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Dearest reader,
You might think ghost stories to be an unseasonable genre for June, particularly a June that is setting new records with its intense heat. Ghost stories, like campus novels and ‘cosy crime’, have their time and place, often as the evenings draw in and the year begins to wane.
Perhaps this is because we associate ghosts with an odd familiarity. Many ghost stories, along with other gothic genres and tropes, make use of the uncanny (Freud's unheimlich, literally ‘the unhomely’) – the sensation of something being both familiar and strange, alike and unalike.
As Freud famously argued, the uncanny is ‘nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.’ As the nights grow longer and the cold sets in, the home – our childhood bedroom, a parent’s eerily empty house – becomes the perfect setting for a ghost story.
And yet the past’s insistence on returning cannot be confined to a time of year. This week on The London Magazine website, Mariana Enriquez, interviewed by Konrad Muller, calls for a new kind of summer holiday, a ‘necro-tourism’ that includes stop-offs at cemeteries and catacombs rather than beaches and pools.
Cemeteries, Enriquez suggests, are among the few places where we can still feel the weight of time itself:
You feel time – the recent graves are completely different to the old graves, many of the old graves don’t have names anymore, they are completely forgotten. So here we can feel how time passes, how history passes, when today is almost always a whirlwind of the present, and things barely have context, things barely have history – or at least not history with the gravitas of real time. Cemeteries retain that gravitas.
Cemeteries, battlefields and other sites of death are places where history resists collective amnesia. They remind us, she argues, of what entire cities – and our own minds – are often trying to repress.
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Mariana Enriquez: Seven Questions
By Konrad Muller
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Nowhere is this more pertinent than in Lawrence Osborne’s short story, ‘Hotel’, published in our June / July issue and available to read exclusively in print.
The story begins in an elegant Tokyo hotel built around transplanted gardens and a pagoda rescued from Hiroshima. A grieving Canadian academic, staying there over Christmas to give a lecture at the nearby university, finds herself sleepwalking to the same apparently empty hotel room each night, drawn towards ghostly figures glimpsed in its windows.
Like Enriquez, Osborne’s story is interested in the relationship between travel – the discovery of a new place, its histories and traditions – and our own personal hauntings. The titular hotel offers anonymity and retreat, yet it is also a place where numerous lives, both in the past and now, briefly overlap before going off in their separate ways. Tourism, in both writers’ hands, is an encounter with memory as much as it might seem an escape from it.
And though Osborne’s story is set in a Japanese winter, its ghostly fires and feverish nightmares make it more than suitable for our recent summer issue.
You can order the June / July issue to read Osborne’s story in full or, if you haven’t already, now is an excellent time to subscribe. Subscribe before 30 June and we’ll include a complimentary copy of our special Catalan issue with your order – that’s seven issues for the price of six.
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I hope you have a cooler weekend, and I’ll be in touch next week with the latest from our website.
Very best wishes,
Zadie
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