A collage ... Hustvedt’s stitching skills are nimble. This book is cohesive, melancholy, distinctive and — despite the occasional longueur or 'lyrical' moment — genuinely moving ... Hustvedt writes so intimately about their physical and intellectual companionship that she makes you feel, in a way not all memoirists can, the dimensions of the crater he left behind ... The significant and the trivial mix, neither pushing the other aside ... She goes too deeply, for this reader, into the nature of ghosts. I wish her sense of humor were, even darkly, in evidence. She writes about laughing and says she is alert to humor but tends to be deadly serious on the page. This might be the place to remark that Auster’s and Hustvedt’s books have never quite been in my wheelhouse. But Ghost Stories is almost exactly my kind of thing. It’s a grainy and resonant book about loneliness, despair and confusion. It’s close to a howl.
For a thinker of such exquisite taste and grasping wisdom, a writer incapable of a limp sentence or lazy answer, the loss of her own thoughts is right next door to the hell she’s already living in. Her new notion of self then, one without Auster to accompany her, becomes suspect, uncertain, a scaffold that trembles beneath the tentative steps of deep sorrow ... Hustvedt’s attention to objects—Auster’s pens, his typewriter ribbons, his boxer shorts—will remind you of the fetishistic detail of Proust, but without Proust’s aesthetics of consolation. There is no madeleine here to restore the past. Instead, objects testify to emptiness, to irreversibility ... the prose oscillates between much-needed detachment and deeply lyrical engagement. This oscillation mimics grief’s dual nature: it is both a physiological disruption and an existential undoing ... There is no manufactured uplift at the end of her telling. She knows the abyss left by Auster’s death will never fill. But after six months of his absence she has begun to reassemble herself: in small parts, in disparate places.
Fragmented, full of short, even single-sentence paragraphs – preserves the concussive nature of grief, catalogues haptic memories...searches for solace and insights...mourns the endless winter ahead ... For all the loss and loneliness it itemises, what offsets the pervasive melancholy of Ghost Stories – gives it life – is its incandescent anger.
There is a literary micro-genre of which I am particularly fond in which a novelist breaks into memoir, almost against their will, to describe some especially haunting or violent real-life ordeal. There’s no one like a fiction writer to capture darkness and despair with humour and unsentimental precision ... Hustvedt captures the experience with refreshingly spiky precision ... The book is pleasantly fluid in structure, jumping back in time to tell the four-decade-long story of the couple’s romance from start to finish ... The odd bout of Beckettian stair sex aside, this is an intensely touching book.
Beautiful ... Something of a diary, something of a meditation, something that allows a glimpse of Auster’s final and most personal work ... It seems necessary to give something of the background of these two writers, yet there is no need to know any of this to find solace and deep delight from the intelligence and humanity of Ghost Stories, its portrait of a marriage of true minds.
Siri Hustvedt nods to Proust in Ghost Stories, her memoir of the death of her husband of 40 years, the writer Paul Auster, and of the asphyxiating grief that replaced him ... For a thinker of such exquisite taste and grasping wisdom, a writer incapable of a limp sentence or lazy answer, the loss of her own thoughts is right next door to the hell she’s already living in ... At Auster’s end, Hustvedt brings us through the almost second-by-second undoing of his life ... These scenes are, almost literally, unbearable to experience: You have to stop, put down the book, and, with Hustvedt, gather whatever strands of fortitude remain for you to continue.
Feels intimate, impressionistic and a little unfinished, with its scraps of observations and memories. It is a record of a long marriage and of the great unmooring of grief. It may be of most interest to Hustvedt and Auster fans, with its references to their books and glimpses into their writing lives.
Revelatory focus shapes this forthright, richly faceted chronicle of grief as she tells the story of her long marriage to the sublime writer Paul Auster ... Interlacing the manifest with the mysterious, Hustvedt offers a vivid and intimate homage to Auster the man and the writer, and their loving and creative life together.
he warm letters share family history, especially of Miles’ mother—Auster’s and Siri’s daughter, Sophie—and the man she married. Auster could be stubborn and tactless, Hustvedt admits, but also kind and sentimental. Their bond was physical, emotional, and deeply intellectual. He told Hustvedt he wanted to return as a ghost; she honors that desire in this intimate memoir. A widow’s candid love story.
Tender ... The book’s title comes from Auster’s stated desire to return as a ghost; Hustvedt sweetly fulfills his wishes by recounting anecdotes from his life and sharing letters he wrote to her and their children. The result is an elegy that’s at once heart-swelling and devastating.
