GHOSTS - Hardcover

Figes, Eva

3.62

52 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394571592 ISBN 13: 9780394571591

Publisher: Pantheon, 1988

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Through the four seasons of a single year an aging, unnamed woman comes to terms with her grown children, her former lover, her memories, and her unsettling present

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From Publishers Weekly:

The narrator of this irritating scrapbook, much of it written in fragmentary sentences, reviews her life from a perspective of exhaustion. She moves from the street to the dentist, to the garden, to the kitchen, to a museum, noting that things seem to be running down, little is new, life is a party that repeatedly plays itself out. The prattle of other people fails to cheer her. In the throes of an incurable entropy of the spirit, she drags about with "tired tread," her stomach aches, her mouth is dry, her back hurts. Peering through a window at the swallows in the garden, she complains, "A sense of futility comes over me." She rummages through old papers in her father's bureau, and remarks, "I sit down on the floor, and the breath has gone out of me." There is a fondness for sentences like "I know this city and I do not know it." and "I see and I do not see him." In an upstairs bedroom sits a frail old lady who seems to be her own ghost, and at times is also her mother. The writer concludes that she herself is nothing, nothing lies ahead, and she has nothing to say. One wonders why novelist Figes ( Light ; Waking ; Nelly's Version ) felt the need to inflict so dreary an exercise on her readers.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

ea. vol: Pantheon. 1988. f In these two works, Figes's fans will find a familiar theme: a woman searches for the identity denied her by family and society. Especially intriguing is Nelly's Version , a perplexing yet haunting mystery that traces the attempts of a woman who calls herself Nelly to recover her lost identity and unravel her role in the novel's violence. Although the metaphor of amnesia is obvious at times, Figes's control and skill makes it work; and her terse, taut style contributes to the suspense. Less didactic than earlier novels, this new work makes a strong and frightening statement. Equally strong and even more disturbing is Ghosts , an impressionistic novel that traces events during a year in the life of an unnamed woman who must accept growing old in an unsympathetic environment. In carefully crafted vignettes she recalls the "ghosts"mother, children, loverin her life. Here, Figes's handling of time and structure is superb. Both works should be considered by public libraries and academic libraries strong in feminist literature. Elizabeth Guiney Sandvick, North Hennepin Community Coll., Minneapolis
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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