Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

Abstract

Taska brilliantly brings to the forefront the contradictions inherent in idealism, secrets, and nationality, showing the imminence of disaster that accompanies every pen stroke, every train ride, when one lives under the surveillance of a dictatorship. Ultimately, however, I must give the thrust of my credit as an anglophone reader to Christopher Moseley’s masterful translation . Through careful structuring and witty literalism, Moseley has made universal a story so inherently regional, and for that I cannot thank him enough. “One has to preserve form so that content doesn’t disappear forever,” gripes one character, but this book proves that neither need be sacrificed, blending form and content, bringing both across time and space to grip the hearts of modern readers. Linda Stack-Nelson University of Oklahoma Sarah Moss Ghost Wall New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 144 pages. Early in Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, the narrator , a smart seventeen-year-old named Silvie, recalls accompanying her father to a history museum near their home in northern England. A bitter man who abhors the modern world, Bill Hampton rhapsodized about an exhibition of Bronze Age artifacts. “That’s where you come from,” he told Silvie, “those folk, that’s how it used to be.” Unfortunately, Bill is consumed with the crackpot idea that his once-pure country has been sullied by immigration. He channels his rage and insecurities into historical reenactments, one of which is at the heart of Moss’s harrowing novel. The reenactment is meant to mimic life as it was lived 2,500 years ago, and so the participants—Bill, his wife, Alison, and their daughter, Silvie; an archaeology professor and a few of his students—are roughing it in a wooded area near the North Sea. They pick berries, gather mussels, and cook their meals over an open fire. Most everyone tries to keep the mood light, but Bill, a stickler and a sexist, criticizes the students’ store-bought tents and expects all involved to observe outmoded gender roles. Worse, when he sees Silvie bathing topless in a stream, he takes her aside and beats her with a belt. Inspired by an ancient tribe that was said to have built a defensive “ghost wall” out of human bones, the campers collect rabbit and sheep skulls, intent on constructing a small replica. The project awakens something primal in the male members of the group. Soon, the increasingly febrile men begin planning another primitive ritual, this one centered on a shocking act of misogyny. The author of a lauded memoir about living in Iceland, Moss writes beautifully about the natural world, and she’s incisive when discussing the dynamics that emerge among strangers in close quarters. But this is more than just a story about a horrifying misadventure in the woods. Moss has written a feminist parable for an era in which an American president promises to build an insuperable wall and Brexit-supporting Brits are erecting barriers between their country and the rest of Europe. An unflinching depiction of tribalism and sexism , Ghost Wall is an intelligent work of fiction, one in which a character’s baleful misunderstanding of the past helps explain our fraught present. Kevin Canfield New York Giorgio van Straten In Search of Lost Books:The Forgotten Stories of Eight Mythical Volumes Trans. Simon Carnell & Erica Segre. London. Pushkin Press. 2018. 130 pages. Giorgio van Straten’s day job as director of the Italian Cultural Institute of New York seems to have been tailor-made for him. He is a public intellectual whose interests seem as wide-ranging and omnivorous as any true polymath. He has written books, translated the works of others, and serves as an editor. He is the author and presenter of the institute’s wonderful video series, “Il Novecento racconta il Novecento: Rubrica letteraria a cura di Giorgio van Straten,” a series of short editorials on Italian literature. His second and latest book to appear in English is the enchanting In Search of Lost Books in Review 86 WLT WINTER 2019 ...