Ghost Town by Kevin Chen, translated by Darryl Sterk (Europa Editions)

Keith Chen has escaped from Yongjing, the rural village in Taiwan where he grew up, a place so small that the only privacy the inhabitants know is found in the secrets they carry. Secrets, Keith learns early in life, breed violence. “We never held you,” his dead father tells him in a ghostly confession that no human can hear, “We hit you instead.” 

In Berlin, secrets haunt the lives of Keith and T, the man who wants to marry him but is constrained to a domestic partnership by German law. Unable to answer the questions his lover asks in the one language they share, Keith writes down what T wants to know, in stories that T is unable to read. T’s own secret emerges in acts of sadism that culminate in his death. His murderer goes to prison and when Keith is finally released, he returns to his village and the four sisters who survived their childhoods. 

Ghosts are commonplace entities in Yongjing: the woman who haunts a deserted bamboo grove, Keith’s father whose death fails to remove him from his family, the most beautiful of Keith’s sisters whose lush body encloses an aridity that drives her to suicide.  But when he returns, Keith discovers his own ghostliness, moving through a changed landscape, where odors provide his only orientation and his sisters prove to be his only anchors.

Kevin Chen tells this story through the voices of the dead and the living, each one unfolding a narrative that’s brutal, steeped in sensory details that rarely make their way into fiction, relieved by surprising bursts of humor and quick flashes of beauty. Every voice rings out with its own individual timbre, carrying its own particular burden of memories. Slowly secrets come into the open, bit by bit, until the facts appear in stark truth, losing their power once they’ve been told.

Ghost Town is a shocking novel in the way it toys with its readers’ emotions, while maintaining a stoic and matter-of-fact unveiling of its details. A child striptease artist becomes an unlikely savior; a girl is punished by witnessing her grandmother kill her dog and serve it as the family dinner; a nouveau riche mansion is described in satirical detail, right down to the waterbed that’s filled with “melted snow from the Swiss alps.” In prison Keith takes comfort in knowing that he’s “small fry compared to some of the guys” with whom he’s acting in a version of Hamlet. “The guy who is playing Ophelia in drag killed three people. Another of the Hamlets killed five. I only killed one.” Then there are the sisters, each one of them a small masterpiece of sibling rivalry, coming together “like bacon in a skillet…I know where your scars are, you know where I hurt…The sisters kept turning on the heat.” And it’s doubtful that any reader will fail to be surprised by what emerges at the story’s end.

Everyone in Yongjing, ghosts and survivors, exist outside of the world at large, “in a time zone all of their own.” The dead, observing the present, often seem more alive and aware than the living, who carry the weight of the past. As Chen asks in his Afterword, “Do you become a ghost only after you die? Or can you qualify as a ghost while you are still alive?” It’s a question that taunts and haunts, one that will keep this novel alive long after its last page has been turned.~Janet Brown