Held

Throughout the novel, the principal characters all “ache” for some form of “reunion” with their loved ones both living and dead, and Michaels uses varying amounts of ambiguity in her vignettes to create a range of what appear to be ghostly visitations. The wounded John, in the first line of the novel, raises the conjecture that death is not an end, and as the novel progresses, death itself is shown to ebb and flow like the tides: never final, and never only in one direction. Repeatedly, the novel’s characters sense the “presence” of the dead, and two scenes actually take the perspective of ghosts: Anna, who is killed abroad and then visits her family home in 1964; and the dead Aimo, who haunts the café where he and his lover first met decades ago. 

Throughout the novel, Michaels’s ghosts flicker through the porous veils of life and memory, and their own memories are piecemeal as well; for example, Anna retains no recollection of her death, and Aimo is “afraid he would remember only enough to wish for [his lover] and not enough to find her again” (218). In every case, it is the emotion of longing that either dissolves the barriers between life and death or rekindles enough memory for a loved one to crystalize like snow in the air.