Amitav Ghosh, in his extraordinary novel called, “The Hungry Tide,” focus on several thematic ideas through its duration; however, one sticks out as the center point as that is romance. The novel (as in the object/thing not as in Ghosh’s specifically) is always tied to romance, no matter what novel it is, or who writes some type of romance is bound to be implanted in it, and one without it usually feels awkward. This novel however has a fond limerence of romance. From the very first chapter, scratch that the first page we are introduced to romantic elements, and they certainly do not slow down throughout the duration of the novel. Kanai, Piya, Fokir, Moyna, along with many other characters can be spread around in a detective’s pegboard of connections that is detailed and intriguing to explore. However, to keep this topic brief, and explorable to a possible ambitious me in the future (as a final project), I will only talk about two connections. Piya and Fokir, and Kanai and Kusum.

Firstly, I would like to touch on Piya and Fokir. From when they are introduced (to each other) in the novel there seems to be this odd tension between the two of them. Both seem to understand their lack of communication but make through with what they can and this odd language barrier reveals a physical expression of questions, responses, and emotions. This could be through holding for comfort or signing to something as to ask what it is; these physical signs offer a unique connection that wouldn’t be the same as if they were able to speak to each other. Even when Fokir sings Piya seems to be enthralled by this unknown language, and thought not exactly romance in that pristine moment, still holds great admiration for this connection with his must culture. The same goes for his ability to traverse the swamps, one of Piya’s main reasons for slight attraction comes from his connection to the world around him. One direct quote I can offer comes pages 93-94 and states, “What could have happened anyway? Although she knew little else about Fokir, she did know he had a child and was married. And as for herself, no thought was farther from her mind than the idea of personal entanglement.” This comes after a scene where Piya is comforted by Fokir due to being shivering cold. Both seemed to be incredibly awkward but underneath sparsely lies some short of connection that can be labeled as romance. It is incredibly interesting to see Piya’s thought process because she snuffs out it to be the fact Fokir is married and has a child as the reason for nothing being able to happen before her own opinion on it, as if Fokir was single or widowed that her mind might be changed. She furthermore goes on to explain that her idea of no relationship also sparks from her being on assignment. So, it seems that her actual reasons lie with Fokir’s current relationship status, and that if Fokir had been single there is a definite chance this resentment wouldn’t stick. It is most certainly the most interesting bout of romance in the novel as it is subtle but directly mentioned.

Secondly, let’s touch up on Kanai and Kusum. We get a couple of chapters understanding the connection between these two characters. Kanai was sent away to Lusibari as punishment for him being a bit of a snob in school, and one of the people he meets while in his (you can so-call it) rehabilitation is Kusum. This is supposed to be Kanai first step in the idea of romance as he is still a young kid at the time of these events. As described here, “Kanai and Kusum held each other’s gaze, and for the duration of that moment it was as though they were staring across the most primeval divide in human creation, each assessing the dangers that lay on the other side; it seemed scarcely imaginable that here, in the gap that separated them, lay the potential for these extremes of emotion, this violence,” (Ghosh 76). This is described as I said this is supposed to be some type of barebones attraction based on a single darted glance. A natural crush found on the simple sight of another person, and it makes sense that it is described with such oddity because it is natural, but it is also weird. This attraction is random and spontaneous and is probably the reason Kanai wanted to get along with Kusum in the first place. This odd connection is both natural and weird.

The Hungry Tide is a novel by Amitav Ghosh, and while reading it I have tasked myself with diving into every single little detail Ghosh has sprinkled into his narrative. This has hindered my reading speed but has advanced something else, and that being my comprehension of the story; and furthermore my understanding to exactly what Ghosh labeled as, “serious literature,” in his novel called The Great Derangement. Ghosh’s ideas in this forementioned novel include the premise that there are two types of novels: one being more mainstream and the other being more “serious”. Serious in this context means work that can be deep-dived into in a way. It’s work that takes time to process and decipher the true meaning of rather than the more straightforward inquiry of mainstream literature. The Hungry Tide is Ghosh’s try at this forementioned, “serious literature,” and is about climate change; however it’s way more than that. From the first chapter I was blown away by the detail Ghosh puts into his work, and more specifically the characterization of his characters and the imagery and descriptions of scenery, and events.

In the first chapters we are introduced to one of the many main characters Kanai and are slowly but surely shoved into his traits which are all but likeable. Kanai describes himself as, “having the ability to both praise and appraise women.” (Ghosh 3) The ironic part being he probably isn’t the best, but his cockiness as a character is so immense that he would like think he is right, which I find both humorous and cheeky by the author. Not to mention that not too long later the reader will learn that Kanai is fresh out of a failed relationship out of presumed many. This little spew of sprinkled events are laid out for the reader to instantly gain a disliking to Kanai because in reality he isn’t a good character, and the people he cares about is mostly definitely slimmer than the ones he does. Kanai has both an obsession and passion in language. Him being able to easily identify if someone is a foreigner or not based on basic observations. (Ghosh 5). Kanai’s love for language is a constant boast of his, and makes him more unlikable. All of these descriptions are in the first ten pages of the book, however, not all of them are as obvious as others, and even if they are, they are still hidden among long texts that are detailed. However, I feel this is the weaker of the two things I want to talk about. Ghosh’s imagery is tenfold better than his characterization because of its density that makes it tough to swallow and impossible to skim over.

For me, I have two examples of imagery. One is of the Malta river, and the other is the drowning scene with Piya. The Malta river scene spans over a couple of pages, and is between both internal and external dialogue of how it hurts the two characters viewing it. This section has both great imagery and characterization. At one point the river is described as, “a low tide…no wider than a narrow ditch, flowing along the center of a half-mile-wide bed. The freshly laid silt that bordered the water glistened in the sun like dunes of melted chocolate,” (Ghosh 21). This only being a excerpt of what was said but still shows the immense detail of Ghosh. Ghosh uses both normal descriptions, and figurative language to create an image, and it is always immaculate. In this little excerpt he is trying to create the image of a dying tide, but in that he is still showing it’s beauty, and the first time I read this section I had to start it over twice, to really imagine what was being described to me. At first, I took it literally, and imagined real chocolate, and with every reread I refined it to what Ghosh was wanting me to see, and I eventually saw the dying beautiful Malta river as Ghosh intended. This I feel is what Ghosh was intending by “serious literature,” it’s something that has to be read over and over in order to fully comprehend the exact image, or idea that is being presented. The purpose of this style of writing is not to be fancy, but to require a true deep reading of the text. The construct of that is to give the reader something to constantly look for, and keep them in a constant state of deciphering what they are reading, which will result in a greater reading experience. The second scene I would like to go over is the drowning scene with Piya. Pages 47-50 are at the moment my favorite out of the whole book, and what inspired me to write about Ghosh’s expertise in writing. The way this scene evolves from a women who fell into water only slightly concerned of her situation into someone who is coming to terms with the realization that she might be dying is expertly done. My favorite part has to be when she confuses the touch of Fokir to one of a possible crocodile, and how she feels something prickling her neck, and on top of that how she feels something flowing out of her neck. (Ghosh 47). When I first read this I had thought that it was weird to kill a character off this soon, and when I got to the part where it all came together, I had to pause, and reread everything before thinking I had miss something that had been causing me this feeling of suspense. However, I hadn’t, this part was written in that way and it was fantastic. I have never been in as much suspense as I was in that scene while reading something. I had truly thought Piya was dead, or going to die at least, and I was tricked, and the way scene is described is perfectly tweak to which you can fully believe either side of the story to be true before the reveal. By that I mean you can either see through the facade and read it as someone saving her or as her meeting her faith. I had wish I had more of the novel to work with to give even better examples, but something about this novel is vastly different to ones I have read outside of this class, and even the one we read early in the year. The way Ghosh goes at describing things is amazing, and truly inspiring. Like this novel has caused me to go in my projects, and increase the quality of them to actually require the reader to think about what they are reading, and that exactly is what Ghosh is aiming for. Ghosh is aiming for making a novel that requires a deep understanding of a text and not just a subtle inquiry of it.

In Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, she uses anecdotes as a central part of her storytelling. She expertly brings up these anecdotes through either words, or phrases that spark up memories, and it seems to be a common concept in the world building of this novel. You are thrown between two worlds: the current future which has Snowman loathing around what remains of the world he had come to known; and a past future which looks different than our world but is the past for Jimmy (Snowman). Atwood does an effortless job of blending these worlds together in the context of storytelling. She is building two separate worlds both of them equally futuristic to us, but one is the cause, and the other is the effect. Atwood’s world is different than a dystopia in my opinion, as it feels like the world is moving on peacefully without human interaction. In the first page of the novel it states, “on the eastern horizon there’s a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow…the offshore towers stand out in the dark silhouette against it, rising improbably out of the pink and pale blue lagoon…the distant ocean grinding against the ersatz reefs of rusted car parts and jumbled bricks and assorted rubble…” (Atwood 1). The oddity to have such an honestly beautiful description for what is supposed to be a destructed world is intriguing to me. Maybe this isn’t supposed to be a destroyed world. I am still reading the novel, and haven’t gotten to chapter 8 yet, so maybe my hypothesis well be wrong. However, as it stands now I have a feeling this futuristic world (the one Snowman is in) is supposed to be the better world; the utopia, and the story is here to show the slow downfall of the past world into this new world that will rebuild itself now that humans are no longer the focal point of it.

First, let me explain why I think this new world is supposed to be a utopia of sense. In the beginning of the story before we start going deep into the anecdotes of Snowman’s past, we get to see the world as it is, and one important factor we learn early on is in relation to time. In the novel it states, “there’s an absence of time,” (Atwood 1). This is laid straight out for us the reader on the first page, and I think that is important. It is telling us that a concept created by humans, time, is no longer known; it doesn’t exist. What does this tell us? Well, it tells us that this is a world where human creations are no longer needed. Later on we see a group of kids, who find a bunch of items that humans might have seen in their everyday life. They find a piano key, a hubcap, a bottlecap, a plastic container, and so on. They ask Snowman what are these items, and all he can say is that they’re things from the past. (Atwood 7). What this conveys is that nothing from the past is of any use for the people in this world. Yes, some of these items are of varying importance; but something like a plastic container could be used to store water, or food, but is still seen as something from a past time, as if it doesn’t matter what it is anymore. The kids themselves are interesting; they are described as, “…each one being perfect…” (Atwood 8). These kids are described almost elegantly; they have their issues but they are seen as almost a beautiful animal, not human. They are described as a part of nature and they interact with it as so. So, if these are the new generation, what does that mean for the world? Well, that’s what I’m going to get at. I believe these kids are suppose to be the new humans, they are suppose to start anew and restore life on Earth by being a vicarious part of it, instead of being an entity which only destroys.

Let’s talk about the world before. The world before is a futuristic world that seems to be build off capitalistic corporations which are doing anything to further their earnings. One of these corporations was OrganInc Farms which was an organization that mutated different animals to try to form humanoid organs to sell them. They’re top animal was a pigoon, which was a pigeon/pig combination that has skin, and other organs that could be used as replacements for humans. (Atwood 23-24). This is of course a massive innovation, and it could save many lives, how could this possible mess up the world? It is revealed later on during an argument between Jimmy’s mother and father that these companies aren’t all sunshine and rainbows, and it is obvious that these companies only care about draining the money from their patients then use their findings for the betterment of the world, (Atwood 56-57). Both of these components come together to illuminate the picture of a past world that was riddled with greed. It was a world that cared more about the exchange of money then the actually protection of it’s people, and I think it is suppose to shed light on our actual world. See, our world is not far off from this world in ideology. There are capitalistic companies in this world that will rather not use their funds to help the world, and will rather waste it on making their company better so they can get more money. It’s a constant cycle of that, and I feel Atwood is trying to point out what our world will succumb to if we continually ignore it’s pleas for help (while obviously having science fiction elements that dramatize the reality). She is trying to say if we don’t stop our era of capitalism and go into an era of reconstruction, we will wind up in a world where nature takes over, and we will have to resort back to the animals we use to be.

Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote an extensive piece on climate change and the Anthropocene in his article, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,”. Chakrabarty explains that throughout the past few hundred years people have slowly disconnected themselves from nature in a quasi-egotistic way to label our species as something above all on Earth. He compares this to the slow realization that people start having during the age of climate change that this isn’t true, and we people are directly connected to nature. Chakrabarty wishes to outline the ignorance that humans carried for ages that led to the split between human and natural history, and how the two should be bound together especially as we humans are becoming more of a threat to the environment than it is to us; this effectively creating a new era of history: the Anthropocene.

Chakrabarty expresses the split between nature and humankind and how humans’ ignorance has led to climate change; all overlapping to overarching idea that humans need to see themselves as a factor to the environment. Near the beginning of his article Chakrabarty talks about the separation of human history and natural history. He explains that people see, “our past, present, and future connected by a certain continuity of human experience,” (Chakrabarty 197). Humans tend to believe our history is only determined by humans and what humans have done. This means we as a species have a hard time comprehending the world outside of us because we see ourselves as the center of everything; so, without us there is nothing in the human eye. This further results in the cycle of not caring about something until it directly affects us. During the late 1980s and early 1990s globalization became a center point of conversation while climate change which was discussed at the same time wasn’t lingered on. Chakrabarty states, “…but self-conscious discussions of global warming in the public realm began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the same period in which social scientists and humanists began to discuss globalization. However, these discussions have so far run parallel to each other. Globalization…was an immediate interest to humanists…global warming…did not become a public concern until the 2000s,” (199). Obviously, we humans have our tendencies to pick and choose our battles; if an issue doesn’t affect us in the moment, then why waste the resources on fixing it? We see it as a waste of time and wait for something to get awfully close to making a longer lasting impact on our species before we do anything. The issue with this is we cannot do this anymore. We as a species have grown to the point where we ourselves are major factors in the world itself. We have control over the whole world, but it doesn’t mean we can control the way it reacts to our way of life. Nature was here before us, it is here with us, and it will find its way to be after us. We cannot sit by an issue like climate change and expect it to not get worse. However, it is exactly what people during the 80s and 90s thought, because we have such a concept of fixing our humanitarian issues that we cannot stop for a second and tackle our natural issues. The same issues our ancestors had to endure. Chakrabarty uses the Viconian-Hobbesian idea to call nature, “God’s work and ultimately inscrutable to man,” (201). Humans may understand how other humans think but they cannot comprehend how nature thinks, how it feels, or fully even grasp how to fix it. Nature has too many layers, and we can pretend to understand the complexities of it, but it is a force we don’t know the lengths of, and likely never will. However, we can try to fix it, we can try to connect to it, and that is exactly what Chakrabarty wants, he wants us to bound nature like our ancestors did. Chakrabarty states, “There are now so many of us cutting down many trees and burning so many billions of tons of fossil fuels that we have indeed become geological agents. We have changed the chemistry of our atmosphere, causing sea level to rise, ice to melt, and climate to change,” (206). Humans cannot deny the fact that they have grown into a direct factor to the environment. We have grown so far from the nomadic hunter-gathers we were back in the Ice Age, past the warriors we were in the Greco-Roman empires, and past the feudalistic societies of the middles ages. We have pursued the pinnacle of advancement for so long that now our advancements are directly killing the world. We as a species must come to realize that the environment is not a danger to us, and realize we are a danger to the environment. Once we can do this, then we can move into another era of history; one were human and natural history are finally reconnected after generations of disconnect. This being called “Anthropocene,”.

Chakrabarty spends a large part of his essay on these ideas of human ignorance and the separation of human and natural history. He uses it as a long segway into the Anthropocene, which will be the epoch of our world if we all collectively see ourselves as a geological factor in nature, and try to finally own up to our destruction of it, and work on the reconstruction of it. His argument spans several other mini arguments, but I feel this part of the argument is a large chunk of the overarching idea on Anthropocene. This is because without our world coming to realization of it being ignorant of climate change there will be no Anthropocene and probably will eventually be no Earth. Chakrabarty talks on the split between human and natural history, outlining the ignorance humans have about their effect on nature, and how we as a species need to connect and finally make nature apart of our history; effectively creating a new epoch of history: the Anthropocene.