Ghost-Eye
In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017), Ghosh urged his fellow novelists to embrace the unthinkable, the catastrophic, the prodigious, and the uncanny. Nothing short of the improbable, he insists, can capture—and resist—the dominant reality of our time: the speed and scale of the Anthropocene. Only stories that center the marvelous can represent the power of non-human forces unleashed by three centuries of capitalist-driven devastation.
In his newest novel, Ghost-Eye, last in a trilogy, Ghosh once again brings extra-human and trans-individual wonders from Bengali folklore to the aid of those most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change: the poor and displaced peoples of the Global South.
The story begins in 1969 with a “case of the reincarnation type.” A three-year-old child born into a strictly vegetarian, wealthy Calcutta family develops an inexplicable craving for fish. Even stranger, she shows an exquisite ability to distinguish among local varieties and to identify their traditional forms of preparation in Bengali cuisine. An investigation into her possible past life by psychologist Shoma Bose and her nephew Dinu unravels over five decades, and the mystery of these exotic talents links the New York Stock Exchange and a Brooklyn fish market to the mud huts and mangrove forests of Bengal’s impoverished and exploited Sundarbans. Solving this mystery promises nothing less than to reverse the course of planetary destruction.
Ghost-Eye sometimes reads like The Great Derangement rendered into fiction, and at such moments the veil between author and narrator becomes quite thin. Yet the novel does something that nonfiction cannot, at least not in the same way. It brings together characters from across continents and through time, drawing them and us towards a fantastic synchronicity. By centering the story in the marvelous, it imagines our collective transformation—one inspired by forms of belief and a respect for the earth that Western progress has despised.
