- Saving Time, by Jenny Odell. Bodley Head, $35
The ticking clock, the wall calendar, the smartphone alarm: these facets of modern life are so pervasive that escaping "clock time" can seem impossible. Weekends can be consumed by it - holidays ruined by the impending end, birthdays by a sense of life slipping away. These are anxieties many readers will be familiar with, and which Jenny Odell taps in Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock.
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In the introduction, Odell suggests if you go into a bookstore looking for answers, you might be tempted to browse books that offer practical solutions for making "better use" of time - perhaps by "managing" it better, setting goals or getting up at 5am - but that you might be better off considering the foundations of how you think about time and "what time even is".
It is this line of enquiry, with a particular focus on the way that time (and by extension, the freedom and autonomy of individuals) has been co-opted for capitalist, materialist and political purposes, that shapes the book. Saving Time delves into the evolution of time as a fungible commodity, bought and sold to feed wealth and profit. The key moral question here is that if one group of people can buy another's time to "save" their own, what does that do to the freedom of those who must sell their precious time for very little?
How to do Nothing, Odell's first book, established her strong and genuine personal voice, leading the reader through an analysis of how our attention has been co-opted in ways that don't serve us or the planet. In Saving Time, Odell's voice is similarly strong, but the personal and analytical don't interweave with the same clarity of purpose, leaving the reader with a series of somewhat discrete ideas to ponder.
Many of these ideas are nonetheless powerful, and the book provides many different entrés for a reader interested in unpicking how they think about time. For example, Odell draws on Tyson Yunkaporta's excellent book Sand Talk to discuss Indigenous concepts of time as "non-linear" (a term that's vastly inadequate). Odell explores how Western culture has come to think of time in spatial terms: the future as a series of equal-sized blocks that must be progressed through to reach a destination. In this view of time, it is inexorable - contributing to a sense of climate doom that threatens to paralyse action on global warming. Odell has a particular and welcome focus on the role of place and nature.
These ideas and others in the book certainly have the potential to make a reader pause and reimagine how they think about time - much more useful than bandaid time-management solutions, and the potential beginning of a transformation.
