Ghost Music by An Yu
You’ve just woken up. Your dream, which was once so vivid and tightly held in your grasp, has now slipped through your fingers as your body begins to awaken more by the second. All that’s left are whispers of memories, strange scenes and disjointed moments that hold no clear sense of meaning. This is exactly what it feels like reading Ghost Music. The best way I can portray the disorienting, dreamlike sequence of this novel is to do so briefly and in glimpses, peering into the weird, eerie life of our narrator, Song Yan.
A box of mushrooms delivered to your door every week, with no return address and no name. A mother-in-law who whispers the name of a child she gave away long ago. A man with never-ending secrets becomes more of a stranger rather than the man you married. A famous pianist, who disappeared suddenly on the brink of long- lasting fame and success, comes to you for help. An orange mushroom that grows in the corner of your room begins to talk to you. And throughout all this, a question eats away at the back of your brain: ‘What do you think the sound of being alive is?’
This psychedelic haze of a novel is an exploration of music, life, love and existentialism. It is a short book, but it contains countless inexplicable images that leave you starved for more. The surreal prose pours from the page like the melodies of a lullaby, making you listen to the subtle notes of self-discovery and of the difference between living and existing. Reading Ghost Music, all I could think was how much this book reminded me of a Salvador Dalí painting: mystifying, hallucinatory and irresistibly hypnotic.
