
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Saunders' book is part a dialogue between ghosts, written like a script for a play, and part a collection of brief citations of historical sources, some real and some invented, indistinguishably mixed. While this bizarre form may seem contrived or pretentious, it is the overwhelming variety of perspectives that gives this story its incredible power.
Speaking from a crowd of historical sources, each recounting their own version, distances the facts from the overall truth. I mean that the facts - whether the moon was full on a certain night, who was at the party, what was said to whom, &c. - are infinitely contested and therefore irrelevant; the reader must reject the idea of history as a tidy, known quantity, and accept that the truth can be understood without the facts being known. (How very quantum!) Further, that confusion is so much more true to life than to pretend that there is an agreed upon story of anything.
But! This is not a dense, philosophical book. Saunders' ghosts run riot. Funny, tragic, obsessive characters manifest their unfinished business with a bursting abundance of life force. Anything is possible in this afterlife, but these ghosts are bound by their human foibles. Surely any reader can imagine themselves among them. In the end, a wonderful story about the meaning of death and life.
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