A deadly disease originating in China, collapsing infrastructures, people wearing masks on the streets – everything seems a little familiar to Ling Ma in her debut New York Ghost so told. But as clumsy as it may sound at first, the novel by the author, who was born in China in 1983 and lives in Chicago, was shortlisted for the PEN / Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and received, among other things, the Young Lions Fiction Award not – which is not least due to the fact that it was published under the original title in 2018 Severance appeared in a distant time when Corona was still a beer. That is what is also drunk in this novel by the survivors of the Shen fever, nine people who start after the “END” in the “BEGINNING”, which consists of the plundering of abandoned properties or properties that are partially still inhabited by sick, semi-living people ( they call it: stalking) and ends in a mall. New York Ghost is a deeply capitalism-critical novel, and it takes place in a world that is not only infiltrated by capitalism, but which is pure capitalism.
–
