Kevin Chen’s darkish and eerie novel opens with a query: “Where are you from?” This seemingly easy query reverberates all through Ghost Town, and although its many characters are all determined for a solution, satisfaction eludes them. Watching them attempt—as they tumble via their lives and wrestle with their sophisticated relationships to each residence and household—makes for a wealthy and layered studying expertise.
Ghost Town facilities on the Chen household. Patriarch Cliff makes a dwelling as a small-time service provider in a rural Taiwanese city. Cliff and his spouse, Cicada, are dissatisfied by the births of their 5 daughters earlier than lastly having two sons. Keith, the youngest, turns into a author and finally leaves Taiwan for Germany, hungry to get out from below the burden of familial expectations. He falls in love with a German man, whom he finally murders.
The novel opens with Keith’s return residence after years in jail. His homecoming coincides with the Ghost Festival, a time when spirits go to the world of the dwelling, who in flip make choices to honor the ghosts and ease their struggling. Several chapters are narrated by ghosts, however they’re not simply characters. Their presence permeates the guide as a relentless buzzing backdrop—the ghosts of the lifeless and the might-have-been, the ghosts of inherited trauma and home violence, the ghosts of reminiscence.
It’s a dramatic setup, however the first two-thirds of Ghost Town are deliciously sluggish, lingering within the particulars and alluring readers into the characters’ inside lives. Keith muses for pages in regards to the adjustments to the swimming pool the place he realized to swim. Betty, his sister who now lives in Taipei, remembers a bookshop she frequented as a toddler. Middle sister Belinda describes her wealthy husband’s home abuse with chilling detachment. This consideration to the continuing drama and minuate of the household’s life causes the bigger thriller—why Keith murdered his boyfriend—to recede into the background.
The closing third incorporates the sort of grand revelations that may typically really feel overwrought, particularly after such a sluggish, meandering journey via reminiscence and loss. But Chen units it up masterfully sufficient that, as a substitute, the ending feels inevitable.
Winner of each the Taiwan Literature Award and the Golden Tripod Award (one of the very best honors in Taiwanese publishing), Ghost Town is full of gauzy prose and darkish imagery. Darryl Sterk’s translation has a dreamlike high quality, and it’s clear how a lot care he took to render the nuances of the unique Taiwanese into English. This isn’t a simple learn, however like a ghost, it lingers.
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