Amitav Ghosh’s L’occhio fantasma Examines History Beyond Binary Logic

Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, L’occhio fantasma, appears in Italian translation by Norman Gobetti and Anna Nadotti, published by Einaudi in 2026. In the book, Ghosh argues that history is a tangled knot, and that disentangling it requires stepping away from the monopoly of reason and from analytical tools he describes as increasingly obsolete, if not rigged. History, understood as the science of time and space, has neither center nor apex and does not follow a linear course, he contends. Attempting to discern its meaning by forcing it into a logic built on pairs — before/after, here/there, us/them, dead/living, past/future, near/far, cause/effect, human/non-human, mind/body, memory/imagination — can only lead to a blind spot, according to the writer. By insisting that A leads irreversibly to B and by denying any principle of contradiction, one ends up disoriented and ready, simply to escape, to yield to simplification and to the apparent clarity of easy answers. The Italian edition carries the subtitle-less title L’occhio fantasma and is credited to translators Norman Gobetti and Anna Nadotti. The book is published by Einaudi in 2026. The piece was published on Doppiozero on Wednesday, 21 October 2026, with the byline Maria Nadotti and Anita Romanello.