The Ghost of Understanding

Lynne Perras teaches communication arts at the University of Calgary.

The Ghost of Understanding chronicles the emotional journey of Claudine,
a singer/writer trying to find an existence between “‘order’ and
‘chaos.’” Claudine recounts her efforts to redefine and simplify
her life by moving to a more rural environment. She includes significant
encounters with friends and lovers, and interspersed among the
first-person narrative are interviews, author’s notes about the
novel’s construction, plot summaries, letters to and from various
characters, and two drawings.

According to Smith, “[C]omplexity is the ghost of understanding.”
Unfortunately, in order to prove this point, she has made her novel too
complex, too disjointed. Her experiments with structure seem forced and
serve to reinforce the inaccessibility of the book. Her characters are
too one-dimensional to engage the reader’s sympathies. The graphic
sexual scenes hint at issues like female victimization but fall short of
conveying a clear message. Ungainly sentences like the following abound:
“I wondered how that information could produce the sensation it did,
but that seemed to lead me to the type of thinking that was in
opposition to the conclusion I’d drawn. I was trapped trying to
decipher the words on the wall. A ghost. What is a ghost?”

At one point a characters says, “It doesn’t matter what the
storyteller meant to tell, in the end, it’s what the listener
understands.” Readers of this ambitious and somewhat pretentious novel
will be left feeling more confused than enlightened.