RaveThe Christian Science MonitorGhosts is less an analytical or journalistic account than it is a character-driven, novelistic narrative about loss and trauma in a community disfigured by tragedy. While it is filled with meditations on the rituals and possible meanings of death, it begins with a new life ... Opening in the first-person voice helps ease non-Japanese readers into a cultural milieu studded with names (Sayomi, Takahiro) and locations (Tohoku, Ishinomaki) that they might not easily recognize or remember. But it also serves a more resonant function ... As with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the author is complicit with the reader: We don’t know these people who at first seem so different. But through unflinching observation and patience, we can begin to understand the emotions that connect ...Ghosts reveals an undertow of rage and distrust in unforced, metaphorical lyricism ...Lloyd Parry’s real achievement is to humanize the survivors of the catastrophe, to infuse their haunted lives with intimately recognizable humanity.
RaveSalonA relentless, capacious and sometimes spastic voice guides us through a saga spanning three generations and two nations … Yunior’s voice dominates nearly every page, and the novel finally reads most powerfully as his own coming-of-middle-age story, with its minor keys of loss, self-betrayal and regret...Oscar’s emotional rawness and authenticity, his willingness to die for love, exasperate and then engross Yunior, and the novel traces the strands of Oscar’s peculiar emotional DNA back through familial and national histories … An overactive imagination, even one as tragically self-delusional as Oscar’s will become, may be the only means of sustaining love’s power in a world gone mad with corruption and iniquity.
