SOURCE: Hussein, Aamer. “In Various Incarnations.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4642 (20 March 1992): 20.

In the following review, Hussein provides a brief synopsis of The Triple Mirror of the Self, noting that Ghose's experiments with style and theme are difficult to follow in the beginning of the novel but become integral to the story as the novel progresses.

A cryptic document recovered from the Brazilian rainforest, ostensibly the memoir of a refugee from the urban wildernesses of Asia, Europe and North America, is handed by “the leading Latin American Realist” to Jonathan Pons, an academic in search of a subject. On discovering himself—in a place he has never visited—in this text, Pons identifies its author, who has renamed himself Urim, as a former colleague, an expatriate South Asian poet. Driven by curiosity and the promise of a research grant, Pons undertakes to complete the fragmented text and reconstruct the...