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Maybe someday
49
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
7/100Critics
91/100Scholars
Author:
Sarah Viren
Publisher:
Scribner
Date:
June 13, 2023
Sarah's story begins as she's researching what she believes will be a book about her high school philosophy teacher, a charismatic instructor who taught her and her classmates to question everythingâin the end, even the reality of historical atrocities. As she digs into the effects of his teachings, her life takes a turn into the fantastical when her wife, Marta, is notified that she's been investigated for sexual misconduct at the university where they both teach. To Name the Bigger Lie follows the investigation as it upends Sarah's understanding of truth.
What The Reviewers Say
Strange and wonderful.
Gripping in part because it combines a detective story with a Kafkaesque nightmare of becoming tangled in academic bureaucracy. Crucially, throughout, Viren reflects on the relationship between truth and facts.
If Viren had pursued her original intent, the resulting book — about the making of a conspiracy theorist — would have been disturbing enough, especially as undertaken by someone with her expansive mind, journalistic skills and ability to write clearly about even the most opaque ideas. But the subject defies her initial plan and becomes far more unsettling in the process.
It not only brings us through a philosophical exploration of these concepts but it also becomes a challenge to Woolf’s conception of a before self and a now self. How can we so easily box ourselves and our experiences into two separate worlds, two separate planes, two separate selves?.
