Name: Music of the Ghosts
ISBN: 9781432841713

Vaddey Ratner

A New York Times Bestselling AuthorTeera returns to Cambodia for the first time since her harrowing escape to America as a child, carrying a letter from a man who claims he knew her father in the Khmer Rouge prison where he disappeared twenty-five years ago. A lyrical hymn to the power of forgiveness, Music of the Ghosts is an unforgettable journey through the embattled geography of the heart.

Music of the Ghosts

An astonishing and powerful new novel from PEN/Hemingway finalist Vaddey Ratner. Leaving the safety of America, Teera returns to Cambodia for the first time since her harrowing escape as a child refugee. She carries a letter from a man who mysteriously signs himself as "the Old Musician" and claims to have known her father in the Khmer Rouge prison where he disappeared twenty-five years ago. Arriving in Phnom Penh, Teera finds a society still in turmoil, where perpetrators and survivors of atrocity live side by side. Soon she meets a young doctor who carries his own memories of that time but also shows her a beautiful country on a fragile path of reconciliation. Meanwhile, the Old Musician anticipates the confession he must make. Together Teera and the Old Musician confront the truth of their intertwined past, weaving a melody that will leave both transformed, and freeing Teera to find a new home and a new love in the places she least expects.

A Novel

Laura

Like many people I imagine, I periodically make the effort to read internationally, to get out of the Eurocentric world my books usually inhabit. I picked up Ratner's Music of the Ghosts because it intrigued me in this respect; I'd never read a book about Cambodia and in fact it was one of those countries I was only vaguely aware of until now. I knew where it was on the map, and I recognized the name Pol Pot, but the country never really had reason to enter my mind. Until now.

The best thing about Music of the Ghosts is how artfully it's written. There's a lyricism to her words, a beauty to her sentences that frequently mesmerized me while reading. This is especially apparent in the Old Musician chapters, and those chapters, as well as his character, were my favorite parts of the book. Those pretty words made the book go down easy, something that is especially admirable since books about foreign events and politics the average Westerner knows almost nothing about are usually dense and confusing and even a little slow.

In that respect, she reminds me of Khaled Hosseini, another author who writes about a country with an often confusing past and makes it easily accessible to a layperson with no background knowledge in Middle Eastern history. I do admit, though, I was a bit more confused while reading her works, and the story itself is not as intriguing as the stories in Hosseini's work. I'd imagine someone would be least interested to pick this up than The Kite Runner or A Thousand Splendid Suns, for instance.

One of the most comment complaints is that this book is slow. I admit, it is a little bit slow and I was bored in some parts, but the reason I didn't find this novel as slow as I would have is because last month, I attempted to read a book called My Last Lament and could not get even half-way through it before putting it down. When I think of slow books, I think of that one, or The Night Circus, a book that really tested my patience and ultimately proved that, no, I don't have the stamina to get through a plotless, description heavy, slow-moving novel. This is not a slow book by those standards, though I suppose that if one does not have the patience to get through sometimes jarring time leaps, or how long it took for Ratner to get to the point of the book, one should not read this novel.

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Music of the Ghosts

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