“Solitude is tolerable, even gratifying at occasions. However while you realise that you simply’ve given your life to somebody, but you realize nothing however his identify? That sort 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 remodel her.
Thirty-year-old Tune 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 not too long ago widowed and now lives with them of their Beijing house. Though Tune Yan traded her profession as a live performance pianist to be a dutiful spouse, Bowen is extra desirous about his job as a BMW government than in having youngsters.
The disquiet between Tune Yan and her mother-in-law is quickly quelled by the mysterious weekly supply of prized mushrooms, which the ladies prepare dinner collectively. Nonetheless, Tune 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. Within the course of, Tune 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. Tune 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. All through this haunting social commentary, Yu’s lyrical language and atmospheric descriptions deliver out the distinction between Tune Yan’s oppressive, superficial actuality and the hypnotic world the place she converses with fungi. Followers of literary novels with a supernatural edge, corresponding to Jamie Ford’s The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, take word.
