![]() ![]() While somewhat maintaining the playfulness of Zemecki’s film with a narrator who is laugh-out-loud funny, wry and forthright, I found the novel to simultaneously be extremely immediate, considering personal and international issues. ![]() The process of time, the way the past introduces the present and the present informs the future, man’s ability to actively change the future with actions in the present are all central ideas of the novel. It is from here that Lerner’s novel takes its name (10:04 is the moment that lightning strikes the bell tower that initiates the protagonist’s voyage through time and space), and Lerner seems to concern himself and reinvent the themes of that film in what is a distinctly twenty-first century novel. Having read the book, I feel that a good place to start for those who haven’t seen it is Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 time travelling Back to the Future. As far as I can tell, the book seemed to steamroll onto the British literary scene and the ubiquitous intelligent reviews lauding 10:04 as this year’s great novel saw it climb speedily up my reading list. Since its publication in September 2014, New York-based writer Ben Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, has drawn praise from all corners of the publishing world and was recently announced on the shortlist for the prestigious Folio Prize 2015. ![]()
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