accusation that her dog has impregnated someone’s else dog even though he was surgically neutered:
“What I knew about Bert’s sterility was a veterinary fact, perhaps even a biological one, but I acknowledged that this was only one way of seeing things. The woman had, doubtless, her own worldview, one that was evidently incompatible with mine but no less true, according to its own internal rules.”
In the first situation with the tree (i hope no-one would find me ignorant for referring to it that way), “a “recursive” anthropologist, would ask what sort of adjustments to our conceptual schema have to be made in order for it to make sense to think of the tree as a spirit.” (as per the article). But the second situation with the dogs makes me feel a bit “stalemated” and a bit sad. I am not sure i would be able to go all the way to make “necessary adjustments” to my “conceptual schema” to meet this person even half way in her version of the dog-truth. Neither would she. But we should have to manage to live together in a society somehow.
In case the “ontological turn” appeared to be correct, I personally would greatly miss an assumption that there is something that called “common humanity”. Or did we use to refer to this as “common human values”? Who are those "we" in any case?.. But still my ideal is that those old "common values" do exist. But then reluctantly, under the growing evidence of the contrary in the world around me, i seem to move away from that ideal.
One would still hope together with another Thirlwell’s character, Izabela, that “truth could be made on this chaotic planet, even if it was always made of falsehoods.” And i believe but “truth made of falsehoods” Izabela meant the power of art, including literature.
_______________
A few of many passages/ideas I liked:
about conversations:
"...inside true conversations there was always a moment when a voice emerged that belonged to none of the people who were in the conversation but was the voice of the conversation itself, and when that happened it was like a little lamp switched on, spreading warm light in a limited space. Other people thought of this as a god emerging or speaking through a person but Celine did not think like that. It was the voice of the conversation, she thought, that belonged to everyone and to no one and to let it emerge and give it space was maybe the most important thing you could do."
On America and politics there:
"To only have a small vocabulary had a strange effect on reading, as if these articles or reports she was reading were hinting at a mystery that those who spoke the language more fluently might never notice. It was apparent that people here feared many things, they feared people from the North and East and West and South, they feared the black population, the people from the islands or those who had escaped from slavery in the South, they feared the Mohawks and the Sioux, and in reaction to this fear they seemed to propose a total violence against the people who made them afraid, which didn’t seem rational to Celine or in any way likeable, even though the people who thought these things could also, as she knew, be very caring and attentive in different ways."
Relevant and new:
The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789
“The Future Future” is labeled a historical novel. However, it is far from what is normally categorised in this way. It is certainly inspired by a real episode predating the French revolution. But other than that it is quite a bit “wilder” than what this genre is known for. This book is shamelessly anachronistic in its language, sometimes demonstratively and absurdly counterfactual and "quirky" in a good sense of the word. It does not limit itself to the past. It even contains a cameo trip to the moon (a nod to Jules Verne?). I suspect it would puzzle the lovers the genre. In fact i’ve read this book back to back with Man-Eating Typewriter where the actions take place in the late 60s of the previous century. Both novel deal with history and an ability to envisage an utopia, the future to some extent; both are the works of experimental fiction. However, I caught myself thinking that “the Typewriter” was more focused on reflecting the atmosphere of its period compared to this one.
If I would attempt to categorise it, I would call it “systems novel with a light touch”. Systems novels are normally associated with the works attempting to connect seemingly unconnected phenomena, times or places and reveal new patterns in the complex reality. I think that what Thirlwell is doing here: the scope of the novel is a globe; the timeframe: the future in the same way as the past, but arguably the most it is about the present; interconnectedness is the essence of the book. However, the “light touch” is because while talking about challenging ideas, Thirlwell, does not overburden the book with the scientific jargon or eager to demonstrate the evidence his potentially extensive research.
In fact, the writing style of the novel is almost conversational. I was thinking: "that is how you would tell a story to a precocious child". And that helps him to get to the core of the ideas he cares about without unnecessary destructions. The writing seems almost deceptively simple, but in reality it is just very lucid, clear; and a pleasure to read.
The novel is written from a female perspective. This is by itself is a rarity in our times when a male author dares to write purely from the female point of view. From the first pages, we are introduced to Celine, a very young lady of means in the 18th century Paris. The majority of ideas and observations in the book are presented through her eyes. We also meet with a number of her friends, some of them are real historical figures. I was pleased that the time frame of the novel was not narrowly defined. But at minimum, it was spanning Celine’s lifetime. A lot of recent experimental fiction i’ve read takes a form of an interior monologue lasting a day or so. This is not one of them. And it was refreshing to read a novel still attempting an individual subjectivity, but keeping a wide time span as well.
As it sometimes happens, the best description of this novel’s ambition is actually within the text:
“Beaumarchais was telling her all the time that he wanted a different kind of writing. All the scripts and novels he was seeing were the same. There must be more to life, said the cats and dogs of every village in every story – all of them keen to get to the neighbouring village, in which there would just be other cats and dogs lamenting that there must be more to life. It needed a bigger perspective. For instance, said Beaumarchais, he still did not understand how the universe began. There was no space and then there was space. Did this not seem a logical impossibility? And until a work could include this, he was not sure it was worth writing at all.”
This novel indeed attempts a big scale of questions. Again, I find it refreshing in the current literary scene and worth encouraging. It even includes an attempt at suggesting a cosmology of universe, even if more poetic than convincing. By the way, the aforementioned Beaumarchais was very real 18th century dramatist and a diplomate or a fixer of some standing.
The starting premise of this novel stems from Thirlwell’s observation that “graphomania” has penetrated all layers of contemporary society. His views are summarised in his article in the Guardian. According to him, everyone is a “writer” now. It is a “universal syndrome”. But the language that is dominating public sphere is of a very peculiar kind: it “is designed to provoke the most luridly moral emotions, such as contempt or self-congratulation.” It leads to polarisation and inability to have a minimal discussion. The language has been weaponised in many cases.
Thirlwell notes the historical parallel: the 18th century pre-Revolutionary France. Something similar was taking place there. They did not have our technology, but apparently they’ve managed just fine to face a similar problem. Coincidently, his impression is confirmed by another article I was reading that quoted Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris writing in 1789:
“Everyone wants to be an author or reader. Even the coachman reads the latest work on his perch. Every person down to domestic servants and water carriers is involved in the debating,”
Some example of this radical writing were directed against the upper class women basically slurring and revealing the fictional “secrets” of their sexual life. Celine, Thirlwell’s protagonist is one of these women. But they have found the way of resisting using language. They did not use the same kind of hate speech and slur though. They did not try to denounce their tormentors directly or reject the accusations. Instead they’ve created separate networks of communications and played with the forms of linguistic expressions that were not “violent and brutal” but “tender media for the production of pleasure and more friendship”. In short, according to Thirlwell, they resisted with different types of discourse and linguistic forms. With hindsight, maybe they were not mega-successful, i have to add. But at least they’ve acted.
Thirlwell’s diagnosis of the modern malady might not be not very original. But his historical parallel and the idea of resistance is interesting. It seems, that this novel might constitute an act of such linguistic resistance for our times.
Inevitably considering her situation, Celine experiences are related to language. She is trying to understand what is the link between this world created by language and the real one: “At any moment, it turned out, the old world could disappear entirely and become little digital strings of symbols, vanishing into the white air”.
She, and Thirlwell through her, poses even wider philosophical question: what is our experience of the world before it turns out in a linguistic expression or communication? She is not very impressed:
“It’s really terrible how language modifies the world, she was thinking. So much of what’s important in a life happens incredibly rarely, sometimes only once, and therefore it’s distressing how quickly language has to take it over, our experience, and make it neater and more regular and less abstractly splurged.”
It made me think: can we at all convey this unique experience without words? Is art, music, gesture occasionally is a better expressive medium?
On the other hand, it has reminded me of Joan Didion’s The White Album where she talks about human tendency to make a smooth narrative out of sequential but potentially unrelated events. This is especially acute in the cases when such narratives help to justify one’s action, or the lack of it, or it helps to avoid facing certain facts. Famous: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, more specifically: to keep going as per usual, but to justify to ourselves why; to make ourselves look better in our own eyes; to obtain some meaning and move on. Didion expands:
“We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
“Especially if we are writers”. But everyone is a writer in Celine’s world, and in ours as well, according to Thirlwell. Celine further observes “everyone wrote to each other every day, as if an experience were not an experience until it had acquired its own image in words”.
Still with all this writing, we hardly possess a suitable language to imagine the future. Not what happens in a month or a day but “alien and incommunicable future, future” as one character calls it in the novel.
It might be a scary thing considering what we know about our present. Probably it was a scary stuff for Celine as well. But it does not have to be. Maybe this is another message Thirlwell wants to convey. Maybe by trying hard at imagining better future we would make it nearer or at least have a word in shaping it. Celine certainly does try. And though I did not find her imaginings and her Moon’s dream, very original or very convincing I enjoyed her trying.
Recently, a review by the one of my friends here on GR has drawn my attention to a phenomenon called “ontological turn in anthropology”. I've never heard of it before and i was intrigued. It turned out to be quite complex theory to define in a few worlds. But it is worth trying, bear with me.
Traditionally, the anthropologists assume that there is a single object of study (ontologically - the natural world) but every group (of people) has got a different perspective on this single world. These perspectives were traditionally called “culture”. So cultural differences in this traditional view assume that there is such a phenomenon as “common humanity”, the integral part of this natural world. However, now there is a significant support for an anthropological theory that there is no such thing like the single natural world. According to this theory, there are many natural worlds instead.
So as far as i understand this, a culture as perspective on one world is too narrow and won’t help us here. Instead, we need to endeavour to reconceptualise the object of our study, perhaps, another natural world, on its own terms. It might sound like just a play of words. But it is not apparently.
This article Ontological turn provides a fabulous example how to grapple with this:
“If you imagine multiculturalism in diagrammatic form as a circle of viewpoints from differing perspectives onto the same central object, multinaturalism would look the same, only the labels would be inverted: one central viewpoint onto multiple different objects. The point is perhaps best encapsulated in an anecdote from Levi-Strauss: when the Spanish were debating, at a series of now-infamous debates at Valladolid in the sixteenth century, whether or not Amerindians were human on the basis of whether or not they possessed souls, the inhabitants of the Antilles were drowning captured Spanish soldiers in order to answer the very same question, only their concern was whether or not the Spanish had bodies like them, or if they were ghosts.”
In summary, traditional thinking was: many worldviews (or cultures), only one world. “The ontological turn, instead, proposes that worlds, as well as worldviews, may vary.” (a quote from the same article).
It takes time to get one’s head around this. But I've decided to talk about it here as i’ve noticed that some writers seemingly incorporate those ideas into their work. I think i can feel the presence of this theory in this novel. It seems, Thirlwell probes this idea and attempts to reveal the presence of those different “natural worlds” in various conceptual settings. For example, this passage:
The third legend of Toussaint was that he was simply monstrous. All of them were legends about a person who was ignored, or unknown, by what was assumed to be the world. ...A legend is a story about the way no world ever realises that it’s surrounded by another world, until it is too late.
There are many such attempts to imagine these “other worlds” in the novel: the unknown ones, the imaginary ones or sadly - the destroyed by colonialism in different forms and irrevocably disappeared ones as a result. At one point, Celine interacts with the indigenous tribes in America; in another - she is on the Moon.
Incidentally, Toussaint L’Ouverture, another historical personage appearing in the novel, was a former slave who has lead the Haitian revolution in the 18th century.
In anthropology, the “ontological turn” attracts both strong proponents and strong critics. I am not in the position to judge the robustness of the theory, but it certainly forms the basis for interesting thought-provoking literature.
Another tendency i’ve noticed, possibly under the influence of anthropology as well, that some writers are trying to write of human history in the context of much bigger narrative: the natural history, the power, the impermanency and complexity of it. For example, in this book: “All history including the history of words it turned out was really natural history.”
In his last two novels, Carlos Fonseca, another talented contemporary writer, addresses a similar theme. For example, in Natural History, a character plans to write “a novel about the history of fire: a novel where fire was the true protagonist, a novel that would start with the chemical equation of combustion and then spread over all the continents and all the ages, a novel that would cross history like a field in flames.”
In this book, Thirlwell picks up forrest in a similar role. A forrest grows and matures with Celine. In the forrest she first hears “the voices” that to become the key elements of Thirlwell’s cosmology in this novel: “The universe is a collection of voices that can echo each other and talk.” Forrest is also where (or how) the novel ends. In my view, Thirlwell has achieved something quite special here. He has managed to make a protagonist our of this forrest without visibly anthropomorphising it.
Generally, it seems the “ontological turn” has spilled of anthropology and started to percolate a wider discourse. Respectively, another implication of this brings usinevitably back to language, or rather to the limits of human understanding of another human. In the same article i brought up above, there is a following illustration:
“If your interlocutor tells you that the tree she is pointing to is in fact a spirit, do you, for example, describe this as a belief? You might, but to your interlocutor it is not of course any such thing: to her, it is a fact.”
It reminded me a wonderful piece of fiction I’ve read recently Study for Obedience. In that novel, a protagonist faced the accusation that her dog has impregnated someone’s else dog even though he was surgically neutered:
“What I knew about Bert’s sterility was a veterinary fact, perhaps even a biological one, but I acknowledged that this was only one way of seeing things. The woman had, doubtless, her own worldview, one that was evidently incompatible with mine but no less true, according to its own internal rules.”
In the first situation with the tree (i hope no-one would find me ignorant for referring to it that way), “a “recursive” anthropologist, would ask what sort of adjustments to our conceptual schema have to be made in order for it to make sense to think of the tree as a spirit.” (as per the article). But the second situation with the dogs makes me feel a bit “stalemated” and a bit sad. I am not sure i would be able to go all the way to make “necessary adjustments” to my “conceptual schema” to meet this person even half way in her version of the dog-truth. Neither would she. But we should have to manage to live together in a society somehow.
In case the “ontological turn” appeared to be correct, I personally would greatly miss an assumption that there is something that called “common humanity”. Or did we use to refer to this as “common human values”? Who are those "we" in any case?.. But still my ideal is that those old "common values" do exist. But then reluctantly, under the growing evidence of the contrary in the world around me, i seem to move away from that ideal.
One would still hope together with another Thirlwell’s character, Izabela, that “truth could be made on this chaotic planet, even if it was always made of falsehoods.” And i believe but “truth made of falsehoods” Izabela meant the power of art, including literature.
_______________
A few of many passages/ideas I liked:
about conversations:
"...inside true conversations there was always a moment when a voice emerged that belonged to none of the people who were in the conversation but was the voice of the conversation itself, and when that happened it was like a little lamp switched on, spreading warm light in a limited space. Other people thought of this as a god emerging or speaking through a person but Celine did not think like that. It was the voice of the conversation, she thought, that belonged to everyone and to no one and to let it emerge and give it space was maybe the most important thing you could do."
On America and politics there:
"To only have a small vocabulary had a strange effect on reading, as if these articles or reports she was reading were hinting at a mystery that those who spoke the language more fluently might never notice. It was apparent that people here feared many things, they feared people from the North and East and West and South, they feared the black population, the people from the islands or those who had escaped from slavery in the South, they feared the Mohawks and the Sioux, and in reaction to this fear they seemed to propose a total violence against the people who made them afraid, which didn’t seem rational to Celine or in any way likeable, even though the people who thought these things could also, as she knew, be very caring and attentive in different ways."
Relevant and new:
The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789
October 15, 2023
Shortlisted for the 2023 Goldsmiths Prize
This of course took place in a time when everything was happening at the same time, because everything was being connected to everything else by little networks that were voracious and expansive, but not everyone had understood this. Celine was beginning to understand this, some others were understanding this, but many people continued to believe that what happened was happening only to them. Little systems, however, were expanding everywhere, creating related effects. In America, the Americans were trying to kill the British while also trying to kill some Iroquois and others. But to kill as many British as they wanted to kill, the Americans needed the Iroquois as allies. There were therefore many crisis meetings, and on the outcome of these conversations which were also negotiations many possible futures depended, not only for the people who seemed most directly involved but also people who at that moment never thought that such events could be relevant to them at all. One of these was a meeting that took place in a forest near the Ohio River, in an overcrowded cabana, between George Washington, an American general, and Louis Cook, a Mohawk chief. Its subject was the future of what some people called America and others called the great hunting grounds.
Adam Thirlwell's The Future Future opens in 1775, in pre-revolutionary France, but as the title of the novel might suggest this is far from conventional historical fiction. The judges' citation from the Goldsmiths Prize describes this as:
Thirlwell himself explains the timing of the novel's setting as follows:
The novel opens with the main character, Celine, a society woman, finding herself the subject of scrullilous, often pornographic pamphlets (although I was pleased to see Thirlwell keeping most of the sex in this novel off his own pages), which also serve as attacks on the officials of the last embers of the Ancien Régime.
Thirlwell's inspiration is the historical pamphlets that did indeed circulate in this period, in particular those written in London by the self-styled Chevalier de Morande. When he threatened to publish one on the sexual exploits of Louis XV’s mistress, Madame du Barry, "Mémoires secrets d’une femme publique", Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was sent by the French Government to London to negotiate with Morande, securing their destruction for a one-off payment of 32,000 livres and a pension of 4,000 livres.
"The French lawyer in London" (1774) in the possession of the British Museum depicts this:
Beaumarchais is now best known for his plays Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro, themselves, particularly the latter, best known for the operas based on them, and he himself was, per Wikipedia, variously "a watchmaker, inventor, playwright, musician, diplomat, spy, publisher, horticulturist, arms dealer, satirist, financier and revolutionary (both French and American)." A fictionalised version of him appears in the novel and this interconnectedness (see the opening quote to my review) and theme of writing, transmission and translaton appears key to Thirlwell's manifesto (indeed the novel reminds me more of Tom McCarthy's previous work than Thirlwell's the two both previously shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2015)
What if the true art of language wasn’t literature, but translation? wrote Izabela
Although perhaps the most important focus of the work is the location and exercise of power.
There are references to the French both supporting and opposed by revolutionary regimes - revolutionary America, and their intermediation in dealings between Washington and the Mohawk tribes, to Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, and (I was less clear on the historic links) to I think French Polynesia, although much of this is referred to indirectly.
I said earlier this was far from conventional historical fiction and linguistic anachronisms abound from page 1 with a reference to Samizdat literature, and within a few pages the hosts waiting for the most important guests to arrive at the first of Celine's salons compare the experience (or the narrator puts their thoughts in that way) to the small-talk that takes place while employees wait for the boss to join a conference call. Thirlwell's intention, I think, is not so much though to be anachronistic, as to produce a flattening effect (he typically refers to any form of transport by the neutral term 'vehicle'), a blurring of time, suggesting the universality of his themes. He most explicitly does this via a brief visit to Celine to the Moon, in 2231. and the longer-term distanced perspective of the lunar dwellers on terrestrial activity.
Other running themes include mycelia and colours, particularly of the sky (starting on the second page "the sky was blue then pink, then pink then blue").
It all makes for both an impressive work - and I can see why the Goldsmiths Prize nominated it - but a slightly unsatisfactory read. There is an oddly detached element to the narrative - even while the characters are trying to avoid becoming victims of la Terreur, there is little sense of drama - and at times this reader suspected he had not grasped Thirlwell's artistic intent. Indeed this quote rather resonated with me (and perhaps the author?):
He never replied to her messages, or only answered them bizarrely, as if asserting some oblique power, maintaining philosophical conversations that made no sense. He had recently read that novel, he wrote to her, the one everyone loved called Messages. It was a novel she had once recommended to him but he had never read it, he said. And now, the other night, he found himself reading it and understanding why she loved it so much —and then pitying these poor writers, poor geniuses, whose fate was always to be misunderstood by their contemporaries.
3.5 stars. Rounded to 3 for now while the book settles.
This of course took place in a time when everything was happening at the same time, because everything was being connected to everything else by little networks that were voracious and expansive, but not everyone had understood this. Celine was beginning to understand this, some others were understanding this, but many people continued to believe that what happened was happening only to them. Little systems, however, were expanding everywhere, creating related effects. In America, the Americans were trying to kill the British while also trying to kill some Iroquois and others. But to kill as many British as they wanted to kill, the Americans needed the Iroquois as allies. There were therefore many crisis meetings, and on the outcome of these conversations which were also negotiations many possible futures depended, not only for the people who seemed most directly involved but also people who at that moment never thought that such events could be relevant to them at all. One of these was a meeting that took place in a forest near the Ohio River, in an overcrowded cabana, between George Washington, an American general, and Louis Cook, a Mohawk chief. Its subject was the future of what some people called America and others called the great hunting grounds.
Adam Thirlwell's The Future Future opens in 1775, in pre-revolutionary France, but as the title of the novel might suggest this is far from conventional historical fiction. The judges' citation from the Goldsmiths Prize describes this as:
An elegant and adamant dispatch from the crossroad where inner consciousness meets and sustains extrinsic self. The perspective unfolds like a map and turns as a globe turns, drawing the reader into finely etched pursuit of a protagonist’s almost subliminal secret: self possession that’s contemporaneous with fulfilling the claims of an era.
Thirlwell himself explains the timing of the novel's setting as follows:
I guess it was a mixture of the sudden predominance of writing and information media, coupled with the proliferation of technologies to reduce the distance that came from colonisation. So the idea was that whole areas were suddenly coming into contact with other areas and power was being exercised.
The novel opens with the main character, Celine, a society woman, finding herself the subject of scrullilous, often pornographic pamphlets (although I was pleased to see Thirlwell keeping most of the sex in this novel off his own pages), which also serve as attacks on the officials of the last embers of the Ancien Régime.
Thirlwell's inspiration is the historical pamphlets that did indeed circulate in this period, in particular those written in London by the self-styled Chevalier de Morande. When he threatened to publish one on the sexual exploits of Louis XV’s mistress, Madame du Barry, "Mémoires secrets d’une femme publique", Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was sent by the French Government to London to negotiate with Morande, securing their destruction for a one-off payment of 32,000 livres and a pension of 4,000 livres.
"The French lawyer in London" (1774) in the possession of the British Museum depicts this:
Beaumarchais is now best known for his plays Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro, themselves, particularly the latter, best known for the operas based on them, and he himself was, per Wikipedia, variously "a watchmaker, inventor, playwright, musician, diplomat, spy, publisher, horticulturist, arms dealer, satirist, financier and revolutionary (both French and American)." A fictionalised version of him appears in the novel and this interconnectedness (see the opening quote to my review) and theme of writing, transmission and translaton appears key to Thirlwell's manifesto (indeed the novel reminds me more of Tom McCarthy's previous work than Thirlwell's the two both previously shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2015)
What if the true art of language wasn’t literature, but translation? wrote Izabela
Although perhaps the most important focus of the work is the location and exercise of power.
There are references to the French both supporting and opposed by revolutionary regimes - revolutionary America, and their intermediation in dealings between Washington and the Mohawk tribes, to Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, and (I was less clear on the historic links) to I think French Polynesia, although much of this is referred to indirectly.
I said earlier this was far from conventional historical fiction and linguistic anachronisms abound from page 1 with a reference to Samizdat literature, and within a few pages the hosts waiting for the most important guests to arrive at the first of Celine's salons compare the experience (or the narrator puts their thoughts in that way) to the small-talk that takes place while employees wait for the boss to join a conference call. Thirlwell's intention, I think, is not so much though to be anachronistic, as to produce a flattening effect (he typically refers to any form of transport by the neutral term 'vehicle'), a blurring of time, suggesting the universality of his themes. He most explicitly does this via a brief visit to Celine to the Moon, in 2231. and the longer-term distanced perspective of the lunar dwellers on terrestrial activity.
Other running themes include mycelia and colours, particularly of the sky (starting on the second page "the sky was blue then pink, then pink then blue").
It all makes for both an impressive work - and I can see why the Goldsmiths Prize nominated it - but a slightly unsatisfactory read. There is an oddly detached element to the narrative - even while the characters are trying to avoid becoming victims of la Terreur, there is little sense of drama - and at times this reader suspected he had not grasped Thirlwell's artistic intent. Indeed this quote rather resonated with me (and perhaps the author?):
He never replied to her messages, or only answered them bizarrely, as if asserting some oblique power, maintaining philosophical conversations that made no sense. He had recently read that novel, he wrote to her, the one everyone loved called Messages. It was a novel she had once recommended to him but he had never read it, he said. And now, the other night, he found himself reading it and understanding why she loved it so much —and then pitying these poor writers, poor geniuses, whose fate was always to be misunderstood by their contemporaries.
3.5 stars. Rounded to 3 for now while the book settles.
October 22, 2023
Ugh. I wanted to love this book so bad (because the description seemed so, so, so interesting), but everything from the language to the punctuation to the plot development was very poorly executed, not to mention that the story and dialogues were so bland that finishing this book felt like an accomplishment in itself.
October 11, 2023
1.5 stars
What a long winded book that just drags and drags. (This took me weeks!) How do you make a book set through the French revolution with a random trip to the moon boring? Write a bunch of characters I don't care about and make your writing as distant as possible. Something something language, power, patriarchy, time is a flat circle.
Played myself and requested and received arc through netgalley
What a long winded book that just drags and drags. (This took me weeks!) How do you make a book set through the French revolution with a random trip to the moon boring? Write a bunch of characters I don't care about and make your writing as distant as possible. Something something language, power, patriarchy, time is a flat circle.
Played myself and requested and received arc through netgalley
February 18, 2024
It is the year 1775 in pre-revolutionary France, and Celine is in trouble. It is terrible enough that she is 18, married to an older man whom she doesn’t get along with, and barely ever gets to see her parents, but now she is also the subject of scandalous, pornographic pamphlets peddling lies about her sexual escapades and addictions – lies that the public can’t get enough of and which makes her into a symbol of everything rotten and worthy of despise. In this world ruled by men – all high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, legalese, and literature – language is the ultimate weapon, and Celine is determined to use it as a means to her emancipation. The Future Future paints the story of Celine’s resistance and insistence on trying to imagine utopias, taking her from throwing lavish literary salons to being exiled in the French countryside, in the far-flung colonies of America and to the wild, overrun forests of her own making, and even including a surprise, surprising trip to the moon.
This is a systems novel like none other, a dizzying new take on historical fiction infused with the spirit of sci-fi, anthropology, and counterfactual imagination that works to reveal the fluid anarchy of power systems and how those who wield little influence can move through them. Here, Adam Thirlwell reshapes anachronism as a vehicle for truth: his portrait of Enlightenment France, with its taste for stimulants (tobacco rather than snuff), celebrity gossip, and conquest – through land deals and environmental ruination, through an insistence on arbitrary order and limitless expansion, and through graphomania, media manipulation and censorship – reveals a society facing technological upheavals and neuroses quite like our own; one that is undergoing an elongation of the present that inhibits originality and limits citizens from imagining an ‘otherwise’ or taking stock of the future – the “alien and incommunicable” future future.
Indeed: “everyone is obsessed with theories of everything”, the west “wants to steal from people with the consent of those from whom they [are] stealing”), “everything is just museums and shopping,” and regular people seem increasingly to “want[ a new way of talking but [have] so far not quite found the way [they] mean” – is the West in the throes of late capitalism really that different? As with 18th century France, many today are calling for something akin to a revolution, but
This is likely why The Future Future engages us in Celine’s narrative. Unusually for our era or any other, Celine is a woman written by a man whose perspective is actually, believably feminine: her sexuality is key to the novel but does not subsume her (or take up much space on the page); she has a child but does not stop existing as an individual in her own right; she ages gracefully out of the social currency of youth and is allowed to enjoy it. Just as importantly, Thirlwell’s heroine is a keen observer, quick to note the structural injustices and socio-political phenomena that the men around her do not see. In her commitment to escaping her particular predicament as a society woman, she also recognises and reflects on, and attempts to do her part against the violence inflicted on nature and on colonised people.
In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist for AnOther magazine, the author talks about being inspired by philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s assertion that current conservatism is based on three denials – of climate change, colonisation and its effects, and of gender and gender fluidity. In writing Celine’s consciousness, he attempts to undo each of these denials.
But Celine is not the only principal character in this story – Thirlwell also foregrounds animism against anthropomorphism in writing of the forest as a character in its own right. In this, Thirlwell is informed by non-European cultures and ways of thinking, and further gives depth to the eighteenth-century setting of the novel by highlighting the destructive forces of colonialism, so that imperialist movers and shakers like Pierre Beaumarchais, George Washington, and Napoleon Bonaparte appear in the narrative alongside the likes of the Mohawk leader Louis Cook, the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, and the Oneida interpreter Montour. Thirlwell’s own commitment to imagining otherwise also shines through in the way he rearranges historical fact for the benefit of the colonised, and his tirade against language and writing in the novel takes precision when he has a character write the following in her message to Celine: “What if the true art of language wasn’t literature but translation?” Translation is, after all, more geared towards facilitating understanding and connection than most writing is.
It took me nearly two weeks to finish reading this book, but for all the very best reasons: be as it may an attempt at pointing the reader to the arbitrariness, violence, and limiting nature of language, The Future Future is written in a sprawling, dreamlike, and detached prose that lends itself to lingering and copious underlining on every page. I can see how this can come off as 'boring' for some readers, but for me it was meditative and very, very deliberate – the mark of an accomplished stylist. That being said, this novel certainly isn't for everyone, though perhaps if not for the distinctions created by language it would be. Thirlwell seems all too aware of this, even foretelling readers like myself "pitying these poor writers, poor geniuses, whose fate was always to be misunderstood by their contemporaries."
This is a systems novel like none other, a dizzying new take on historical fiction infused with the spirit of sci-fi, anthropology, and counterfactual imagination that works to reveal the fluid anarchy of power systems and how those who wield little influence can move through them. Here, Adam Thirlwell reshapes anachronism as a vehicle for truth: his portrait of Enlightenment France, with its taste for stimulants (tobacco rather than snuff), celebrity gossip, and conquest – through land deals and environmental ruination, through an insistence on arbitrary order and limitless expansion, and through graphomania, media manipulation and censorship – reveals a society facing technological upheavals and neuroses quite like our own; one that is undergoing an elongation of the present that inhibits originality and limits citizens from imagining an ‘otherwise’ or taking stock of the future – the “alien and incommunicable” future future.
Indeed: “everyone is obsessed with theories of everything”, the west “wants to steal from people with the consent of those from whom they [are] stealing”), “everything is just museums and shopping,” and regular people seem increasingly to “want[ a new way of talking but [have] so far not quite found the way [they] mean” – is the West in the throes of late capitalism really that different? As with 18th century France, many today are calling for something akin to a revolution, but
…cannot make [their] revolution part of the way people live their lives every day. To do that a revolution would need to become domestic – and this was a condition that the revolutionaries in this city had so drastically feared, because the domestic was where the women were.”
This is likely why The Future Future engages us in Celine’s narrative. Unusually for our era or any other, Celine is a woman written by a man whose perspective is actually, believably feminine: her sexuality is key to the novel but does not subsume her (or take up much space on the page); she has a child but does not stop existing as an individual in her own right; she ages gracefully out of the social currency of youth and is allowed to enjoy it. Just as importantly, Thirlwell’s heroine is a keen observer, quick to note the structural injustices and socio-political phenomena that the men around her do not see. In her commitment to escaping her particular predicament as a society woman, she also recognises and reflects on, and attempts to do her part against the violence inflicted on nature and on colonised people.
In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist for AnOther magazine, the author talks about being inspired by philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s assertion that current conservatism is based on three denials – of climate change, colonisation and its effects, and of gender and gender fluidity. In writing Celine’s consciousness, he attempts to undo each of these denials.
But Celine is not the only principal character in this story – Thirlwell also foregrounds animism against anthropomorphism in writing of the forest as a character in its own right. In this, Thirlwell is informed by non-European cultures and ways of thinking, and further gives depth to the eighteenth-century setting of the novel by highlighting the destructive forces of colonialism, so that imperialist movers and shakers like Pierre Beaumarchais, George Washington, and Napoleon Bonaparte appear in the narrative alongside the likes of the Mohawk leader Louis Cook, the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, and the Oneida interpreter Montour. Thirlwell’s own commitment to imagining otherwise also shines through in the way he rearranges historical fact for the benefit of the colonised, and his tirade against language and writing in the novel takes precision when he has a character write the following in her message to Celine: “What if the true art of language wasn’t literature but translation?” Translation is, after all, more geared towards facilitating understanding and connection than most writing is.
It took me nearly two weeks to finish reading this book, but for all the very best reasons: be as it may an attempt at pointing the reader to the arbitrariness, violence, and limiting nature of language, The Future Future is written in a sprawling, dreamlike, and detached prose that lends itself to lingering and copious underlining on every page. I can see how this can come off as 'boring' for some readers, but for me it was meditative and very, very deliberate – the mark of an accomplished stylist. That being said, this novel certainly isn't for everyone, though perhaps if not for the distinctions created by language it would be. Thirlwell seems all too aware of this, even foretelling readers like myself "pitying these poor writers, poor geniuses, whose fate was always to be misunderstood by their contemporaries."
December 26, 2024
I really wanted to like this book and the overall idea is great but it’s poorly executed 😔😔 don’t be fooled by the promising plot
August 15, 2024
Where to start?
How would I even dare to try?
People wanted to compose their own crônicas, or comment on the writings of other people, only interrupting this writing for more reading, which led to even more writing. It was as if writing was a narcotic, or at least an obsession...
Celine, the focus of this astonishing novel, sometimes hears a voice. It's a reassuring voice, an encouragement to believe that there is a different world that might be imagined, a way of thinking beyond the constraints of the system she lives in. Remember tenderness, said the voice. I feel Celine at my back, gentle and tender, saying go on, you can do this.
This is an astonishing novel: it is about power, about the illusion of power, the wielding of power, the subversion and corruption of power. Celine has none: she believes she has found a way to acquire a particular kind of, let us say influence at the very least, through the magic of words, of language, of taking authorship and ownership of her own story. Or no, she goes further, she reigns over the MEDIUM in which those stories are disseminated. But there are cross-currents too, that prove how language is an unreliable medium: we are party to negotiations between George Washington, an American general, and Louis Cook (whose real name is Akiatonharónkwen), a Mohawk chief. The subject of their meeting is what some people call America and others call the great hunting grounds. How can these two communicate? Only through an interpreter, Montour.
Montour was understanding something that Celine, along perhaps with some other small groups of people on this planet, was also understanding. Increasingly, in this world, which was a world of expanding systems, Montour disliked his job as an interpreter. He was always having to find a way of paraphrasing, a form of words acceptable to everyone. But he could not.
Astonishing? Well, yes, because although the subject matter is weighty, the novel is sprightly and acrobatic, just as the voice says Celine's thinking needs to be.
Astonishing because although we are in the eighteenth century, with Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette and Napoleon, the idiom is a very modern one, the characters use words like cool, totally, the chief minister was so stupid he talked shit about Antoinette. Like thirteen seconds before she is about to become the Queen.. The women send each other messages, they arrive in vehicles: all this has the magical effect of underlining the parallels between the world of the 1780s and our contemporary one.
Celine was a woman who was moving further away, she was the woman who leaves. But it would be wrong to think this movement was easy or unhampered. All the time she was making her first moves into a new world, or new space, her old life continued to stick to her! - the way a gallant fly will feel its legs tugged back by flypaper.
Gallant Celine. I loved her.
How would I even dare to try?
People wanted to compose their own crônicas, or comment on the writings of other people, only interrupting this writing for more reading, which led to even more writing. It was as if writing was a narcotic, or at least an obsession...
Celine, the focus of this astonishing novel, sometimes hears a voice. It's a reassuring voice, an encouragement to believe that there is a different world that might be imagined, a way of thinking beyond the constraints of the system she lives in. Remember tenderness, said the voice. I feel Celine at my back, gentle and tender, saying go on, you can do this.
This is an astonishing novel: it is about power, about the illusion of power, the wielding of power, the subversion and corruption of power. Celine has none: she believes she has found a way to acquire a particular kind of, let us say influence at the very least, through the magic of words, of language, of taking authorship and ownership of her own story. Or no, she goes further, she reigns over the MEDIUM in which those stories are disseminated. But there are cross-currents too, that prove how language is an unreliable medium: we are party to negotiations between George Washington, an American general, and Louis Cook (whose real name is Akiatonharónkwen), a Mohawk chief. The subject of their meeting is what some people call America and others call the great hunting grounds. How can these two communicate? Only through an interpreter, Montour.
Montour was understanding something that Celine, along perhaps with some other small groups of people on this planet, was also understanding. Increasingly, in this world, which was a world of expanding systems, Montour disliked his job as an interpreter. He was always having to find a way of paraphrasing, a form of words acceptable to everyone. But he could not.
Astonishing? Well, yes, because although the subject matter is weighty, the novel is sprightly and acrobatic, just as the voice says Celine's thinking needs to be.
Astonishing because although we are in the eighteenth century, with Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette and Napoleon, the idiom is a very modern one, the characters use words like cool, totally, the chief minister was so stupid he talked shit about Antoinette. Like thirteen seconds before she is about to become the Queen.. The women send each other messages, they arrive in vehicles: all this has the magical effect of underlining the parallels between the world of the 1780s and our contemporary one.
Celine was a woman who was moving further away, she was the woman who leaves. But it would be wrong to think this movement was easy or unhampered. All the time she was making her first moves into a new world, or new space, her old life continued to stick to her! - the way a gallant fly will feel its legs tugged back by flypaper.
Gallant Celine. I loved her.
January 7, 2025
I'm not sure what Adam Thirlwell was intending exactly but this didn't work for me at all
I'm OK with the anachronistic tale ostensibly set during pre-revolutionary France. However as the number of anachronisms piled up any pretense that this was set in the past almost disappeared.
I wondered whether he was trying some Oulipo-inspired thing by set himself some rules on the use of language. The prose seemed very limited in its vocabulary as if it was supposed to be a YA novel (not that I really know what those are like - YA didn't exist when I was a YA).
I really didn't care what happened in the end.
I'm OK with the anachronistic tale ostensibly set during pre-revolutionary France. However as the number of anachronisms piled up any pretense that this was set in the past almost disappeared.
I wondered whether he was trying some Oulipo-inspired thing by set himself some rules on the use of language. The prose seemed very limited in its vocabulary as if it was supposed to be a YA novel (not that I really know what those are like - YA didn't exist when I was a YA).
I really didn't care what happened in the end.
June 29, 2025
What a chore to read. Couldn’t tell you the plot cause it didn’t have one.
May 4, 2023
What a cool story.!
It's 1775 and we meet Celine - a young women married in France to a much older husband. For some odd reason, someone is inventing stories about her, distributing papers of poems telling about her sexual affairs. While the stories are lies, the citizens are hooked, her husband is less than amused and Celine is forced to find a new place to call home.
In this truly wild story, Celine fights back and works with her friends to overcome history. Can they succeed? #TheFutureFuture
It's 1775 and we meet Celine - a young women married in France to a much older husband. For some odd reason, someone is inventing stories about her, distributing papers of poems telling about her sexual affairs. While the stories are lies, the citizens are hooked, her husband is less than amused and Celine is forced to find a new place to call home.
In this truly wild story, Celine fights back and works with her friends to overcome history. Can they succeed? #TheFutureFuture
October 11, 2023
‘Unlike anything you will read’ writes Rushdie of this book and he is correct. I wouldn’t want to read anything else like it, and in fact didn’t read all of it, giving up only a fifth through the book. It may be set in 1775 but traditional historical fiction it certainly ain’t! The write up sounded intriguing and its theme of reputation damage via the media is topical. The anachronistic language really annoyed me because it wasn’t consistently used, only now and again. Was it meant to be more shocking that way?
As for the descriptions, what pretentious twaddle!
As for the descriptions, what pretentious twaddle!
Read
August 20, 2023I requested an ARC of this because the cover and the premise were interesting. I feel bad saying this, or maybe I got the wrong file(?), but this was so hilariously bad-written it had to be a joke. Draft zero level bad. I'd be curious to hear from other reviewers if the story gets better.
![Profile Image for ali :].](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.gr-assets.com%2Fimages%2FS%2Fcompressed.photo.goodreads.com%2Fusers%2F1731278404i%2F156517056._UX200_CR0%2C0%2C200%2C200_.jpg&w=128&q=75)
July 26, 2025
Questo è forse il libro più brutto che io abbia mai letto.
Ci fosse una, dico UNA, cosa da salvare.
Finirlo è stata la mia più grande conquista. Devo ammettere che sono riuscita a raggiungere la fine solo perché volevo vedere quali livelli di squallore si sarebbero raggiunti. Direi molto alti.
La trama è inesistente, solo un’accozzaglia di scene veramente buttate alla rinfusa; si sono sfiorati i picchi del ridicolo. In certi momenti mi sono sentita in imbarazzo per l’autore, in altri ho pensato che non era possibile che stessi veramente leggendo una cosa simile. Senza senso.
La scrittura è pessima, ci sono delle riflessioni che mi hanno letteralmente fatto mettere le mani tra i capelli per la loro bassezza.
Ma la cosa che mi ha dato più fastidio è stata sicuramente la vena palesemente maschilista di questo libro.
Mi aspettavo un romanzo forte e femminista, ma mi sono ritrovata a leggere veramente una schifezza maschilista che prende apertamente in giro le donne, che passano per l’ennesima volta come frivole e di poco conto.
Adam Thirlwell è l’esempio palese di uomo che una penna non dovrebbe nemmeno sfiorarla.
È veramente necessario ficcare in quasi ogni angolo un riferimento al sesso?
Non credo proprio.
L’amicizia tra due donne deve per forza prendere una sfumatura sessuale?
No. È chiaramente una perversione dell’autore.
Mi fermo perché ho seriamente solo cose brutte da dire su questo libro.
Terribile, una vera delusione.
Ci fosse una, dico UNA, cosa da salvare.
Finirlo è stata la mia più grande conquista. Devo ammettere che sono riuscita a raggiungere la fine solo perché volevo vedere quali livelli di squallore si sarebbero raggiunti. Direi molto alti.
La trama è inesistente, solo un’accozzaglia di scene veramente buttate alla rinfusa; si sono sfiorati i picchi del ridicolo. In certi momenti mi sono sentita in imbarazzo per l’autore, in altri ho pensato che non era possibile che stessi veramente leggendo una cosa simile. Senza senso.
La scrittura è pessima, ci sono delle riflessioni che mi hanno letteralmente fatto mettere le mani tra i capelli per la loro bassezza.
Ma la cosa che mi ha dato più fastidio è stata sicuramente la vena palesemente maschilista di questo libro.
Mi aspettavo un romanzo forte e femminista, ma mi sono ritrovata a leggere veramente una schifezza maschilista che prende apertamente in giro le donne, che passano per l’ennesima volta come frivole e di poco conto.
Adam Thirlwell è l’esempio palese di uomo che una penna non dovrebbe nemmeno sfiorarla.
È veramente necessario ficcare in quasi ogni angolo un riferimento al sesso?
Non credo proprio.
L’amicizia tra due donne deve per forza prendere una sfumatura sessuale?
No. È chiaramente una perversione dell’autore.
Mi fermo perché ho seriamente solo cose brutte da dire su questo libro.
Terribile, una vera delusione.
August 20, 2023
★★★☆☆
When the bit where the main character suddenly appears in the future and travels to the moon is the easiest part of the book to comprehend, there may be some issues.
I felt like trying to tread water in a severe rip tide reading this. The language is pretentious and abstract, the dialogue is distant, constantly dictated to you through the main character rather than direct conversation and the narrative itself is thinly tied together. I had little to no idea what was going on for most of this book. Aside from the blurb and the inclusion of Marie Antoinette I would have zero idea of time period and setting. I had a lightbulb moment about halfway through that this read like a critical theory essay shoehorned into a fictional format, and from then on, it was easier to get through; at least I knew what I was going up against.
Saying all that, it's not a bad book, it is just a lot. I'm sure there are many English literature academics and experts in the French Revolution (I'm sure there were many clever references to this throughout, but I know absolutely nothing about it so I missed them all) that would LOVE this. It's commentary on language and the destruction of it through power is great and prevalent, and combines Derrida's idea of deconstruction with Foucault's "knowledge is power". This would have been a great essay, but as a novel, it fell flat.
I also do think there is something to be said of a novel written from the perspective of a woman, focused solely on her trying to claim power against a patriarchal society and the obstacles she faces...written by a man. I have no doubt that Thirlwell understands the misogyny and discrimination faced by women, but can you really write about an experience you can never have?
I read the blurb and was expecting a Bridgerton/Fantomina-style of women reclaiming power through their sexuality and agency, but this was nothing even remotely close to that. And maybe that's my fault - I had expectations that it failed to reach, simply because it was on a different path altogether. (But really if you do want an 18th century woman absolutely trashing gender roles please read Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze it's amazing and only 40 pages).
cw// domestic abuse, dictatorship, revolution,
Massive thank you to Jonathan Cape/Vintage Books for sending me a gifted copy to review. All opinions are my own.
When the bit where the main character suddenly appears in the future and travels to the moon is the easiest part of the book to comprehend, there may be some issues.
I felt like trying to tread water in a severe rip tide reading this. The language is pretentious and abstract, the dialogue is distant, constantly dictated to you through the main character rather than direct conversation and the narrative itself is thinly tied together. I had little to no idea what was going on for most of this book. Aside from the blurb and the inclusion of Marie Antoinette I would have zero idea of time period and setting. I had a lightbulb moment about halfway through that this read like a critical theory essay shoehorned into a fictional format, and from then on, it was easier to get through; at least I knew what I was going up against.
Saying all that, it's not a bad book, it is just a lot. I'm sure there are many English literature academics and experts in the French Revolution (I'm sure there were many clever references to this throughout, but I know absolutely nothing about it so I missed them all) that would LOVE this. It's commentary on language and the destruction of it through power is great and prevalent, and combines Derrida's idea of deconstruction with Foucault's "knowledge is power". This would have been a great essay, but as a novel, it fell flat.
I also do think there is something to be said of a novel written from the perspective of a woman, focused solely on her trying to claim power against a patriarchal society and the obstacles she faces...written by a man. I have no doubt that Thirlwell understands the misogyny and discrimination faced by women, but can you really write about an experience you can never have?
I read the blurb and was expecting a Bridgerton/Fantomina-style of women reclaiming power through their sexuality and agency, but this was nothing even remotely close to that. And maybe that's my fault - I had expectations that it failed to reach, simply because it was on a different path altogether. (But really if you do want an 18th century woman absolutely trashing gender roles please read Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze it's amazing and only 40 pages).
cw// domestic abuse, dictatorship, revolution,
Massive thank you to Jonathan Cape/Vintage Books for sending me a gifted copy to review. All opinions are my own.
December 24, 2023
From the moment in Blackwells when my eyes caught sight of Madame de Pompadour on the moon— it was love.
December 8, 2023
the very very best book i’ve read in a while……more on this later
January 20, 2025
The only thing he manages to shine light on is his own insufferable psyche, and it’s by accident. Adam Thirlwell if you see this I want you to know I don’t like or respect you
October 25, 2023
I rarely underline or annotate fiction, but I found myself doing this throughout this playful yet serious new novel. It mixes the historical and the contemporary in brilliant ways, making “anachronism” anachronistic. Thirlwell’s bon mots flow and ebb. Right up front, for example, there’s “The words emerged from nowhere, like insects. It was as if paper wanted to smother every surface . . .” or “Every sentence extended objects or people beyond their natural habitat, creating images and rumours – the way a shadow might be peeled away from a person and converted into a silhouette.” Mixing metaphors is not a problem, but part of the play.
The central theme is power, the many kinds of power, how it is used and abused, and how hard it is to know who has it and in what contexts (“Celine hadn’t thought about what other people would do if she became powerful. All her thinking about power had been about how she might acquire some kind of freedom for herself and her friends”). Another theme is understanding, which takes in language, communications, relationships and, of course, for Thirlwell, translation. And then there’s time, a principal concern of the protagonist and object of play for the author.
One question I would enjoy discussing with the author is his choice of tense. Would this originally historical novel have been better in the present tense than the past? For one thing, this would have put the many subjunctive verbs (central to his approach) in the past tense rather than, as Thirlwell did, ignoring them by using the ordinary past. The present tense would also have mirrored the protagonist's obsession with being in the present. The future tense would sadly not work in The Future Future.
Despite often skirting the precious and including characters who can get annoying, this is a novel I found a joy to read. And whenever you think the author is running out of ideas, he surprises you. A 4.5.
The central theme is power, the many kinds of power, how it is used and abused, and how hard it is to know who has it and in what contexts (“Celine hadn’t thought about what other people would do if she became powerful. All her thinking about power had been about how she might acquire some kind of freedom for herself and her friends”). Another theme is understanding, which takes in language, communications, relationships and, of course, for Thirlwell, translation. And then there’s time, a principal concern of the protagonist and object of play for the author.
One question I would enjoy discussing with the author is his choice of tense. Would this originally historical novel have been better in the present tense than the past? For one thing, this would have put the many subjunctive verbs (central to his approach) in the past tense rather than, as Thirlwell did, ignoring them by using the ordinary past. The present tense would also have mirrored the protagonist's obsession with being in the present. The future tense would sadly not work in The Future Future.
Despite often skirting the precious and including characters who can get annoying, this is a novel I found a joy to read. And whenever you think the author is running out of ideas, he surprises you. A 4.5.
February 12, 2025
I cannot communicate how much I did not enjoy this book. At its most forgiving interpretation, the book is meant to be satire. At its most realistic interpretation, the book is a treatise on gender inequality by a white man who seems to have discovered feminism for the first time. The writing style is sterile and infuriating, the parts that actually hold any semblance of promise are cut short, and the commentary is so surface level and unoriginal that you can’t help but wonder if the author actually thought deeply about any of these topics. I finished it for a book club but in any other context would have left it unfinished.
dnf
January 31, 2025DNF on page 145. This was such a waste of time. Per my last update, the relationship between Marta and Celine felt unfeeling and useless—like it was written just for the sake of writing and for no particular reason. And for a male writer to do so consistently comes off as fetishistic. Additionally, there was little to no plot in this, and it felt like a failed attempt to recreate modern adaptations of period pieces—like Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (but obviously nowhere near that caliber). I was just bored the entire time I read it and so was finally RELIEVED to give up.
Read
April 26, 2023Wow I loved this. Historical fiction yet futuristic in the thoughts and behaviours of the characters, especially the women (who doesn't live women supporting women). I loved seeing different topics being dealt with in this eighteenth century setting and following Celine on her journey. The Future Future is written in a beautiful way with an intriguing set of characters and storyline.
March 16, 2024
Ugh! Horrible book. I detest super feminist books written by men - seems to me like an insidious kind of mansplaining. Also the book is boring, the characters undeveloped, the whole thing lacks any real heart or soul - so male in fact it made me want to scream.
I gave up at p87 skimming the rest to make sure it didn’t get any better- it didn’t - was so glad I didn’t waste too much time on it.
I gave up at p87 skimming the rest to make sure it didn’t get any better- it didn’t - was so glad I didn’t waste too much time on it.
September 26, 2024
I couldn’t finish this! I should’ve read the GoodRead reviews before picking this up, it was so boring. I fell for the reviews on the cover, “Sexy and funny and sharp as hell”… think of the opposites to those words and you have my thoughts exactly.
April 29, 2024
I just couldn't get into this book.
October 14, 2023
Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. In the time before the French Revolution, Celine is seeing the stories of her affairs and orgies spread through society. People are appalled, but they also can’t stop listening. The problem is the stories aren’t true. Celine eventually has to flee to America, where she hears the rumors of many old friends who perished during the revolution. Celine misses France and her daughter and makes her way back home, only to run afoul of Napoleon. This is such a fun book, which uses modern dialogue, showing life for a woman alone in society and just how precarious that can be.
June 25, 2023
This book is like swimming through a beautiful dream. A statement on language and power and the impermanence and fluidity of both.
The setting of 19th C France I think helps ground the abstract concepts within a history with which most are familiar.
This is an incredible journey of Celine and survival in a wild world. One that will stay with you even years after reading.
The setting of 19th C France I think helps ground the abstract concepts within a history with which most are familiar.
This is an incredible journey of Celine and survival in a wild world. One that will stay with you even years after reading.
February 10, 2024
I needed a lot of time to get into the short, somewhat detached chapters and writing of Thirlwell. The Future Future starts in 1775 and tells the story of Celine - it's vague on purpose but she lives in Paris and is part of the upperclass, trying to make her life her own, especially against a lot of male backlash. Language and its power is at the center of everything, and I loved the contrast of Celine and her small, everyday-ish problems with the historical events happening around her. There's a point during the French Revolution where a character basically screams in Celines face that she needs to wake up or she'll be killed due to her ignorance. It really gets the point across that history is always happening around us but often isn't our main focus.
There are a few interesting ideas and paragraphs but it always stay on the surface level and combined with the style it read a lot like a non-fiction book. Also for some reason part 4 suddenly takes a sci-fi turn and after that it just gets weirder and historical incorrect? I don't know what Thirlwell wanted to archive by that plus the random ending... The Future Future definitely is a curious novel.
There are a few interesting ideas and paragraphs but it always stay on the surface level and combined with the style it read a lot like a non-fiction book. Also for some reason part 4 suddenly takes a sci-fi turn and after that it just gets weirder and historical incorrect? I don't know what Thirlwell wanted to archive by that plus the random ending... The Future Future definitely is a curious novel.
November 30, 2023
Boring, boring & even more boring. Acts 1-2 were somewhat decent. Acts 3-4 were a never ending, long winded mess. Dialogue was boring, writing was pretentious, the plot sounded intriguing but I felt like it resolved after act 2 & everything that happened after that wasn’t necessary. I understand that maybe the author felt like Celine’s story wasn’t over, but I wish it was wrapped up in a way that didn’t feel like a pain to read.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 98 reviews