“Solitude is tolerable, even enjoyable at times. But when you realise that you’ve given your life to someone, yet you know nothing but his name? That kind of solitude is loneliness. That’s what kills you.”
In An Yu’s ethereal Ghost Music, a lady’s grip on her suffocating life loosens as she is drawn right into a surreal world of secrets and techniques and ghostly experiences the place her deep yearnings can lastly resurface and rework her.
Thirty-year-old Song Yan has devoted the previous three years to her husband, Bowen. She has additionally made room in her life for his disgruntled mom, who’s just lately widowed and now lives with them of their Beijing condo. Although Song Yan traded her profession as a live performance pianist to be a dutiful spouse, Bowen is extra all for his job as a BMW govt than in having kids.
The disquiet between Song Yan and her mother-in-law is briefly quelled by the mysterious weekly supply of prized mushrooms, which the ladies prepare dinner collectively. However, Song Yan turns into more and more pissed off with and disconnected from Bowen after she learns some details about his previous. She turns her consideration towards investigating who despatched the mushrooms, which leads her down the proverbial rabbit gap to Bai Yu, a well-known pianist who vanished a decade earlier. In the method, Song Yan rediscovers a side of herself that was additionally on the verge of disappearing.
Ghost Music, like Yu’s first novel, Braised Pork, is fantastically metaphoric and insightful. Song Yan’s first-person narrative reveals the total richness of her thoughts and senses, which have been stifled by her worry of disgrace and the disregard of her husband and mother-in-law. Throughout this haunting social commentary, Yu’s lyrical language and atmospheric descriptions deliver out the distinction between Song Yan’s oppressive, superficial actuality and the hypnotic world the place she converses with fungi. Fans of literary novels with a supernatural edge, equivalent to Jamie Ford’s The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, take notice.
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