Ghost-eye: A Novel by Amitav Ghosh PDF Download

 

Ghost-eye: A Novel by Amitav Ghosh Book Review

Today we are discussing Amitav Ghosh’s new novel Ghost Eye. This is a book that weaves together rebirth, the environment, folklore, and the rigidity of modern civilization. If you are a lover of literature or want to understand climate change not merely as news but as lived experience, then watch this video till the end.

Context of the Book
Ghost Eye is, in fact, the next step in Amitav Ghosh’s literary theory, which he has been developing for the past fifteen years. During this period, he has written several books on the subject. In 2016, when he wrote The Great Derangement, he directly accused the realist novel of concealing environmental realities. He argued that contemporary literature prevents us from seeing the impossible and terrifying events that are knocking at our doors.

Ghost Eye is the literary response to that accusation. Let us now understand what the story of this novel is about.

The story takes us to Kolkata in the 1960s. In a strictly vegetarian family, a young girl named Varsha Gupta suddenly insists on eating fish. Her family is alarmed because this goes against their values. She speaks of things that do not match her age or her home environment. Not only that, she says that this house is not her real home; her real home was by a river. This deeply unsettles her family.

A therapist is then called, who identifies it as a case of rebirth. As the novel progresses, rebirth becomes merely a doorway—a doorway pointing toward a far more unsettling world.

The second narrative unfolds in the post-COVID period, when a middle-aged man named Deenu, living in Brooklyn, is drawn toward the Sundarbans through the old files of his elderly aunt. There he encounters a character named Tipu, whose eyes are of different colors. Folklore says that such eyes can see both the physical and the spiritual worlds. From here, the story becomes one of environment, memory, politics, and resistance.

At this point, the narrative is no longer just about family and memory. It connects with water, rivers, systems, and the world of the margins. Gradually, the atmosphere of places like the Sundarbans begins to seep into the novel.

In this book, Amitav Ghosh introduces a new concept called environmental uncanny. He suggests that the climate crisis is not merely a scientific issue but a ghostly experience. It appears as hunger, as disappearing fish, in the sinking mangroves of the Sundarbans, and in the silence imposed on the media by powerful corporations.

In the novel, a coal-based power plant is set up in a fragile region like the Sundarbans, and the struggle against it becomes not just political but almost existential. In response to techno-utopian thinking, Ghosh places folklore, magic, and memory, suggesting that purely rational solutions may no longer be enough.

In this novel, fish is not just food. It is a sign of the river’s health, the water cycle, and the lives dependent on it. When fish disappear from the story, the entire system begins to collapse. The environment of the Sundarbans deepens this sense of unease, where floods, erosion, and climatic uncertainty are a constant part of life.

Here, the idea of rebirth becomes even more unsettling. The question arises: do memories belong only to humans, or does a drowning landscape also carry its own memories?

In this novel, Amitav Ghosh does not preach about the environmental crisis. Instead, he transforms it into everyday experience. The fear here is not of ghosts, but of a truth that can no longer be hidden.

This leads to the question: why should this book be read?

If you have read The Hungry Tide and Gun Island, then Ghost Eye is the next—and much deeper—stage of that journey. It is not a fast-paced narrative driven by dramatic events, but one that unfolds slowly. Its tension does not shout; it grows quietly within.

At many points, the book asks the reader to pause—not just to observe events, but to observe the surroundings. Sometimes it feels like thought, sometimes like memory, and sometimes like an old document. That is why it stays with you long after it ends.

This novel is for those who want to understand the environment not just through data, but through story and experience; for those interested in rivers, forests, coasts, and landscapes like the Sundarbans; and for those who read mystery not as fear, but as meaning.

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