Cli-fi genre is on the rise, rather like sea levels

Have you seen the rave reviews already online for Weather by Jenny Offill? A quick Google search will show you several already. Dozens. “That hum in the air about climate change” was one headline about the book. The New York Times inexplicably ran 5 separate glowing reviews of this one book before it was even released by the publisher. This is called savvy PR marketing. Or overkill!

The literary world is buzzing, from the New York Times (5 reviews on different days by 5 different staff critics), the Los Angeles Times, NPR, New Statesman, Time magazine and The Washington Post. Every review was a glowing thumbs up for this small novel that tackles climate change head on in a stylish, existential way.

Even in London, the Evening Standard’s reviewer Phoebe Luckhurst reached across the Pond and called it a cli-fi novel that is a perfect read in these unstable times of wildfires and floods.

Offill, born in 1968, grew as the only daughter of two teachers. She spent her childhood years in various places with her parents, including Massachusetts, California, Indiana, and North Carolina. Her married surname of Offill might possibily be an alternative way of spelling the German-Jewish surname of Ophuls, as in the family name of the famous European movie director Max Ophuls. Her husband is Jewish, Jenny is not.

In the novel’s story arc, Lizzie’s husband, Ben, who is Jewish, is very worried about where America is headed with Trump in power, and after the elections, readers learn that “Ben looks into the Israel thing; and I look into the idea of true north.”

This means that Ben, who is an American Jew with liberal attitudes about life and politics, is so worried about what might happen with Trump in power that is looking into making ”aliyah” to Israel, which means he is thinking about giving up his American nationality and becoming an Israeli citizen.

But while Ben thinks of emigrating to Israel for safety’s sake, his non-Jewish wife Lizzie wants to “look into the idea of the true north.” That means she is thinking of getting out of the Lower 48 and heading up north to Canada.

All-in-all, the novel is a fun, comic and thoughtful novel about climate change, ”and a deeply necessary one,” says one reviewer. And an editor in the book industry, Katie Adams, sent out a tweet on Twitter regarding Weather, saying:“[Offill] will not make you feel safe. She will make you feel less alone.”

Is there such a thing as ”Jewish cli-fi”?

Some are thinking about it now.

I will give the last word to book reviewer Phoebe Luckhurst in London: ”Climate fiction, or cli-fi, is a genre on the rise —  rather like sea levels. Jenny Offill’s Weather is surely the strangest, most charming entry yet into this emerging canon: a curious, dreamy book that is both a portrait of a polarized world (featuring preppers, doom-mongers and Twitter cowboys) and a small, intimate portrait of Lizzie Benson, a librarian.”

*
Dan Bloom is a freelance journalist, inveterate web surfer, and a climate change activist at THE CLI-FI REPORT