![]() ![]() The ‘primary source’ materials - fragments and correspondences - expose yet more layers of thematic meaning beneath the main narrative, even as the apparitions of spirits imbue hidden overlays upon the photographs, the simultaneous superimpositions creating an intricate interplay between textual and thematic layering. ![]() This is seen in its approaches and methods to the observation of the human psyche, in its Agatha Christie-like questionings of crimes to which the solutions are in many ways already known, in its explications of spirit mediumship and Reconstruction-era politics. That the text fuses journalistic, dialogic, and narrative accounts, it at times renders more akin to an ethnographic study or a legal investigation than a novel. Interspersed in its pages are fictional newspaper and newsletter articles, letters, and interviews, which emerge as intriguing instances of literature within literature. Like its subject, the book is a material artifact with spiritual intentions. ![]() Atmospheric, lyrical, and poignant, the novel deftly interweaves strands of history and fantasy, peering into several characters’ subjective perspectives in a gradual unfolding of revelation and retribution. In The Spirit Photographer by Jon Michael Varese, spirits lurk in the memory, as does the scarcely buried history of slavery. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |