... or, as it is - more poetically and more aptly - in the French, Naissance des fantomes.
Which - appositely - makes me think of this, which I came across in a different context the other day: “And in the repetition or return of play, how could the phantom of the centre not call to us?” (JD). (An aside: it’s surprising how few results come up when googling for “absent center” or indeed “centre”.)
Which - appositely - makes me think of this, which I came across in a different context the other day: “And in the repetition or return of play, how could the phantom of the centre not call to us?” (JD). (An aside: it’s surprising how few results come up when googling for “absent center” or indeed “centre”.)
It’s
true that the - unnamed, I think - narrator does experience her husband’s vanishing, a disappearance which then
haunts everything else. But, more than that, the absence colours her experience
of the world to such an extent that ghosts of all kinds are indeed born and
become present to her perceptions as the familiar ceases to be recognisable.
The phenomenology is one of metaphysical
and epistemological destabilisation and slippage, rather than just the
psychological uncertainty, anxiety and unhappiness that might directly flow
from such a sudden, inexplicable disappearance.
It’s
in the first person - the only possible voice - and the past tense works well.
A strong sense of the narrator’s
personality comes through - in a similar way to in Amelie Nothomb’s books, maybe not coincidentally another
French language author - and Darrieussecq does a fine job in bringing the
reader into her narrator’s
consciousness, using language in a way that demands concentration (sentences
change direction mid-way through or have numerous unexpected clauses; metaphor,
simile and imagery in general proliferate and take all kinds of paths; commas
are frequently used in place of a more expected - and grammatically correct -
punctuation mark, as a way of both conveying the flow of thought and throwing
the reader out of any familiar way of engaging with it). Less successful are
some of the flourishes in the writing, which get just a bit too ornate for me
in places, although even those are mostly a matter of degree, given their
consistency with the type of mental experience of the world that the narrator
is having.
