Music of the Ghosts

Music of the Ghosts is a 2017 novel by Vaddey Ratner about a Cambodian refugee who returns to Cambodia to learn her father's fate. It is her second novel, after In the Shadow of the Banyan.

Book details
Author	Vaddey Ratner
Book type	Fiction
First published	2017
Original language	English
Publisher	Touchstone
ISBN	978-1-4767-9578-2
Subjects	Literature & Storytelling; Migration & Diaspora; History & Remembrance
Creator pages	Vaddey Ratner

About the book

In 1979, thirteen-year-old Suteera and her aunt Amara escaped Cambodia, the only members of their family to survive the Khmer Rouge years. In America, where she is called Teera, she remains haunted by her father's disappearance. After Amara dies in 2003, Teera, now 37, flies from Minneapolis to Wat Nagara, the Buddhist temple where her father was raised by monks and where her aunt left a memorial to all who died under the Khmer Rouge. She carries a letter from a man who signs himself "the Old Musician." He says he knew her father in the Khmer Rouge prison where he disappeared twenty-five years before, and that he holds three classical instruments her father meant for her.

The Old Musician is Tun, poor and disabled, who plays ceremonial music at the temple. He carries guilt for choices he made in the war years and grief for the daughter he lost, and he waits for the confession he must make. In Phnom Penh, Teera finds a society still in turmoil, where perpetrators and survivors live side by side. She falls in love with Tun's friend Dr. Narunn, a former novice monk, orphaned in the war years, who runs a medical clinic and shows her a country on a fragile path of reconciliation. Chapters move between past and present, and between Teera and the Old Musician.

The title comes from Teera's escape. Crossing an abandoned rice field with her aunt, she heard a sound like a string instrument, and the Khmer Rouge soldier leading them to the Thai border told her there was "only music of the ghosts." In the final movement, near the temples of Angkor, she meets three land mine survivors, once enemies, who play together on a three-stringed instrument with one working string.

Writing

Ratner calls the novel a novel-length smot, a form of poetry sung in honor of loved ones, living or dead. Music is at its center. It is written in three movements: the first sets out grief and unresolved remorse, the second follows the characters over several months as they remember their pasts, and the third resolves those themes with hope, for the characters and perhaps for Cambodia. Ratner has said that if her first novel is a story of survival, this one is a story of survivors. She says it is less autobiographical than her first, though Suteera draws on much of her own emotional journey, and that it looks at perpetrator and victim from the distance of years.

Publication and editions

Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, published the first hardcover edition in New York on April 11, 2017. Its length is given as 324 pages by the Internet Archive record and the New York Times, and as 336 pages by Kirkus. ISBNs include 9781476795782 and 9781476795799.

Reception

The novel was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and was longlisted for the 2018 Aspen Words Literary Prize. Kirkus Reviews called it "no easy read but impossible to put down," with Cambodia as its true central character.

References