A Time Outside This Time

In his novel A Time Outside This Time, Guggenheim fellow and Vassar College English professor Amitava Kumar structures the narrative as a writer’s notebook that cannot stop reading the news. His narrator, Satya, an Indian-born writer at an artists’ residency on an Italian lake, arrives to work on a novel about fakeness—what he calls “a report from the world of #fakenews”—only for COVID-19 to shut down the residency and swallow the project whole. The first chapter title states the problem plainly: “I’m Writing a Novel, but There Is the News.” Kumar’s method is to blur fiction and essay until the border between them dissolves: Satya’s manuscript is both a novel about lying and a series of factual journal entries cataloguing one verifiable lie per day—a compendium he describes as “a book made up entirely of rumors. A compilation of fatal falsehoods.”

The novel’s corpus is misinformation itself. Satya collects lies the way other writers collect images, borrowing Hemingway’s ambition to write one true sentence every day and inverting it. His journal entries juxtapose political fabrications with intimate domestic scenes: Snopes entry on a Trump rally sits beside a memory of his marriage; an Indian health minister prescribing sunlight for the virus is followed by a conversation about the Central Park Five over red wine at the residency. These are not arbitrary pairings but deliberate formal choices: Kumar insists that misinformation infiltrates private life as thoroughly as public discourse, and that fiction’s task is to make that infiltration visible. When the pandemic arrives, it folds seamlessly into this project: the virus is rechristened with xenophobic labels, conspiracy theories multiply, and one of the residency’s staff becomes an early casualty—facts and fictions alike proliferating at the same velocity.

The significance of this entry for the archive lies in its sustained argument that misinformation is itself a pandemic within the pandemic. Kumar’s novel insists that the crisis was shaped as much by what people believed and shared as by the virus itself, making it a key text for the archive’s engagement with questions of truth, narrative, and the epistemological chaos that COVID-19 both revealed and intensified.