Ghost Music

Ghost Music / An Yu / Grove Atlantic, January 10th, 2023 - $26 (Hardcover)

An Yu’s Ghost Music is one that feels intimately real and hypnotically unreal in equal measure: at its heart, it is a domestic drama, chronicling Song Yan’s humdrum existence as a piano teacher slash failed concert pianist alongside the collapse of her marriage with Bowen as the secrets of his past are brought to light; yet, anchoring Yu’s story is the surrealism of talking mushrooms, strange orange dust that befalls Yunnan, the lulling refrain of Chopin’s Rêverie, and the seeming specter of Bai Yu, a once world-famous, presumed-to-be-dead pianist. Earthly reality and phantasmagoria collide to create a haunting dreamscape that manages to be, at its best, quietly atmospheric and profound.

The spirit of Ghost Music is perhaps best captured by Yu’s mushroom motif. Just as mushrooms, whose caps and stems are visible above the soil, conceal a dynamic matrix of mycelial roots, so Yu’s novel, with its trappings of surrealist-domestic drama, harnesses an almost subterranean consciousness. With each superficial description of the mushrooms, orange dust, Chopin and Bai Yu, Ghost Music gets under readers’ skin – instead of leaving us alone, it halts and lingers, forcing us to confront the privately uncanny and uncomfortable. Ultimately, it is a novel that endlessly delights in its unsettling, if not hallucinogenic, effect. It is a shroom trip, but with the greatest of compliments.

-- Andrew Hu