In Ghost-Eye, Amitav Ghosh posits the global disorientation of the COVID-19 pandemic as a flux state, where parapsychological phenomena, past-life memories, mythology, and Indigenous knowledge might hold the key to getting humans out of the looming abyss produced by extractive capitalism. Dinu, the narrator, a retired academic living in Brooklyn, is escaping his pandemic isolation and anxiety by reconstructing the world of his childhood in Kolkata of the 1960s. He is especially interested in telling the story of his beloved aunt Shoma, a psychologist, and her experience treating Varsha, a little girl from an upper-class family with seemingly clear memories of having been a rural fisherwoman from the Sundarban forest region outside the city.
The narrative alternates between time periods, until the past catches up to Dinu’s present. The 1960s plot line is enticing for a while, as Shoma devises elaborate tests that prove beyond a doubt that she is dealing with a reincarnated soul in the body of a child. But this vivid and at times hair-raising scenario is eventually muddled with other preternatural events and comes to lose its power. Varsha is not only verifiably a reincarnated soul, but also a clairvoyant with powers of astral projection. There is a Burmese Buddhist who is aided and accompanied by a spirit (called a nat in Myanmar) throughout his life. Tigers and snakes act in protection of sacred places. Mysterious drones hover in New Jersey. It sounds like a cavalcade of action and adventure, but most of the events happen to other people Dinu talks to and are summarily recounted or drop away, forgotten or unresolved.
The climactic moment the plot slowly builds towards is described very briefly in a phone call to Dinu, as Ghosh has his protagonist conveniently become too ill to go and witness dramatic acts of climate activism in India produced by a cohort of powerful mystics. This reliance on denouement via hearsay doesn’t seem like a literary technique. It feels instead like an author weary of the pyrotechnics he believes necessary to sustain the reader’s attention. While Dinu and his aunt Shoma emerge as flesh-and-blood creations, many other characters seem invented merely to resolve narrative problems, and dialogue often clunks along in service of exposition.
Ghosh’s true passions are quieter: Bengali cuisine, the ecology of the Sundarban and the effects of globalization on culture. He devotes many more pages to naming and describing the various types of fish inhabiting the brackish waters of the mangrove forests, down to genus and species. This interest stems in part from all of the delicious and traditional ways of preparing these fish. Lists of ingredients and methods of preparation are not lacking. Dinu’s most consequential action is to attempt to prepare a traditional meal from his 1960s childhood in 2021, revealing that the novel is at its heart a deep reflection on changes wrought over fifty years:
What had seemed like a minor matter—cooking fish in the Bengali style for Varsha—was actually a challenge of monumental proportions, requiring the undoing of decades of disruptions in the ways that people ate, and indeed in how they experienced the world. GMOs, hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, antibiotic-heavy aquaculture practices and industrial packaging had made the taste of many foods almost unrecognizable. What were the chances that I would ever succeed in recreating the flavours of my childhood in my kitchen in Brooklyn?
Dinu’s quest to find and cook the authentic fish of Bengali cuisine takes up more space than the psychics. Ghosh is most eloquent with social history and with the everyday. He evokes in lovely detail, for example, Shoma’s home with its curved veranda overlooking the park that surrounded Dhakuria Lake, with its “committee of vultures that always perched in a long line on a tall Java-almond tree,” “carts of competing brands of ice-cream, bright orange for Magnolia and blue-and-white for Kwality,” and jhalmuri vendors “making a great show of mixing puffed rice, mustard oil and chillies in tins that they wielded like shamans’ rattles.” The specificity and simplicity of the scene are weightier than the weirdness of the New Jersey drones. Most memorable are not the speculative divagations, but the evocation of middle- and upper-class life in Kolkata of the past and the shaken-up, overconnected world of the recent pandemic. This would be enough on its own.
The author’s grand narrative gestures towards the preternatural serve as an assertion that older forms of knowledge and ways of being should not be underestimated in the face of growing catastrophe. This message is hard to glean, however, considering the cursory treatment given to the possibility of dazzling and powerful phenomena. Instead, the overwhelming feeling is that the clued-in animals, the helpful spirits, the weight of karmic fate are ultimately an exercise in wishful thinking.
FICTION
Ghost-Eye
By Amitav Ghosh
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published June 16, 2026
