A History of the World in 10½ Chapters was published by Jonathan Cape in 1989. It is a novel only by courtesy — or rather, it expands the definition of “novel” to include a sequence of stories, essays, and meditations connected not by plot or character but by recurring motifs (arks, boats, water, journeys, catastrophe, survival) and by a gradually emerging argument about history, truth, love, and narrative itself.
The first chapter is a woodworm’s-eye view of Noah’s Ark — a brilliant revisionist account that presents Noah not as a righteous patriarch but as a drunken tyrant, and the voyage not as divine rescue but as arbitrary selection and systematic cruelty. Subsequent chapters include: a medieval trial of woodworms accused of destroying a church; the hijacking of a cruise ship by terrorists; Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa and its relationship to the actual shipwreck; an actress’s documentary voyage to find the Ark on Mount Ararat; a nuclear survivor’s account; and a visit to heaven that turns out to be as disappointing as earthly life.
The “half chapter” — a personal essay on love — interrupts the historical narratives to argue, with surprising emotional directness for so cerebral a writer, that love is not the answer to history’s horrors but the only adequate response to them. Love does not explain or redeem suffering; it simply exists alongside it, as the thing that makes human life bearable without making it comprehensible.
Collecting A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1989): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Signed first edition: $60–$150
- US first (Knopf, 1989): $15–$35