Fictions

"I don’t think there will ever be a better writer on uncertainty and science than Borges. I’m a huge fan.“On Exactitude in Science”, a story about a map the size of the Empire, is such a wonderful way to think about scientific modelling. Like the British statistician George Box said, “all models are wrong but some are useful”. Scientific models are simplifications of reality. We can make them look more or less like the real world, but we need to be careful that in our drive to create realistic, complex models, we don’t end up with a map of the world the size of the world itself. I also love“The Lottery in Babylon,” about a society where outcomes result from layers and layers of random chance. The rules are clear at first: lottery winners receive money, losers pay out. But the introduction of more rules – more complexity – leads to a world where everything is uncertain and nothing makes sense. You can trace the underlying logic that leads to the randomness. And “The Library of Babylon” has the most accurate description ever of my working life – “As was natural, an inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression” – and is a beautiful metaphor for discerning pattern within a torrent of random noise. “Adversity tends to empower demagogues with easy answers, and climate change will bring plenty of adversity” Certain sorts of people are very fond of telling climate scientists that climate has always changed, as if we weren’t the ones who figured that out. And there are some people with an inordinate of power who seem to believe phenomena like ‘winter’ are unknown to science. The signal of climate change – a human fingerprint on temperature, rainfall, cloud cover – is always superposed on a noisy background of natural climate variability. If we never existed, of course the climate would change: the Earth would still go around the sun on a tilted axis; air and water would still slosh back and forth, hurricanes and heat waves would still happen. But – and this is what I love so much about Borges – there is order in randomness. We don’t just throw up our hands when confronted with noise; we can use the tools of statistics to understand it. And what those tools are telling us is that the changes we’ve seen recently are very, very, very unlikely to be due to natural variability alone."

"When I first read Jorge Borges , I was amazed by what I encountered. Borges explored how stories work by situating us inside the analysis of a story. In this book, you have essays about a work and world of literature that exists only in the imagination of Borges. There is a transnational quality to Borges’s writing. He has references rooted in Europe, Africa and Asia in a way that is so audacious as to be unprecedented. He wrote about the world and from a global perspective at a time, pre-internet, when it was difficult to do. I was always attracted to writers who created an emotionally impactful and honest experience while writing free from the boundaries of consensus realism. I don’t think consensus reality exists. Whether you’re a Sufi poet or a contemporary neuroscientist looking at the brain inside a magnetic imaging machine, what you realize is that the self and what we perceive are constructs, stories that we construct. Borges realized this as fully as anyone. Certainly Borges was one of the pioneers of what became magical realism. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In my own writing, up until Exit West , I’ve worked with plausibly realistic narratives inside of unrealistic frames. For instance, the story at the core of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is framed by an implausible conversation. In Exit West , for the first time, I’ve knowingly bent the laws of physics inside the main story of the manuscript itself. For a long time, the notion that there is a center and a periphery—in literature, economics, politics and culture—has been under threat. Cities like London and New York, the center for so long, are now experiencing problems once associated with the periphery, places like Pakistan. You see the rise of nostalgic, nationalistic, tribalistic movements in not just Afghanistan or Pakistan or Syria, but also in America and Britain. You see politicians trying to undermine the press and intimidate judges, not just in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Syria, but also in America. We are seeing echoes from place to place that we are just not used to seeing. This is perhaps a new era of globalization; the problems of the periphery are now transnational."

"Jorge Luis Borges is Argentinian and a masterful short story teller. All of his short stories have an intriguing question behind them. In his famous short story Funes the Memorius he writes about a young man who, after a riding accident, has forgotten how to forget. He remembers everything he has been exposed to in excruciating detail. He can’t walk any more and lies in his bed and has books brought to him. He reads them once and remembers everything. Borges describes how he visits this young man and realises that Funes has lost his ability to forget and thus to generalise and to extract. Borges writes that Funes only sees the trees but never the forest. He remembers all the details but can never rise above them. Borges asks what happens if we can’t forget? Will we, like Funes, be forever tied to an excruciatingly detailed past? Or will we be able to forget parts of it over time and therefore be able to evolve and move on? We might as a society have had that riding accident in a sense that we now have digital tools available to us that make it impossible to forget. Everything digital these days is being stored and kept accessible because of low storage costs, easy retrieval and a global network."