Varsha Gupta wants fish for lunch. Her family is shocked; the three-year-old has never tasted fish in her life. The Guptas are strict vegetarians and don’t allow it inside their Calcutta mansion. But Varsha claims she can remember another life, in a mud house by a river where she caught and cooked fish with a different mother. Perplexed, the Guptas turn to Dr. Shoma Bose, a psychologist who has been investigating what are known as "cases of the reincarnation type" for years. But her understanding of the world is changed forever by Varsha's revelations.
Strikingly, Ghost-Eye has none of the eerie mood of a Gothic novel or ghost story. This is because the book treats reincarnation not as an ambiguous phenomenon but an empirical fact. ... The strangeness of Ghost-Eye will keep readers on their toes, but the book’s earnest, scientific framework makes it seem like an elaborate exercise in wishful thinking.
Transnational and translingual, with a planet-spanning curiosity, Ghosh is a synthesist of the highest order, able to weave big, genre-bending ideas, vast sweeps of History and nuanced characterizations into compulsively readable narratives ... A trim 322 pages. No one will ever accuse Ghosh of a lack of audacity ... It kills me, however, to report that Ghost-Eye is the weakest entry in the trilogy and the end of Ghosh’s history-making streak ... Ghost-Eye attempts way too much with too little ... I understand what Ghosh is trying here, reminding us that the complexity of our endless worlds will always trouble that simplifying fiction we call causality, but he needed more room and time to make his case compelling on a literary level ... I’ve laid out my problems here, but even so Ghost-Eye is still a novel that I would enthusiastically recommend. The truth is that there are more insights and pleasures to be had from a flawed Ghosh than from the countless vapid mid-hits that inundate our bookstores and crowd our cognosphere.
The plot has been quite intricately worked out ... But much of the prose is dead on arrival. I say this with regret ... The novel’s good bits – the energy with which it evokes Shoma’s meticulous intelligence; Ghosh’s rich attentiveness to food as metaphor and as marker of globalisation – are very good. The rest is – well, perhaps it’s appropriate to end with a cliche: your mileage may vary.
