For the most part, reviews for A Reunion of Ghosts have tapered off, but today I came across a new one from The Bookshop, a bookstore in England that looks just the way a book shop ought to:
I have to say that coming across a lovely review such as this during a week when I have been questioning everything including the worth of the work I do was very affirming. It reminded me that it is, indeed, important to put literature out into the world.
When I write, I try to live up to the exhortation of my professor, the late James Alan McPherson, who one day interrupted class to urge us to “consider writing about something important.” Those words changed me and my work. Ever since, I’ve tried to take risks and tackle the hard stuff. Thus, a first novel about genocide, a second that I consider to be a biography of the 20th century narrated by three suicidal (if wisecracking) sisters.
Jim also used to characterize all his work as failures, even his Pulitzer Prize winning work, even the work that won him a MacArthur genius award. He meant it, I think, in the sense that all art falls short, fails to achieve perfection, fails to live up to the vision we had for it when we began. Certainly, in that sense, my own work fails too, and it fails far more than Jim’s ever did. So it means a lot to know, imperfect though it may be, it touched someone.
Anyway, the review:
A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell is an absolutely astounding novel and I urge anyone and everyone to go and read it. I bought this book simply because of its pretty front cover, but it is so much more than that: a novel beautifully written – startlingly so in fact – and drew from me both tears of sadness and laughter on more than one occasion. The novel is written as a joint suicide note by three sisters whose great grandfather invented poison gas for the Germans during World War One. It is evocative and chilling, hilarious and devastating, and brutally questions the difference between truth and fiction, between meaning and coincidence. READ IT. Please.