"I think sometimes you're possessed," says the narrator's mother when he probes her about family history. "Can't you just let the past be past?" Like everyone else in this family from Derry, Northern Ireland, the narrator in Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark is haunted by the past. Unlike his parents, who harbor secrets they cannot tell each other, the narrator is determined to unearth the story behind his family's unspoken anguish. These family secrets are inseparable from Northern Ireland's violent political history and from the national culture of storytelling in which ghosts and haunt…
