David Simpson is G.B. Needham Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California at Davis. His books include 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration and, most recently, Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity.
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Vol. 30 No. 16 · 14 August 2008
pages 11-12 | 2814 words
Wandering Spooks
David Simpson
- BuyGhosts of War in Vietnam by Heonik Kwon
Cambridge, 222 pp, £25.00, March 2008, ISBN 978 0 521 88061 9
Conjuring up the ghost of his dead friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh asks what things are like in the afterlife. Enkidu tells him it might be better that these truths remain hidden, but he agrees to answer the hero’s questions about the individual fates of those he knew on earth. It seems that life after death is not so different after all, a somewhat intensified but not inexplicable or inappropriate continuation of worldly behaviour. Ghostly as he is, Enkidu can still be embraced. Achilles is not quite so lucky: after a long conversation with the spirit or phantom of Patroclus in Iliad 23, he reaches out but grasps only air, as the image of his dead friend turns to vapour and disappears beneath the earth, losing language as well as form.
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Letters
Vol. 30 No. 17 · 11 September 2008
From Terence Eccles
David Simpson’s review of Heonik Kwon’s Ghosts of War in Vietnam brought to mind something I heard in that country just a few weeks ago (LRB, 14 August). Confronted by a motorcyclist speeding the wrong way towards us on an otherwise empty motorway, our driver – unsurprised – remarked: ‘She must love bananas.’ Bananas, it seems, are a traditional offering at shrines to the dead (beside the phony dollar bills, I presume).
Terence Eccles
London NW6
