Strange and wonderful ... The book is preoccupied with twinned phenomena and dual perspectives. It’s a book for our times, when singular truths seem less certain with each passing day ... She seems to be saying that creating art is as much meaning as we can hope for in this world. This might sound self-congratulatory, but it struck me as the ideal ending for this ouroboros of a book.
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 ... She threads her storytelling with subtle commentary on truth, honesty, and narrative ... Engrossing.
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 ... Viren...has pulled off a magic trick of fantastic proportion. There are elements here of the classic thriller that function like a flock of seductive doves, released to distract the eye. All the while, her other hand is shuffling multiple shells that conceal a critical reading of Plato, an examination of the mechanics of memory, a study of the anatomy of a lie and an analysis of misinformation’s insidious creep ... Viren quickly and masterfully re-complicates what only appeared for a second like a quick fix: It is in speaking the truths that are hardest to voice and to hear — like the fall of an idol, like the urge for retaliation when wronged — that we find our way out of the darkness of deceit. She may be a memoirist in style, but she remains an epistemologist at heart.
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? ... She takes us through the history of these ethical preoccupations through the works of Plato, Socrates, Woolf, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Kurt Vonnegut to, hopefully, uncover exactly why the truth is so valuable and how we should wield it as a means to becoming freer.
Even in the days after I’ve read the book, I’ve found myself haunted by what Viren reveals not just about her life, but all our lives ... If these narrative threads were all “To Name the Bigger Lie” had to offer, it would make for a compelling story, but Viren takes the opportunity of these braided incidents to interrogate how our memories function, and show how memories that are technically accurate to us may not tell the whole truth ... It would be satisfying to know that ultimately Dr. Whiles and the individual fabricating the charges are outed and punished, but if we understand anything from To Name the Bigger Lie, it’s that narratives are rarely so tidy, and the only thing we can do is make the best sense of the world with what we have.
Two experiences intertwine in To Name the Bigger Lie, and both stories are gripping; they unfurl with a sense of suspenseful foreboding to show how lies can tear apart the fabric of everyday life and our most intimate relationships. But underlying them is a more groping, philosophical inquiry...to probe our sense of what is real, how we know, and, most importantly, how we come to that knowledge together. Ultimately, Viren argues less for the pursuit of truth than the pursuit of understanding, and the necessity of this...as a social responsibility. This, she says, is the work of storytelling.
