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    The Ghost in Love: A Novel
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    The Ghost in Love: A Novel
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    The Ghost in Love: A Novel
    Ebook339 pages6 hours

    The Ghost in Love: A Novel

    By Jonathan Carroll

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "I envy anyone who has yet to enjoy the sexy, eerie, and addictive novels of Jonathan Carroll. They are delicious treats—with devilish tricks inside them."—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post


    Neil Gaiman has written: "Jonathan Carroll has the magic. He'll lend you his eyes, and you'll never see the world in quite the same way ever again."

    Welcome to the luminous and marvelously inventive world of The Ghost in Love. A man falls in the snow, hits his head on a curb, and dies. But something strange occurs: the man doesn't die, and the ghost that's been sent to take his soul to the afterlife is flabbergasted. Going immediately to its boss, the ghost asks, what should I do now? The boss says, we don't know how this happened but we're working on it. We want you to stay with this man to help us figure out what's going on.

    The ghost agrees unhappily; it is a ghost, not a nursemaid. But a funny thing happens—the ghost falls madly in love with the man's girlfriend, and things naturally get complicated. Soon afterward, the man discovers he did not die when he was "supposed" to because for the first time in their history, human beings have decided to take their fates back from the gods. It's a wonderful change, but one that comes at a price.

    The Ghost in Love is about what happens to us when we discover that we have become the masters of our own fate. No excuses, no outside forces or gods to blame—the responsibility is all our own. It's also about love, ghosts that happen to be gourmet cooks, talking dogs, and picnicking in the rain with yourself at twenty different ages.

    Stephen King has said that "Jonathan Carroll is as scary as Hitchcock, when he isn't being as funny as Jim Carrey." Jonathan Lethem sees Carroll as the "master of sunlit surrealism." However one regards this beguiling original, two facts are indisputable: It's tough being a ghost on an empty stomach. And The Ghost in Love is a triumphant return.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 30, 2008
    ISBN9781429930666
    Unavailable
    The Ghost in Love: A Novel
    Author

    Jonathan Carroll

    Jonathan Carroll (b. 1949) is an award-winning American author of modern fantasy and slipstream novels. His debut book, The Land of Laughs (1980), tells the story of a children’s author whose imagination has left the printed page and begun to influence reality. The book introduced several hallmarks of Carroll’s writing, including talking animals and worlds that straddle the thin line between reality and the surreal, a technique that has seen him compared to South American magical realists. Outside the Dog Museum (1991) was named the best novel of the year by the British Fantasy Society, and has proven to be one of Carroll’s most popular works. Since then he has written the Crane’s View trilogy, Glass Soup (2005) and, most recently, The Ghost in Love (2008). His short stories have been collected in The Panic Hand (1995) and The Woman Who Married a Cloud (2012). He lives and writes in Vienna. 

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    Reviews for The Ghost in Love

    3.5/5

    20 ratings18 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I normally don't pay much attention to book jacket blurbs by Famous Writers, but when I saw Neil Gaiman's name on one of the blurbs for "The Ghost in Love" I admit I was hooked. I have a good deal of respect for his judgment, so if he likes Carroll, then it's worth giving this book a try. Neither man disappointed me.Carroll does indeed have the magic. His work is actually rather reminiscent of Gaiman's in the sense that his imagination is fertile and quirky. The moment he won me over was when his angel of death manifested as plate of bacon and eggs. Carroll walks a fine line between sweet and bizarre throughout much of this book. Sweet because it is both humane and affectionate. You have the sense that Carroll loves his characters, knows them well, and cannot think ill of them. Bizarre because, well... bacon and eggs. You know.In the end, literally as well as figuratively, I was a little bemused by the turn the story took -- which I will not reveal here since I don't want to be hunted down with a spoiler-phobic mob brandishing torches and pitchforks -- but even that, even an ending I wasn't sure I was entirely buying into, was redeemed by the very last scene, one of such sweet-natured chaos, that I couldn't fail to forgive any shortcomings.What really seals the deal for me is that I, who was utterly unfamiliar with Carroll's work before this, am now firmly in the camp of the Carroll Fans, and I can't wait to read more.
    • 2/5
      Unfortunately I didn’t want to read a book about “What is life all about”, or “How do my past actions influence my present and future?” I wanted to read an interesting story. Unfortunately I found little of that in this book. Instead it is loaded (especially at the end) with metaphoric images and situations. It’s not a bad book, it’s just not for me.
    • 2/5
      What happens when someone is scheduled to die and survives instead? Is it a "heavenly computer glitch"? Is it the work of Satan? Or, is it merely a human being's free will. This is a whimsical book about that very question. It is a little reminiscent of TIME TRAVELERS WIFE although not as intriguing. A good read none-the-less.
    • 3/5
      Started out interestingly enough. A man goes to a shelter to buy his girlfriend a dog and he picks the one that has been there the longest, sight unseen. On the way home he slips in the snow and hits his head. He was supposed to die, but didn't and things go very wrong in the universe.
      It reminded me of The Christmas Carol gone awry. The gist of the story is that we are always hardest on ourselves and there are part of ourselves we are not proud of, but they are still a part of who we are.
      I liked the story, but wasn't pleased with the ending.
    • 1/5
      This one was for book club. Not my type of writing.
    • 4/5
      After a bad fall on some ice, Ben's life has been turned upside-down: he’s seeing flashes of someone else’s life, nothing makes any sense, and his dog is talking to him. He fears he's going crazy.

      Imagine his surprise when he finds out it's all because he was supposed to have died when his head hit the sidewalk. But instead of being dead, he's walking around with one foot in each world.

      It’s a fascinating combination of circumstances, but unfortunately, they don't come together into one of Carroll's better books. He has an interesting idea, exploring the ways we come to grips with our pasts and reconcile who we were with who we are, but the interpersonal relationships--usually the backbone of everything he writes --lack his usual sincerity. Dialogue tends toward expository chunks rather than honest conversation or discussion; the ending is a long, philosophical diatribe on the meaning and nature of being alive. Some of Carroll’s lines are brilliant, shining gems of poetry that lilt across the page, but these occasional lines feel out of place with the rest of the narrative. One gets the impression that Carroll wrote this book to exorcise his own demons about getting older, rather than to tell a particular story. Carroll’s existing fans will find this one, but he’s unlikely to hook new readers with this effort.


      This makes a couple of disappointments in a row from Jonathan Carroll. I'm hoping he's just in a slump, and hasn't lost his touch all together. I'm waffling between 3 and 4 stars, but I'm erring on the side of four. I want to believe.
    • 4/5
      I liked this novel a lot--I got sucked in from the first and read it in one sitting. It's not quite like anything I've read. Maybe the closest analogy is a modern prose version of Dante's Divine Comedy with a quirky sense of humor, a contemporary allegory of soul and psyche starring a man, Benjamin Gould, his girlfriend German Landis, their talking dog Pilot, and oh, yeah, Benjamin's ghost, Ling, living with Ben and in love with his girlfriend. And if that sounds whacky, hold on, because this story goes places I didn't expect. At one point it seemed to veer so completely off I wondered if the author had any idea where he was going, and just decided to go off on a tear because he had no idea what to do next. Yet there was enough heart and humor in the book to keep reading, and it eventually makes a bizarro sense. Psychologically sharp and insightful in ways that made me really think about how it would apply to me if I were the protagonist in this novel. It felt a bit heavy handed and sentimental at points but ultimately moving--towards the end it had me teary-eyed and left me grinning.
    • 4/5
      First time I've read/listened to Jonathan Carroll and I loved this book! I don't read a lot of fantasy, so this was a nice change for me. I won't go into the story. However, the way it's written, the reader has to pay attention to try to figure out what's happening. But it's not so convoluted that you can't keep up. It's witty. The ideas are either fresh or totally absurd, depending on how much you let yourself go with the story. The things that happen, like one character smoking a cigar and then climbing up into the cigar smoke, are just off the wall. I had a ball with this book and Ray Porter was just right to narrate once I got used to the ghost's voice.
    • 5/5
      The Ghost in Love makes me want to track down Jonathan Carroll and hug him. (The Land of Laughs made me want to hug him, but this novel takes it up a notch.)This is the story of Ben, his former girlfriend - German, his ghost - Ling, and his dog - Pilot. To say the least, it is a complex tale of how the four of them interact with the rest of society, the world at large, each other, and themselves. This novel explores many aspects of the self and the amount of power an individual has over the course of his life. Perhaps the strongest compliment I can give to the beauty of this work is that I did not want to finish it. I got to the final chapter, and I was so in love with the characters, the depth of the themes, the lyrics of the prose, that I could not fathom how it was going to end, and I didn't want it to. Much like in the midst of new relationship energy, you can't imagine any way that a partnership will falter, and you want to grab on tightly to any piece of the beauty you are enveloped in, I wanted to hold on to this story, never see it end, but allow my heart to play the "what if" game over and over, following multiple paths the story might take, where certain decisions might lead.So, I put it down. I waited a few hours. And then I had to pick it back up, as I didn't want to be separated from it any longer.The final chapter was a thing of beauty, if a bit too blatant in a few moments for my personal taste. I felt as though Carroll was hitting the reader on the head (gently, not wanting to hurt you) with his mantra. And while I appreciated it once, maybe even twice, I did get to a point where I wanted to hug the man a bit more tightly just to get him to shut up. I loved the message, but I also appreciate subtlety. Overall, The Ghost in Love is a masterpiece of the exploration of taking charge of one's self and destiny. The faults are part of the whole, make the whole more stunning, and should not be viewed as a weakness of the piece... as that would mean I took nothing from the work at all.
    • 3/5
      The rules of The Ghost in Love's universe keep changing, and trying to keep up, for this reader, seemed at times like a random meandering through a maze of "what if's". But Jonathan Carroll leads us along his thread with such humor and heart that it is a delight to follow and see where it leads. Favorite character: a talking dog.
    • 3/5
      Ben Gould fell down, hit his head and began having odd experiences. In fact, they were so strange that his girlfriend, German Landis, didn't hesitate to break up with him. Along comes Ling, Ben’s female ghost, who is also in love with German. Huh?! Think this is wild? It gets even more convoluted. If you are familiar with the work of Jonathan Carroll (playful, humorous writing with a pinch of the absurd…and often having good quotes, there for the taking), you know how he loves to use urban fantasy to get across a life lesson. You also know that there will be at least one dog in his book.Although this is not one of my favorite Carroll novels, I found it lightly entertaining. I'd say that, if you’re in the mood for a ghost story, one that's not too scary, there are enough ghosts in this volume to quickly fill your quota.
    • 2/5
      Wow... my opinion is definitely in the minority - it would seem that most reviewers actually liked this book! I found it to be... a very poor knock-off of Palahniuk's writing style (i.e. Lullaby). (If you have read Lullaby then you will have an idea of exactly how this story is written) It is, sorta, a fictional look at the nature of identity. The first half of the story is much much better than the second half - probably because you're still hoping that the pieces will come together and you'll have a sensible story.It does not, and you will not. The second half of the book is a steady slope downhill to some sort of insane understanding of personality/identity, and the end of the book is just stupid... (a philosophy text written by someone who's had too much to drink?)The description and title are misleading... if you stretch your imagination, it's about a man falling in love (or at least coming to terms with) with the various aspects of himself, but the ghost falling in love is a very minor and almost unnecessary add-on to the story.I did finish it, but only because I kept hoping it would make sense at the end... now I wish I had skipped to the end from the half-way point, and then moved on to my next book.
    • 4/5
      I LOVE Jonathan Carroll’s books. I love the crazy places his books take me, and the odd people I meet and the way he can be traveling down one path and then so subtly go a different way…while I am still happily going the original direction. When I finally catch on, it’s still a delight to backtrack and join him on his new route.I stumbled upon “A Ghost in Love” in Auntie’s Bookstore in Spokane, WA. Little did I know that one of my favorite writers had a new book out (well, I guess not THAT new), but Auntie’s would be the place I would find it.Somehow I held off and didn’t start “Ghost” until days later when I was ready to sit down and bit off a big chunk, and then I fell into the world of Ben Gould and German Landis, and Pilot, their dog.The reader is introduces to German in a perfect way, “Fifteen blocks away, a woman was walking down the street, carrying a large letter ‘D’.” Of course she was. In a Jonathan Carroll book, of course she was. It is explained later, and everything ends up making sense, it’s just a wonderful of making sure the reader is paying attention.“A Ghost in Love” is about love and life and the choices people make in both. It deals with who people are at various stages in their lives and how later, all of those people and choices intersect. Instead of waxing philosophic about two such universal subjects, Carroll creates a world of ghosts, talking dogs and verses…and makes his points with a different slant to them.“A Chinese farmer invented the idea of ghosts three thousand years ago as a way of explaining to his precious grandson what happens to people after they die. God thought it was such a novel and useful idea that He told his angels to make the concept real and allow it to flourish within the system.”And “German Landis simply didn’t understand people who moped. Life was too interesting to choose suffering. Although she got a big kick out of him, she thought her brother, Guy, was goofy for spending his life writing songs only about things that either stank or sucked. In response, he drew a picture of what her gravestone would look like if he designed it: a big yellow smiley face on it and the words I LIKE BEING DEAD!”Although I keep mentioning the humor and wonderful absurdity that I find in Carroll’s books – it’s the heart to them that keeps me coming back. He creates characters that I root for and laugh with and start to adore.“Danielle put a hand flat against her chest. “We’re born with everything in here – everything we need to be happy and complete. But as soon as life starts frightening us, we give away pieces of ourselves to make the danger go away. It’s a trade: you want life to stop scaring you, so you give it a part of yourself. You give away your pride, your dignity, or your courage…When all you feel is fear, you don’t need dignity. So you don’t mind giving that away – at the moment. But you regret it later because you’ll need all those pieces.”I found such beauty in this book. Even though I was lost at times, many times, it’s such a wonderful journey that I didn’t care. When by turns, I can read something that makes me laugh out loud and then something that makes me slow down and read again to capture the meaning and beauty of a phrase, then I am enjoying a book to the fullest.And in this book, there was a part about a childhood object that took me back in time, recovered a memory for me that I’d though I’d lost.“Usually at least once in a person’s childhood we lose an object that at the time is invaluable and irreplaceable to us, although it is worthless to others. Many people remember that article for the rest of their lives…If we describe it to others and explain why it was so important, even those who love us smile indulgently because to them it sounds like a trivial thing to lose. Kid stuff. But it is not. Those who forget about this object have lost a valuable, even crucial memory. Because something central to our younger self resided in that thing. When we lost it, for whatever reason, a part of us shifted permanently.”For me, that object was an ivory (probably fake ivory) bracelet that my dad bought me at a Chinese restaurant. When it broke, I knew something, some part of me, was broken and couldn’t stop crying. When I read the passage above, the memory of the delight in having it and the sorrow in losing it came back to me. That’s the power of books. We live lives that are not our own, and in doing so, discover things about ourselves and others that we might never have known, or have forgotten. This idea of forgotten or unknown aspects to ourselves is woven throughout “A Ghost in Love” in a wonderful way. We are the sum of all that we have done…and more than that, we are different things to different people.“Why do people love us, Ben? We’re always trying to figure that out, but only by using our own point of view. That’s so limited. Sometimes they love us for things we don’t even know about ourselves. For example, they love our hands. My hands? Why would someone love my hands? But they’ve got their reasons. You must accept that and realize that the Ben they know is different from the Ben you know.”“The Ghost in Love”, too, is a book that is different for me than it is for any other person; all books are. The version of it read through my eyes? Wonderful.
    • 4/5
      I love Jonathan Carroll. Here's what happens to me when I read his books. Number 1, reading the book is a roller coaster of delights. There is always the element of the supernatural but I would not call these books fantasy, at least not traditional fantasy. There is always some cool dog in the book that can talk. Carroll has a million interesting complicated plot twists and ideas that unfold as the novel progresses and as my friend, C, put it, the novel crescendos to the very end. Number 2, you don't really remember most of the plot of the book, after a year or two. It's just too complicated, and in a way, is sort of incidental to the ideas that it was transmitting. But you do remember 1-3 characters, ideas, or scenes, and they stay with you forever. Forever. He is a wonderful writer and his books are smart but not snooty or overly intellectual. Carroll can describe and show the ways that our experiences--the painful ones, the youthful ones, the shared ones, the internal ones--play out in our decisions and actions of our present. Obviously, I highly recommend. Try one, the one that looks most interesting to you. Best wishes,MicheleBy the way, I own the kindle version, not the audio version but couldn't find one listed here. I do listen to a lot of audio but not this one.
    • 4/5
      Benjamin Gould shouldn’t be alive. He was scheduled to die after falling and hitting his head on the sidewalk…but somehow, he survived, and the natural order of things is beginning to come unraveled. The Angel of Death has sent Ling—the ghost meant to come to earth after Ben’s death to tie up his unfinished business—to watch Ben instead and to figure out how the human managed to defy his scheduled death. Ling finds herself rather at loose ends, and spends her days cooking elaborate, though imaginary, meals; having meandering conversations with Ben’s dog, Pilot; and mooning quietly over Ben’s ex-girlfriend, German, with whom Ling has fallen in love.Meanwhile, Ben is convinced he’s gone crazy. Strange things have begun to happen in his life…things that Ling suspects have to do with having survived his scheduled death. Finally unable to stand dealing with it alone, Ben enlists German to help him make sense of it all. Soon, Ben, German, Ling, Pilot, the Angel of Death, and another survivor like Ben named Danielle Voyles find themselves caught up in the aftershocks ensuing from humanity’s decision to take control of themselves from the powers that be. Poignant and affecting for all its strangeness, “The Ghost in Love” makes the struggle to overcome those parts of ourselves we dislike and to accept those parts of us that others adore a literal one. Imaginative, yet true, with special focus on those everyday details that make life worth living and the quiet moments that define us all.
    • 4/5
      I don't usually read fantasy. I was drawn to this book by the description and I wasn't disappointed. The story is a hero's journey through love and death. Bravery and wisdom are needed for the journey. Part of the bravery and wisdom are provided by the main character's dog, who can converse with (some) humans. One of my favorite aspects of the novel was being able to listen in on the conversations dogs have with each other. It's a very imaginative novel that holds together well. It isn't a genre I'll venture into often, but this was a great story, well-written and enjoyable. I'm glad I read it.
    • 3/5
      I liked the concept behind The Ghost in Love (a man doesn't die as fated, upsetting the natural order of things) and am open to the somewhat nebulous genre known as magical realism. But I'm sorry to report that this novel didn't connect with me. For me, magical realism is most powerful when it depicts the world we live in, laced with selective fantastical elements that make us examine our reality from an unfamiliar perspective. It's the tension between the real and the magical that makes these stories so compelling, and authors like Dean Koontz and Stephen King have a knack for finding that balance. For me, The Ghost in Love tilted the balance way too far toward the magical side. I can accept ghosts and talking dogs, but when you add in time travel, interactions with oneself at various stages of maturity, the ability to cheat death, the ability to create magical protector dogs and beings that are physical manifestations of one's character flaws, and other fantasy devices too numerous to tally, the story loses any grounding in our world. This layering of fantasy on fantasy also slows the pace of the book, as the reader is forced to re-learn every few pages the shifting rules in Jonathan Carroll's Bizarro world. Carroll has a great imagination, and his theme about each person being the sum total of past experiences hit home with me. Sometimes, though, less is more, and I think this book would have been more satisfying if the author had left out some of the magic and focused instead on creating believable characters and situations.
    • 2/5
      A woman, a talking dog , a ghost, the Angel of Death and a man that wouldn't die.Welcome to Jonathan Carroll's world. A world where we learn at least two facts: We are our own worst enemy and we are the master's of our own destiny. A change in all we know of death has been slowly taking place. People that were fated to die are no longer doing so. Instead they are taking charge of their own fates and destiny . Enter Ben Gould. Ben steps off of a snowy curb one day, slips and hits his head and should have died. He didn't. What follows in this book is Ben coming to terms to learn those two important facts that I mentioned This is a book of over 300 pages; filled with cloyingly sweet characters,deep profound thoughts, rambling and unnecessarilylong descriptions. Characters seem to be thrown in for the heck of it, instead of being used to drive the plot. This book is filled with past lives, present lives and I think even a maybe few future lives (but I'm not really sure about that because the book just got too confusing, rambling, and dare I say, boring at times LOL!) I'm sure that I didn't "get" what the book is about; or what the author was trying to convey, but that's not my fault, it's the fault of the author. It's up to him to make as many people as possible "get" his work. Not just a select few. And this is my first time experience with Jonathan Carroll and I'm afraid it will be my last. Just remember these words:We are the master of our destiny;andWe are our own worst enemy.