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.
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.
