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Summary
Summary
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.
In Phnom Penh, Teera finds a society still in turmoil, where perpetrators and survivors of unfathomable violence live side by side, striving to mend their still beloved country. She meets a young doctor who begins to open her heart, immerses herself in long-buried memories and prepares to learn her father's fate.
Meanwhile, the Old Musician, who earns his modest keep playing ceremonial music at a temple, awaits Teera's visit with great trepidation. He will have to confess the bonds he shared with her parents, the passion with which they all embraced the Khmer Rouge's illusory promise of a democratic society, and the truth about her father's end.
A love story for things lost and things restored, a lyrical hymn to the power of forgiveness, Music of the Ghosts is an unforgettable journey through the embattled geography of the heart and its hidden chambers where love can be reborn.
Author Notes
Vaddey Ratner is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Her critically acclaimed bestselling debut novel, In the Shadow of the Banyan , was a Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and has been translated into seventeen languages. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Cornell University, where she specialized in Southeast Asian history and literature. Her most recent novel is Music of the Ghosts .
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Picking up many themes from her 2012 In the Shadow of the Banyan, Ratner's captivating novel is a tragic odyssey of love, loss, and forgiveness in the wake of unspeakable horrors. In 1979 Suteera Aung and her aunt Amara are forced to flee Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime as war rages around them. In a chilling admission as she and her fellow refugees fight to escape their once-beloved homeland, Suteera states that "there is no more home, only this land of open graves." Years later, after receiving a letter from a man known only as the Old Musician, Suteera is pulled back to the country that holds the terrors of her past. She learns that the old man and her father had spent time in the same jail, originally as enemies but eventually as friends. Suteera believes the mysterious musician can help her understand why her father, like the rest of her family, became consumed by the gaping, vicious mouth of war. As the title suggests, the songs and stories of ghosts fill the pages of this novel. Ratner, who lived through the rule of the Khmer Rouge herself, weaves a moving tale of hope and heartbreak that will accompany readers long after they finish the last page. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Ratner's second novel, following her critically acclaimed debut, In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012), begins in 1979 as 13-year-old Teera and her aunt flee the Khmer Rouge soldiers who decimated their village, trying to make their way into Thailand. Ratner then jumps to 2003, when Teera makes the journey back to Cambodia from Minnesota, where she and her aunt settled 25 years earlier. Teera has received a letter from an old man who claims to have known her father in a Khmer Rouge prison. Desperate to learn any information about her father's disappearance and ultimate demise, Teera makes the journey back to her homeland where her home no longer exists, a land as scarred and ravaged as herself. Ratner's descriptions of Teera's confrontation with her past, even as she experiences, once again, the beauty of her homeland, alternate with the old man's memories of his life in captivity with his old friend, Teera's father. The juxtaposition is unnerving and powerful as the reader is transported from scenes of unbearable torture to glimpses of monks arriving at a temple, their saffron robes like a row of candle flames moving across the land. Ratner, herself a Cambodian refugee, has penned another haunting, unforgettable novel.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT LAKES, by Dan Egan. (Norton, $27.95.)Although climate change, population growth and invasive species are destabilizing the Great Lakes' wobbly ecosystem, Egan splices together history, science, reporting and personal experience into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative. THE GIFT: (Or, Techniques of the Body), by Barbara Browning. (Coffee House/Emily Books, paper, $15.95.) This smart, funny, heartbreaking and often sexy novel concerns an artist and professor of performance studies (like the author) engaged in a continuing art project that bears an uncertain resemblance to her life. MISS BURMA, by Charmaine Craig. (Grove, $26.) A character based on Craig's Jewish grandfather marries a woman who belongs to a non-Burmese ethnic minority, the Karen, in a novel that reimagines their extraordinary lives. Their mixed-race daughter becomes the "Miss Burma" of the title. Themes of identity, longing and trust are addressed over nearly 40 years of Burmese history. THE ALLURE OF BATTLE: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost, by Cathal J. Nolan. (Oxford University, $34.95.) A historian argues that focusing on battles is the wrong way to understand wars, because attrition is what almost always wins. This thoughtprovoking book suggests a new approach to military history. ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A Biography, by Mary V. Dearborn. (Knopf, $35.) A perceptive and tough-minded biographer, Dearborn is immune to the Hemingway legend, and concentrates instead on what formed him as a man and a writer. She skillfully covers an enormous range of rich material. MUSIC OF THE GHOSTS, by Vaddey Ratner. (Touchstone, $26.) This tenaciously melodic novel explores art and war as an orphaned Cambodian refugee travels from her new home in Minneapolis to the Buddhist temple where her father was raised by monks, hoping against hope that he is still alive. The author discerns the poetic even in brutal landscapes and histories. WHERE THE LINE IS DRAWN: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel- Palestine, by Raja Shehadeh. (New Press, $25.95.) In deeply honest and intense essays, Shehadeh, a civil rights lawyer who now lives in Ramallah, describes his psychological and physical crossings into Israel. THE WITCHFINDER'S SISTER, by Beth Underdown. (Ballantine, $28.) An English witchhunter caused more than a hundred women to be hanged in the 1640s. In this ominous, claustrophobic novel, Underdown imagines his pregnant, widowed sister, who sees the malignant forces at work but is powerless to resist. FEN: Stories, by Daisy Johnson. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) The stories in Johnson's debut collection explore the shape-shifting world of the Fens, flat, once flooded lands in the east of England. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Kirkus Review
Ratner (In the Shadow of the Banyon, 2012), a survivor of the Khmer Rouge years in Cambodia, has written a novel-length smot, a form of "poetry sung in honor of loved ones, living or dead." As in two other recent novels concerning life under communist regimesElizabeth Kostova's The Shadow Land, about Bulgaria, and Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing, about Chinamusic is central to this tale. In 1979, 13-year-old Suteera and her aunt Amara escaped Cambodia, the only members of their family to survive. Despite the comfortable lives they achieve in America, Suteera, now called Teera, remains haunted by the mystery surrounding her father's early disappearance. After Amara's death in 2003, 37-year-old Teera flies to Cambodia to visit Wat Nagara, a Buddhist temple where her aunt bequeathed a memorial to all who perished during the Khmer Rouge years. Coincidentally, Teera has recently received a letter from a stranger offering her musical instruments he claims her father gave him while they were imprisoned together. The stranger is Tun, a former musician weighed down by enormous guilt over choices he made during the war years and deep grief over the daughter he lost. Now poor and disabled, he lives at Wat Nagara, where he heard about Teera from the abbot. Teera and Tun's awkward first meeting stirs up memories for each. Meanwhile Teera begins a love affair with Tun's friend Dr. Narunn, a former novice monk who runs a medical clinic. Also orphaned during the war years, Narunn chooses to embrace life despite his difficult past. The novel is organized in three movements: the first is a careful exposition of grief and unresolved remorse as themes; the fast-tempoed second covers a period of months as the characters interact with each other while remembering individual pasts of "so much cruelty, so much generosity"; the third resolves the initial themes while attaching hopefor the human characters and possibly Cambodia, Ratner's true central character. Lush with tropical heat and heated emotions, this is no easy read but impossible to put down. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
After nearly a quarter-century spent in Minnesota, Teera returns to her native Cambodia, fulfilling her aunt's dying wish that part of her ashes be delivered home. Having witnessed, decades earlier, the decimation of the rest of her family, Teera is now completely alone. She seeks the Old Musician, who has sent her a shocking letter claiming he knew her father. At the temple where Teera will relinquish her aunt's remains, the Old Musician waits, his aging body marked by the Khmer Rouge's unrelenting torture, his memories a debilitating spiritual burden of everything he did to stay alive. By delivering the precious musical instruments of a dead man to his daughter, the Old Musician hopes for some semblance of atonement, of forgiveness. Presented in alternating chapters over three "movements," Ratner's Music is a mellifluous composition for two voices in echoing counterpoint. VERDICT After fictionalizing her own survivor story in her best-selling debut In the Shadow of the Banyan, Ratner's sophomore title should place her squarely alongside Yiyun Li, Khaled Hosseini, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writers who have miraculously rendered inhumanity into astonishingly redemptive literary testimony. [See Prepub Alert, 10/10/16.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.