The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

The Graveyard Book (2008) is a novel by Neil Gaiman about a boy being raised by ghosts in an English graveyard. Geared towards young adults, Gaiman was inspired to write this story by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) in which a little boy named Mowgli is raised by wolves in the jungle.

The Graveyard Book tells the story of Nobody Owens. At the beginning of the novel, Nobody is orphaned when a man named Jack murders his parents and his older sister. Nobody manages to escape by wandering to a graveyard. The ghosts in the graveyard decide to care for him and protect him with the help of a vampire named Silas who serves as his guardian. Nobody, nicknamed “Bod,” is granted “Freedom of the Graveyard.” He is able to see ghosts and learn supernatural abilities, such as disappearing or Fading, Haunting, and Dreamwalking.

Bod has various adventures and learns about the outside world from the ghosts. He befriends a ghost witch named Liza Hempstock and a young living girl named Scarlett Amber Perkins, who later moves away to Scotland. Though he is safe in the graveyard, Bod craves learning about the outer world and convinces Silas to allow him to go to school. Unfortunately, when Bod attracts too much attention to himself at school, he has to leave.

Meanwhile, the man Jack continues to pursue Nobody with the goal of killing him to finish what he started. Nobody must use his skills to protect himself, his friends, and his home from the evil man Jack.

The Graveyard Book is a coming-of-age novel with an episodic quality. The main narrative conflict is the existence of the man Jack, but he is mainly absent from the story. Jack’s reason for pursuing Bod isn’t very compelling. Still, I really liked Bod and his friends, especially Scarlett and Liza, and I wonder where life will take Bod next.

There were many quotes and exchanges that I loved throughout the story. Here are a few of them:

Silas said, “Out there, the man who killed your family is, I believe, still looking for you, still intends to kill you.”
Bod shrugged. “So?” he said. “It’s only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.”
“Yes.” Silas hesitated. “They are. And they are, for the most part, done with the world. You are not. You’re alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you’re dead, it’s gone. Over. You’ve made what you’ve made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.”

“That’s the difference between the living and the dead, ennit?” said the voice. It was Liza Hempstock talking, Bod knew, although the witch-girl was nowhere to be seen. “The dead dun’t disappoint you. They’ve had their life, done what they’ve done. We dun’t change. The living, they always disappoint you, dun’t they? You meet a boy who’s all brave and noble, and he grows up to run away.”

Liza could be seen now, a misty shape in the alleyway keeping pace with Bod.
“He’s out here, somewhere, and he wants you dead,” she said. “Him as killed your family. Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us. Come home, Bod.”

Bod had allowed himself no friends among the living. That way, he had realized back during his short-lived schooldays, lay only trouble. Still, he had remembered Scarlett, had missed her for years after she went away, had long ago faced the fact he would never see her again. And now she had been here in his graveyard, and he had not known her...

Then she said, “Can I hug you?”
“Do you want to?” said Bod.
“Yes.”
“Well then.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t mind if you do.”
“My hands won’t go through you or anything? You’re really there?”
“You won’t go through me,” he told her, and she threw her arms around him and squeezed him so tightly he could hardly breathe. He said, “That hurts.”
Scarlett let go. “Sorry.”
“No. It was nice. I mean. You just squeezed more than I was expecting.”
“I just wanted to know if you were real. All these years I thought you were just something in my head. And then I sort of forgot about you. But I didn’t make you up, and you’re back, you’re in my head, and you’re in the world too.”

Nothing was said. Just a silence in reply, that echoed of dust and loneliness.

“How is she?”
“I took her memories,” said Silas. “They will return to Glasgow. She has friends there.”
“How could you make her forget me?”
Silas said, “People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.”

...Mother Slaughter interrupted, “And I still feels like I done when I was a tiny slip of a thing, making daisy chains in the old pasture. You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Liza’s voice, close to his ear, said, “Truly, life is wasted on the living, Nobody Owens. For one of us is too foolish to live, and it is not I. Say you will miss me.”
“Where are you going?” asked Bod. Then, “Of course I will miss you, wherever you go...”
“Too stupid,” whispered Liza Hempstock’s voice, and he could feel the touch of her hand on his hand. “Too stupid to live.”
The touch of her lips against his cheek, against the corner of his lips. She kissed him gently and he was too perplexed, too utterly wrong-footed, to know what to do.
Her voice said, “I will miss you too. Always.” A breath of wind ruffled his hair, if it was not the touch of her hand, and then he was, he knew, alone on the bench.

“Will I see you again?”
“Perhaps.” There was kindness in Silas’s voice, and something more. “And whether you see me or not, I have no doubt that I will see you.”

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Poppy

Here's a sketch I made a few months back of a wild poppy.

Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda

Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda is a collection of intertwined short stories featuring living humans interacting with ghosts and spirits. Matsuda’s inspiration for each story came from Japanese folktales, legends, kabuki, rakugo, and plays. She provides synopses for the original tales at the end of the book. I read the English translation from the Japanese by Polly Barton.

The stories are unique in that the ghosts and spirits are growing, learning, and changing. The spirits are not scary, horrifying, or frightening; instead, they exist side by side with the living. The collection begins with the story of a young woman who is blaming herself after her boyfriend breaks up with her. The ghost of her aunt who died by suicide appears to the woman, reminding her not to destroy her strength. Later, the young woman’s cousin (her aunt’s grieving son) appears in other stories. Many of the stories are interconnected. Some stories are connected by the characters, others by their themes, and still others by their location.

I enjoyed the stories and wish I was familiar with the originals. In this season of ghosts, reading this volume was a good reminder that there are spirits all around us, if we just open our eyes to them.

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The Dinner by Herman Koch

The Dinner by Herman Koch is a dark, corrosive tale about bad people doing bad things. I read the English translation of the novel from the Dutch by Sam Garrett. Set in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the book tells the story of two brothers and their wives who meet for dinner at a fancy restaurant to discuss a family matter involving their sons.

The book’s sections are named for the dinner’s five courses: aperitif, appetizer, main course, dessert, and digestif. Paul Lohman and his wife Claire arrive at the restaurant first. They await the arrival of Paul’s brother Serge and Serge's wife Babette. Serge is a famous politician who is planning to run for Prime Minister of the Netherlands.

Paul is the narrator, and he’s an unreliable one. Beyond that, he’s a sociopath. Paul is aware that his son Michel and Serge’s son Rick have committed a heinous crime. Their violent act was recorded on video, but the boys have not yet been identified. Over the course of the dinner, their parents must decide—should they turn their sons in, or should they cover up and ignore their crime?

To any reader with a moral compass, the decision is obvious, but these characters lack morals.


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The Million Things Left Unsaid

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) is a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh about a depressed, unnamed 26-year-old woman who decides to hibernate for a year and emerge as a new person. The narrator seems to have it all—she’s young, she’s blond, thin, and beautiful, she’s wealthy and lives off an inheritance in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and she has a job at an art gallery in Chelsea.

Despite these privileges, she’s dissatisfied, dark, and miserable. We learn that her emotionally unavailable father died of cancer during her junior year at Columbia, and her unfeeling, alcoholic mother committed suicide weeks later. The narrator has little self esteem and has an on-again off-again relationship with Trevor, a cruel older man who works on Wall Street and uses her for sex. She has a complex, resentful relationship with her best friend Reva, whom she seems to judge, dislike, and tolerate. Reva’s mother is dying of cancer, but the narrator is so detached that she has no sympathy for her friend.

She says, "I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you'd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide. Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life."

As the narrator begins to sleep more and more, she finds relief in the emptiness. She contacts an unethical psychiatrist named Dr. Tuttle, and lies about her symptoms, claiming to be an insomniac. Dr. Tuttle barely listens to the narrator, but prescribes her a wide array of pharmaceuticals to help her sleep.

She contemplates her library of psychopharmaceuticals thinking, "Life was fragile and fleeting and one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person."

Will the narrator’s plan work? Is sleep and escape from reality really the answer?

I bought this book sight unseen from Barnes and Noble. It was a surprise book, wrapped up and labeled with the above synopsis as part of a “Blind Date with a Book” display. I don’t think I would have picked the book up on my own, and selecting it helped expand my reading.

Although the narrator craved sleep throughout this book, the story kept me awake, reading until the very end.

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