A book where nothing happens and yet everything happens. The division between this world and the next, black and white, science versus faith, fact, fiction, the supernatural, the wisdom of baring a personal experience to others who abuse that trust - it's all here. It's also written in the present tense which gives it a different tone - the slowing down of conciousness, the sense of seeing everything in slow motion as it actually happens.

This book is a slow-paced, story of a man who works at a mortuary who has seen something unusual. It takes almost the entire book to really see what he saw. It is not really a ghost story as whether or not the supernatural exists is not the central theme. It is more what people do with the knowledge that there might be something else out there - both the narrator and those around him are changed in unexpected (and sometimes disastrous) ways.

As to basic reality, I found it odd that there would be so many people that interested in a possible haunting story. Sure, in today's day and age, that might have been something you would read in a blog on the net and sure, people might come by to walk past the mortuary. However, that big of a to-do over something like this? I presume it's a relatively small town but I doubt this would interest that many people, including the newspaper. I could be wrong about that but it seemed over the top as far as what would really happen. That, to me, was the biggest flaw of the book. I did like the large psychological part of this story as to what was happening inside David's head and the plot, whether true to life or not, was a crucial part of this telling. ( )

I really enjoyed this book. It was full of characters, circumstances, and settings that never failed to hold my interest. Alan Lightman is really good at taking you along with the protagonist and bringing you into his hopes and frustrations to see them from the inside. As for the central premise, this isn't a ghost story in any campfire sense - but there is a ghost in the book (a few classes of them, really), it's just not the one getting most of the attention (with a notable exception).
The "box" testing felt drawn out to one encounter too many between the credulous and the scientists, but Lightman even handles that in a clever way that makes you glad it was there. I'll miss the characters and was glad to have spent time with them.
My POV differs from many I've read in the review section, as I don't think there is much (if anything) left truly obscured. People experience things they can't explain, but this isn't an indication that there's a lack of rational explanation. Sometimes my keys aren't where I think I left them. It happens. ( )

This wasn't very good and I had to force myself to read it, which is odd for me since I love reading. I can count how many books I've had to force myself to read on two hands, this would be one of them. ( )

A beautiful, timely and timeless meditation on irreconcilable belief.

David Kurzweil saw something. The right word seemed to be "ghost." He couldn't not tell someone; the experience was too overwhelming to carry alone. Someone, unfortunately, told other people, people with agendas - reporters looking to break stories, believers looking to hold up David's experience as proof for their beliefs, scientists looking to debunk the proofs of the believers, individuals needing, for personal reasons, to feel the empowerment of knowing something outside the knowable - and not only does the ensuing media circus endanger David's job, it also places his friends and loved ones in awkward positions of having to defend their love for David while not sharing his conviction.

Woven into the story are his confrontations with other things that haunt him, such as the marriage he lost, the lie about the significance of his job that he told to his mother, his memories of his parents, and his lack of visible success relative to his peers, and with other things that only David seems to see: the redness of a toy ball, the beauty of a lake in a local park, the immense worth of his new employer, Martin, despite Martin's conviction that he would never measure up to his own father, a perpetual ghost in the fourth-generation funeral home that Martin still runs, though Martin has no children to whom he can teach the trade.

No, there isn't a thriller-satisfaction Shyamalan twist at the end. There isn't even a final explanation of what the ghost was. No, David doesn't convince any of his family or sciencey friends to believe him, and no, he isn't entirely sure what he believes besides the fact that he saw something, even at the end, when so many questions have come and gone by without clear answers. Some people think David makes a significant and positive difference. Others are glad when the story dies down.

Mr. Lightman, as seems to be his wont, isn't interested in giving us a systematic metaphysics, or even a hint about what to believe. What he wants us to see, and what David learns to see, is that even when nobody else can see what haunts one, one has everything to gain by trusting that something unusual and beautiful comes with every ghost, if one has the endurance to hold a belief in a world in which no other person can share the richness of a moment of one's own experience. The book becomes such a moment to the reader, a thing that can be shared but not mutually and exactly duplicated, a thing that is comic and clever and sad, but in the end, utterly, overwhelmingly, deeply and personally, beautiful. ( )

How can he be certain of anything that occurred in the past? He cannot be certain of thoughts. His thoughts, her thoughts. Even if every minute...had been recorded on a video camera, with oceans of gigabytes, that camera could not show thoughts...The only thing he knows for sure is what happens this instant, this razor blade of the present. But immediately the present is past. (209)

It was so fleeting, so quick. Is something true if it happens only once? If it is experienced only by one person at one time? (244)

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