Ghost Mountain (Rónán Hession, 2024)
I resisted this one at the start. The writing felt like a voice put on. But the longer I stayed with it, the prose drew me in, hypnotised me. I understand the need for simple writing here. This is a story about simple people trying to make sense of their simple lives that are in fact not so simple. The trouble of living our lives is that it our vision of the world is limited, impaired by the very fact that we can only view it from the perspective of our senses. And despite efforts to draw out some grand theory of existence, in the moment our pleasures or sorrows are just that, ours. I don’t think the effort to make meaning is futile. It is inevitable. But through it all, Ghost mountain is just Ghost mountain.
There’s a lump in my throat. I say throat because that is the expression. But I feel it lodged in my body. I think it means different things at different times. I sense it when I struggle with work, feel love or when I see the Milky Way on a clear dark sky. The things I listen, read or watch surprise me when they describe this feeling. But it’s never the exact meaning only an approximate. And then I sit with the unease of that incomplete definition.
Ghost Mountain describes, approximately, that unease.