RaveThe New Statesman (UK)In paying homage to both the man and the marriage its author has lost, Ghost Stories becomes a vivid demonstration of this mutual imaginative permeability ... Not merely about mourning but is itself an act of mourning, integrating into its structure the disjointed, recursive nature of the experience itself. It is an artfully broken book, shifting between memories of Auster as living presence and as ghost, between what they enjoyed together and shattering loss.
Olivia Laing
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... exhilarating ... Laing’s impassioned commitment to the promise of bodily freedom, of every body’s right to move and feel and love without harming or being harmed, shines through every sentence of the book. But she is too canny a writer to miss the rich and bitter irony in which efforts to realise this promise so often get caught: every movement to liberate the body comes to be marked in some way by the constrictive regime it’s trying to escape ... a series of dazzling forays into painting ... This is an expansive book, bold in scope and speculative range, an invitation to ongoing conversation rather than bland assent. In that conversational spirit, I would venture a different view of the dynamic between freedom and control animating the book ... Yet Laing’s Reichian utopianism, with its ultimate horizon of a body without fear, coexists with a clear-eyed sense, at work in all its granular explorations of sexual politics, art and ideas, of how and why that horizon seems always to be vanishing. And this tension, between defiant hope and sober realism, only enriches her intensely moving, vital and artful book.
