My Phantom Husband

by Marie Darrieussecq, Helen Stevenson (Translator)

What would you think if your husband, one day, with no word of explanation or warning, simply vanished? When would you begin to panic - the first hour?, the first night?

A deceptively simple story about a deserted woman, My Phantom Husbandis Marie Darrieussecq's eerie follow-up to Pig Tales, showing her to be a writer of great subtlety and depth. When her husband goes to buy fresh bread and never returns, the young narrator's life changes for ever. Night after night she has to learn to be alone, to sleep alone, to live in a space she has shared with a man for seven years. Yet who was he, her husband, and did they really have much in common? Why can't she remember her love for him - or even what he looked like? Dragged into a world of visions, she is besieged by childhood terrors - monsters behind the furniture, vampires floating around in the dark, strangers walking in other rooms. She begins to see her husband, or an apparition of him. Is he a supernatural visitation or the product of madness - or a figment of her guilty conscience? My Phantom Husband is a profoundly unsettling parable about the way love appears and disappears, about the absences and evasions that can lie hidden within any relationship.

Genres: Fiction, France, Novels, French Literature, 20th Century, Literary Fiction, Womens

153 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Marie Darrieussecq was born on January 3, 1969. She was raised in a small village in the Basque Country.

While finishing her PhD in French Literature, she wrote her first novel, Truismes (Pig Tales) which was published in September 1996 by Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens (POL), who have published all her subsequent novels as well. After the success of Truismes, Darrieussecq decided to quit her teaching position at the University of Lille to concentrate on writing her novels. Her first husband was a mathematician, her second is an astrophysicist. She gave birth to a son in 2001 and to a daughter in 2004.

She endorsed Ségolène Royal's candidacy during the French Presidential Elections of 2007.

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 2 out of 5]

**1/2

Oh well, my decent run of late was always going to come to end at some point, but at least it was with a daring writer that does have talent, than with a writer who needs to find a new career.

This was an atmospheric, existential, and muted affair, told in the first person through thoughts alone using nightmarish and melancholic tones. For me, it felt far more like reading a lengthy prose poem than a novel. Her language was very poetic, with plenty of sentences that were achingly beautiful and ghostly when depicting the sky, sea, or urban streets. She does a good job of building up this strange and unsettling mood, but, on the whole, even though I have positive things to say about Darrieussecq as a writer, her novel just didn't quite work for me. But at least she tried to do things differently, and in her own unique way, than just walking along the same path as others.

In a nutshell, an unnamed French woman falls into a sort of surrealistic space within her psyche after her husband goes out to the shop and fails to return home. After panic and worry sets in, she then slowly descends into madness. She goes through the motions of her daily routine, musing on her thoughts as a wife, and enters a kind of suspended animation born out of tormented and hopeless waiting. Like a rising flood of dark water, her unconscious drowns her normal life with vivid and monstrous images, only to be soothed by the strong healing touch of a masseuse.

Darrieussecq plays around with the laws of memory, and the physics of the moment to create a work that in the end felt inconclusive. Did her husband return? was it all a dream? did she suffer from psychosis or depression? I guess its up to the reader to reach there own conclusions.
But in a way, that's a good thing, as at least it gets you thinking, Darrieussecq never gives the reader an easy ride, and there were always questions to ponder over.

This is a book I so wanted to rate higher after an encouraging start, but I can't keep being overly kind to novels that didn't grab me in the ways I'd hoped. Darrieussecq still gains my respect though.

[GoldGato · Rating 3 out of 5]

A man leaves his wife to purchase a loaf of bread...and never returns. Did he die? Did he purposely hide? An accident? He just vanishes. Then the story begins, as this is about the wife and how her perception of the world, and herself, changes after her husband is no longer in her universe. Bit by bit, her surroundings take on a different look, a different feel. Even his pictures change. Will she disappear, too, now that her anchor is gone?

Even when named, touched, or crossed through, ghosts lose none of their power or indulgence.

This is isn't a long pull of fiction but it kept me turning the pages. I thought about how we define our lives and stay within our outlined universes. Yet, when something unexpected happens, the present suddenly becomes the past. I felt as though I was in an Escher print.

Book Season = Autumn (the darkness begins)

[Jean Ra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Siento que con los libros de Marie Darrieussecq estoy perdiendo la gasolina, cada nuevo libro que leo suyo me cuesta más que el anterior. También hay que precisar que Respirando bajo el agua y este Nacimiento de fantasmas, mis dos últimas lecturas de sus libros, ambos están escritos en ese mismo estilo meticuloso, oblicuo, una poética que se centra en la percepción de personajes en crisis, que intenta dibujar lo intangible, las incertidumbres y el desasosiego. Ambas son lecturas en las que, al buscar bucear en estas mentes, renuncia a la narración en gran medida, los avances son mínimos y escasos, pero también hay que reconocerle la capacidad de concisión, de no llevar estos ejercicios de paciencia más allá de límites razonables, lo que permite aprehenderlos a pesar que el interés durante la lectura es bastante desigual.

Ya en las primeras páginas conocemos en un relato en primera persona a una mujer que vive en una ciudad y que un día su marido dice que va a buscar el plan y no se sabe más de él. Se disparan entonces los interrogantes acerca de sus motivos, de sus posibles destinos, en la mente de la narradora van surgiendo algunos recuerdos y sobre todo la angustia a la soledad, como el individuo moderno vive apresado por ese temor por más que pueda contar por otras personas. Supongo que también es, de una forma más elíptica, una novela acerca del luto, de como sobrellevar las pérdidas, las desapariciones.

En verdad nunca se ofrecen respuestas, todo queda en el aire, la narrativa se centra en ese proceso de asimilación, en como el miedo a las sombras y la oscuridad que sufre la narradora se hacen más presentes y atosigantes, como se dibuja ese proceso, que es un viaje hacia el futuro pero también por el pasado. El ánimo de Darrieussecq se nota algo esteticista, que quiere renunciar al brío de las tramas definidas, a las escenas dramáticas y los grandes efectos, focalizarse en personajes comunes, adentrarse en elementos muy cotidianos con notoria austeridad. No sé si habrá mucha gente capaz de subrayar con emoción alguna línea de este libro, dado que no es un texto dado a las efusiones. Sólo al final parece que, a pesar de esas cuestiones sin cerrar, acierta a definir la historia y darle una conclusión bien razonable.

Sabe un poco mal que cada nuevo libro que leo de esta escritora francesa me gusta menos que el anterior. Marranadas fue en verdad impactante, divertido y sorprendente. Ya sólo queda su relectura de la princesa de Cléves, que espero que rompa con esa dinámica decadente. En resumidas cuentas este es un bocado para locos de la literatura francesa contemporánea o bien para interesados en poéticas muy posmodernas, si no, es una lectura que puede ser perfectamente evitable.

[Pedro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nacimiento de fantasmas es una novela capaz de provocar interés, o un rechazo intenso.
La trama se inicia cuando el esposo, hombre estable y de rutinas, vuelve de trabajar y encuentra que no hay pan para le cena, por lo cual sale a comprar; como pudo ocurrir cualquier otro día. La diferencia, en este caso, es que no vuelve; ni esa noche, ni al día siguiente, ni a lo largo de los días y meses interminables que siguen. No hay señales de un viaje, de un accidente, algo que explique su ausencia, aunque tampoco se entra en mucho detalle al respecto.
Después de eso, y a lo largo de la novela, asistimos a las de pérdida abstracta de la mujer, una pérdida que no tiene un nombre para definirlo, y que conduce a caminos en los que la percepción de la realidad comienza a ser borrosa y confusa. Y a lo largo de la novela la acompañamos mientras se sumerge en estas oscilaciones, entre un ser y no-ser.
Personalmente, me ha parecido una novela inusual e interesante, y he podido seguir con bastante empatía este recorrido, con dolor en muchos momentos, aunque en algunos momentos no he podido sostener esta capacidad de comprensión.
Creo que puede ser una novela interesante para quienes estén dispuestos a acompañar este proceso de orfandad tan especial.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My husband's disappeared. He got in from work, propped his briefcase against the wall and asked me if I'd bought any bread. It must have been around half past seven.

My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq was published in France as Naissance des fantômes in 1998 and in English, translated by Helen Stevenson, in 1999. The narrator's husband has returned from work and then nipped out to get some bread from the local shop only to disappear. The above quotation is the opening paragraph of the novel and it's the type of opening for a novel that pulls me in, there's no messing about and we're straight into the story. The narrator in Darrieussecq's novel recounts how she was on the phone to her mother while leaning against the window waiting for her husband to return. Straight away she suspects that something is wrong as her husband is the type of person who would call if he'd met up with friends and was having a drink. If he was having an affair he would be secretive and discreet. She phones her friend, Jacqueline, to see if she knows anything about his whereabouts and then ends up trying to follow her husband's route to the local bakeries that he may have gone to—but to no avail. She phones her mother-in-law to see if she has any news and the following day contacts the police who are, of course, not interested as they have hundreds of people disappearing every day.

Having already read Darrieussecq's first novel, Pig Tales, about a woman who turns into a pig, I wasn't expecting a realist novel and it is not long before the narrative becomes more dreamlike. Looking out the window she thinks she sees her husband:

It was raining now, a fine drizzle that made everything steam and gleam. Every wall fragmented into its constituent parts, the roofs shivered darkly, insects crystallized in the mist. Then I saw my husband coming back, his easy almost bandy-legged stride, his coat, his hunched shoulders, his tall silhouette. I ran down the stairs and out on to the deserted street.

Only, it's not her husband. As the novel progresses the narrator seems even more fragile and isolated; she has contact with her bossy friend Jacqueline, her domineering mother and her fragile mother-in-law but any type of normal interaction between herself and these people is difficult as reality becomes more elusive. She misses her husband's rather dull solidity ('my husband's big slumbering body always seemed the most mysteriously simple, familiar and real thing in the world') but when she now looks at her wedding photographs his image either seems to be blurred, out of focus or he's turned away from the camera.

The narrative fluctuates between reality and a dreamlike state for the rest of the novel; the narrator visits her mother-in-law, visits her husband's workplace where she continues running his business in his absence and she goes for a walk along the seafront only to experience sea lion corpses to be washed up on the beach. I have read books before that portray a similar hallucinogenic reality, some work and some don't, but Darrieussecq's writing is superb throughout, mainly because her writing remains taut even when what she is describing is rather nebulous. Here is an example about half-way through the book.

It wasn't night, it was simply darkness, with me in the middle hoping all the while that time was carrying on flowing, that something would crop up, me all alone in the middle, with my veins and my muscles dissolving rapidly into nothingness, me made of molecules of flesh and thought, dispersing in a cloud (a process of expansion as sudden as that of the room, a nebula of bedroom and me, between limits that grew dimmer by the moment).

The novel ends with the narrator attending a dinner party in honour of her mother who's intending to move abroad. Her mother's ostentatious dress reminds the narrator of the iridescence of fish scales and makes her feel quite nauseous, so she has to go for a walk but the suburban environment now appears as if underwater.

The street seen backwards was like an invasion by the sea on the night of a flood. What I saw resembled an inside-out glove, the negative of a street. I was walking over the ocean bed, creeping along the walls, the corroded gateways, the mossy leprosy of cars, octopus-infested gardens, pines encrusted with vampire shells (sap drained, suppliant branches forming reefs); to navigate anywhere beyond this housing estate you'd have needed to be familiar with the shadows of the labyrinth, hearing the helm scraping the rooftops, the keel grating against the gutter rails. But my step was light, steady and brisk.

So, does her husband return or is it left unresolved? (You may wish to stop reading here if you really don't want to know how the novel ends.) Well, both really; when the narrator returns to the party she sees her husband enter through the doorway although his form appears vague and nebulous. Her mother-in-law also sees him and faints. The novel ends with the narrator back in her flat, with her phantom husband, trying to decide how it's going to work out.

This book will not be to everyone's taste, and it's the type of book that I have often ended up getting annoyed with because they can end up just being a stream of unconnected words and images. But Darrieussecq manages to maintain a sense of structure to the whole book and although there was hallucinogenic imagery it's not totally at the expense of plot and character. It was an enjoyable read.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

The shadow was scarcely a shadow. Just as when, at night, I try to make out, separating, contrasting, a trail of light floating in the darkness, I tried then to concentrate on the shimmer of light around its edges. If you looked directly at it, it disappeared. It was a sort of densification of space, the kind to weaken the strength of the sun, as through a filter, as an almost palpable thickening of the air before me. It moved slightly, yielding a little to the wind but without breaking up. It was only wind, but at the same time a touch heavier. I turned round to see if it was just my own shadow or the shadow of something else. I held my hand out away from me, but there was no mirror effect. I blew at it, but it didn't move. I stood up slowly, so as not to disturb the new equilibrium that had settled in the room.

And so goes Darrieussecq's heightened micro-dissection of the affect and perception of a haunted absence, a sudden and impossible omission from the solidity of everyday reality. We learn in the first line that the protagonist's husband has gone out for a loaf of bread and vanished, an impossibly ordinary act turned into a disappearance at once strange and, somehow, also impossibly ordinary (the police, knowing there's little to be done, point to two hundred such missing persons cases filed every day. It happens all the time, yes, and yet for a life most touched by it, no disappearance could be anything but rending and extraordinary. The sensation of such, captured in terms at turns clinically concrete and precise, irrationally brutal and hallucinatory, densely abstract and philosophical, and eerily surreal, is the subject of this novel.

The result of this focused attention is somewhat unusual -- the narration ducks and dives from the concrete to the amorphous, to the semi incomprehensible or untranslatable twilight of highly subjective experience. Concerned entirely in this way, metaphysically almost, (and not, say, with the potential intrigue and mystery inherent in disappearance), the plot arc and movement fades to a low murmur -- there's a sequence of events, but they more an illustration to an interior progression than any kind of story-driving action. As such, and due to the moderating effects of time, the ending is not and cannot be the more heightened or significant part of the book, which peaks in the middle with a terrifying dislocation, then swirls and recomposes itself gradually into the finish. Which both suits Darrieussecq's apparent purposes and is something of a self-denying gesture.

Oh, yes, and the writing -- the writing itself is very good throughout, precise and alarming:

The moment I yielded the slightest ground, my body dropping its defenses, my muscles relaxing, my brain slowly lowering its guard, my nerves started violently leaping about. All the accumulated energy slammed into my shin and sent me flying up towards the ceiling, as something tried to escape from inside me -- some great fanged monster, a fat octopus tentacle rolled up inside my guts, that would spurt out in an unknowable form, its bits of tubing writhing away in the puckered folds of my internal organs, clinging, throbbing, gnawing at my ovaries, its jaws embedded in my womb, sending them flying off in eight different directions, spilling out stinking gobbets of blood. My stomach ached fit to burst and I gripped hold of my knees. In a brief moment of respite, the octopus slackened and eased off, at which point my back set upon me, my spine plunging into me like a sword, drilling through my flesh and hooking in, just at the bottom of my neck, the bulb of the hilt as cold as iron, a metal fist locked into the back of my head, the barbs of an electric fishing rod tugging at my veins, crunching to the back of my teeth. I made myself wake up with a start; the only solution was to stay wide awake.

[forough · Rating 1 out of 5]

با عذرخواهی از هر کسی که این کتاب رو خوند و دوست داشت.
بدترین شاید نه ولی قظعاً یکی از بدترین کتابهایی بود که تا حالا خوندم. (البته به نشانه اعتراض کامل هم نخوندم :دی !!) توی توصیفات پیچیده و عجیب و غریبش گم شده بودم. تشبیهاتی که اصطلاحاتی علمی صرف رو وارد دنیای ادبی کرده بود. به اندازه ی خوندن یک متن علمی زیست شناسی برای درک توصیف های نویسنده باید دقت می کردم.

[Santi Contreras · Rating 2 out of 5]

Me costó mucho continuar leyendo, era muy descriptivo y a veces hasta aburrido, pero el final me dejó pensando en cómo se debió sentir el tener que asimilar el perder a alguien tan cercano tras desconocer dónde estuvo sus últimos días.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay, so maybe this book is just not my cup of tea.

Just before dinner, a husband steps out to buy a baguette, and never comes back. The wife rapidly loses her grip on reality and after 150 pages of word-barrage, she finds some sort of resolution - the end.

It's hard to describe, but I suppose you could call it a meditation on love, loss, marriage, madness, written in an endless monotone, prose-poem-esque, but fairly direct series of descriptions of things feelings and banal actions.

[Foroogh · Rating 4 out of 5]

زنی رویدادی شگفت را بیاد می اورد که ده سال پیش برای او پیش امده:شوهر زن برای خرید نان از منزل خارج شده اما به جای اینکه خودش برگردد روحش برگشته:از جلد کتاب
ظاهرا نویسنده تولدی دیگر سرود مخالفی را درجمع خانم های نویسنده امروز غرب سر داده است که با طنز لطیفی همراه می شود:شوهر موجودی است که راحت شدن از دستش به این سادگی ها نیست.حتی اگر به بهانه ای جسمش را از در بیرون کنی تا برود وگم شود روحش از پنجره باز خواهد گشت.از متن نوشته شده توسط عباس پژمان

[Kasandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I wish I could write like this. This story reads like a long, surreal, epic poem, encompassing the speaker's responses (mental, physical, emotional, spiritual) to her husband's disappearance. I didn't like the fact that we never discover what has happened to him, nor the fact that this woman seems to have nearly no identity that was not generated by her husband's presence, but still.... the journey this story takes the reader on is amazing in the original sense of the word. The writing has a flow and rhythm to it that I found hypnotic.

[Haman · Rating 3 out of 5]

من دارای روح سرکشی هستم ...
گاهی میان جسمم و روحم درگیری شدیدی پیش می آید !
هرآن چه از ذهنم می گذرد که نمی بایست انجام دهم ، جسمم عناد کرده و همان را انجام می دهد !
مثلا زمانی که با همسرم روی تخت خوابیده ایم ، از ذهنم می گذرد
که : تکان های بیش از اندازه ام ممکن است موجب آزارش شود ...
در همین حال جسمم لجبازی کرده و از قضا بیش از حالت عادی غلت می زنم و آرامش را از خودم هم می گیرم !
در این طور موارد کاری از دست من بر نمی آید و به ناچار شاهد جدال روح و جسمم می شوم ...

[Maryam · Rating 3 out of 5]

داشت دور و برش را نگاه مي كرد و راه فراري مي جست، از خودش مي پرسيد كه آيا مي تواند بي آن كه كسي متوجه گردد از آنجا دور شود كه ناگهان شبح عجيبي در آسمان ديد؛ حضور شبح در ابتدا سخت كنجكاوي او را برانگيخت، اما بعد كه يك دو دقيقه اي خوب آن را نگاه كرد، ديد آنچه مي بيند يك لبخند است و باخودش گفت: اين گربه چشاير است، حالا يكي هست كه با او حرف بزنم

[Reggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un relato denso y rico en evocaciones, inquietante, a partir del mcguffin de la desaparición del marido de la narradora.

[Kurumayu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Naissance des fantômes est comme un long et magnifique poème sur l'existence et l'absence, j'ai adoré.

[Minna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aika erikoinen lukukokemus. Pisteet outoudesta, mutta tätä lukiessa keskittyminen herpaantui jatkuvasti muualle.

[Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

What would you think if your husband, one day, with no word of explanation or warning, completely vanished? When would you begin to panic-the first hour, the first night? Well read this story and see one women's journey of her husband doing just that. What a very well written book and a great beginning to a story and the ending was just as good, it is a small book which is quick to read. It's a great insight to what happens to a women when her husband disappears she goes through so many emotions just like any normal person would. He heads out to buy bread but never returns, she just doesn't know why he didn't come back. You could really fell the emotions that she felt and the loneliness. She even questioned herself if she really loved him or not. It is a completely different story set up to anything I've read and I found it great. Recommended to anyone who wants something different.

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I first saw this book I was so intrigued by the title of it and I want to check on it so I bought it. At first I got somewhat bored because the slow pacing of the story but then when I'm nigh at the end I realized that all the talk are needed in the story. I was moved by the ending and also I was moved by how she reacted with the things that happened to her. And lastly, even though I don't have a wife or a partner in life I still felt how lonely, sad, hard, and depressing life is when your partner's gone and without even a glimpse or a hint of where and why did he left his partner. Marie Darrieussecq really did a good job at this.

[Ashique Majeed · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is not my piece of cake..

[iván sierra-ojeda · Rating 5 out of 5]

En esta novela, Darrieussecq explora con acusada sensibilidad —además de, por supuesto, una prosa poblada de imágenes complejas y, a la vez, deleitosísimas; en suma, una narrativa prodigiosa— algunas incógnitas fundamentales sobre el amor. Qué conmovedor resulta, pues, para el lector acompañar a esa mujer que, a golpe de palabras, se va desnudando de todo en el trayecto de las páginas, seguirla muy de cerca conforme opera en ella la metamorfosis y congraciarse de su mano, al final, tanto con la otredad como con uno mismo.

[Angela Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extraordinary tale of what happens to a woman when her husband disappears. The guilt, the fantasies, the loneliness, the wondering if she loves him. He gets home from work and then goes out to buy fresh bread (the most obvious and ordinary thing for a Frenchman - or woman - to go out to buy) but he never comes back. Darrieussecq (through her translator, Helen Stevenson) is wonderful at taking her readers into a surreal worlds and making us believe in those worlds.

[Mehrnaaz · Rating 1 out of 5]

علف ها از زمین در می آیند
گاوها می چرند
انسان ها این ماست را درست میكنند و میخورند...
و و و ...
یك موضوع با توصیفات بی نهایت و كش دار..و كمی حوصله سر بر
توصیفات بیشتر ذهنو از موضوع دور میكرد و بنظر من بیهوده پیچیده بود
داستان زنی كه شوهرش از خانه بیرون میرود و باز نمیگردد و كل داستان معطوف میشه به زن و چیز هایی كه حس و توصیف میكند و در اخر چیزی دستگیرش نمیشود.شاید موضوع اولش جذاب به نظر بیاد ولی یكنواختی كه بعدش وجود داره جذابیتش رو برای من كم كرد

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure, all a bit difficult and confusing. At times I felt I was visiting interzone. She does, however, remain as someone who I think is a great writer.

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was 150 pages of vague characterization and imagery-heavy stream of consciousness. There is a glimmer of magical realism (ghosts, refugees from fabricated lands, disappearing buildings, waking dreams), but it never comes to life.

It often had really powerful turns of phrases, intriguing concepts, or salient observations about life, but each chapter was just one strange descriptor or unusual metaphor stacked ponderously on top of another, which becomes very tiring within a dozen pages. Overall, this piece is extremely self-indulgent, and I honestly think the author could have salvaged this collection of writing for its hidden gems of great prose and scattered them across her next 8 books.

Perhaps the weakest point of this novel is the premise that a woman’s connection to reality is disrupted by the disappearance of her husband. There is NO plot, so the rest of the book is simply a psychological exploration of this scenario.

However, the off-page relationship is so undeveloped and the woman’s emotions so untethered that I felt this became melodramatic. I couldn’t CARE that her husband was gone. What good was he anyway? Did she even love him? Isn’t it a little un-feminist for a woman to both to sit at home everyday cultivating her ennui during her marriage and yet to fall to pieces like this after the marriage has disolved? She’s even so rich that the disappearance of her provider means nothing to her financially. She wouldn’t even buy him bread!

Despite these complaints, if you find yourself reading My Phantom Husband, I recommend doing so out loud. There is an interesting cadence and a challenging density to the prose that is better enjoyed and understood when spoken.

(Unrelated side note: parts of this book put me in mind of the dream world and guilty memories of a lost lover in the movie Inception.)

—-

Below are a couple ideas and lines that stood out to me. The ellipses are where I have excised unnecessary and lengthy parenthetical clauses.

“If we consider our body to be a sequence of dams… and if we consider physical love to break through some of these dams until it succeeds… in coaxing the hermit crab out of its shell a tiny bit… then something comparable happens when a friend… takes you in her arms.”

“You had to think a little before deciding where the stars were, agreeing to place a limit on the sea’s height.”

“Every arching wave, as it broke, expelled as if between plates of whale baleen a breath of mingled spray and mist.”

“My mother’s dress, in and of itself, would’ve been enough to hold everyone’s attention.… If she so much as batted an eyelash, flames of light sheared across her dress: an ice cube seem to be melting everywhere on the silicone, making it look wet, iridescent, and transparent… I saw… the room’s carpets slowly parting to reveal a turquoise, iceberg-studded sea into which my mother would plunge beneath our flabbergasted eyes, and we all perceived, through the garment’s scales, the curve of a mermaid’s tail that would freeze us in our tracks. Where the hell did you get that dress?”

[Ceraphina Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like being in someone’s mind for an entirety of a novel - this books does it superbly.

Mild spoilers incoming, and at the end major spoilers - read at your own risk. If you read the blurb, it sums up the novel so I’m not hiding this review. One last time though - read at your own risk.

.

I’m absolutely blown away by the writing. I love this sense of dread I felt during reading, I was hoping beyond words our narrator could find reprieve in the end - but alas, this doesn’t happen, and I don’t believe thats the point of the novel anyways.

Our narrators husband disappears after going to get some bread at the store. First off, how eerie. I often ask my partner to go and get something at the store if I forgot an item (which is almost always, shout-out to fellow people with ADHD). I would be flabbergasted, distraught, mentally unwound if he just never came back. At what point do you start asking for help?

As our narrator grasps with this realization she of course comes undone. The initial part kicks in where you find her worried of society’s bias if she announced her husband is gone - is he just out cheating? You drive him away? Which is gut wrenching, as if the gender roles reversed, a husband would not think of those things or be asked to. At least not initially. She keeps coming up with the scenarios that would make sense. His mother is ill - so did it get worse and he went to be by her bed side? Or - maybe some unavoidable task came up at work, and he needed to take care of it immediately. Over and over again she tries to ascertain what is the truth for him and genuinely struggles to find footings. The thing I appreciate about this book the most is that it’s something I’ve always wanted from a mystery or thriller book. Gillian Flynn is the only one who I bow down to for getting to be in someone else’s mind during tragic events but other than that I don’t get that itch. I’m really happy I stumbled across this book, by accident all because I was trying to buy “My Phantoms” by Gwendolyn Riley, and this one popped up first. Peaked my interest - astounded by the motions this novel tackles without using cheap throw ins e.g. police, investigations, suspected people, etc.

As our narrators panic gets severe, the depression, the confusion and heart break of this man - a loyal, kind hearted person - is still not to be found as the novel progresses kicks in, her mental and emotional state goes down the rabbit hole. Possible hallucinations, hallucinations getting mixed with real events, consume her. We essentially end on that note and we are left to wonder if it’ll ever be different for her, if he’ll ever be found or on the completely side note of her friend Jacqueline suggested, taken from an alien invasion.

Beautifully tragic, I highly recommend.

[Marcos Faria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Descimbrada. Martinete. Abelharuco. Iouangui. Balsâmina. Blocausse.

Para uma novelinha de 120 páginas, é um bocado de palavras obscuras. Algumas delas poderiam até ser opções de tradução contestáveis ("Martinet" é o andorinhão-negro, Apus apus). Mas no geral colaboram para o ar de estranhamento necessário.

"Nascimento dos fantasmas" ecoa tanto o surrealismo de Breton quanto o existencialismo de Sartre. Diante do desaparecimento inexplicável do marido, a narradora perambula num mundo interior e exterior que perde os contornos para se transformar num fluxo ao mesmo tempo vertiginoso e nauseante.

Fica muito aquém de "Porcarias", a comparação inevitável. Mas tem lá seus méritos.

(Descimbrar é retirar os andaimes que sustentam uma abóboda, ao fim da construção; martinete e abelharuco são aves; balsâmina é uma flor; blocausse, do alemão Blockhaus, é uma espécie de guarita de concreto para defesa bélica; iouanguis são habitantes de um país imaginário presente em outras obras da autora.)

[Rahaf · Rating 3 out of 5]

الكاتبة كانت تصف مشاعر الفقد والصدمة والخوف والهلع بطريقة وبلغة شاعرية وهذا ما أحببته بهذه الرواية، اللغة المستخدمة، الوصف الدقيق لإحساس الزوجة فقد أحسست بعمق مشاعر زوجة تفقد زوجها فجأة من دون سابق إنذار بعد اعتياد وحب طويل أستمر لخمسة أعوام.
أعتقد أن الترجمة لم تكن دقيقة إلى حدٍ ما ولكن من جهة أخرى كان يكفي لإيصال وجهة نظر الكاتبة -وجدت نصين مكررين في عدة صفحات من الراوية وقد أفقدني تسلسل أفكاري-.
في الفصل الثامن استعرضت الكاتبة قصة ذهابها لصالون الاسترخاء مع والدتها ووصفت علاقتها بوالدتها، كانت علاقة حزينة ومؤثرة، ولكن قد تكررت كثيراً كلمة -زنجي- وأوصاف كثيرة تنم عن تبني صفة العنصرية ضد السود لدى الكاتبة وقد خيّب ظني كثيراً.
نهاية الراوية كانت متوقعة ومنتظرة لهذا لم أُفاجىء، لأني أدركت أن القصة لا ترتكز مباشرة على إختفاء الزوج وإنما على كل تبعات هذا الاختفاء المفاجىء على المحيطين حوله وخصوصاً الزوجة بالرغم أنني تمنيت أن تكون هناك نهاية أخرى.
بالمجمل أعتقد أنها رواية سوداوية للغاية، ويمكن أن تكون فيلم ناجح!

[Mina Widding · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jagets man går ut för att köpa en baguette och kommer inte tillbaka. Jaget skildrar hur hennes värld löses upp, hennes verklighetsuppfattning skevar, hon känner sig vilsen. Den inre känslan får också yttre gestalt, i jagets upplevelse. Jag tänker bitvis på Clarice Lispector och Passionen enligt G.H., samma nedstigande i en verklighet som faller sönder i sina beståndsdelar, ett jag som undersöker det som händer, men mer uppblandat med ett narrativ. Här finns också element som gör mig osäker på var vi befinner oss, vad är det för stad, för värld? Vilka är yuoanguifolket, hade de blå hud? Vad är det för minor i havet som sjölejonen råkar dödas av, som kommer ur sin kurs? Vad pågår egentligen? Och försvinnandet, vad är det egentligen som har hänt?
Underbart underlig.
Titeln på engelska är My phantom husband. Kanske "avslöjar" den för mycket, men annars gillar jag den titeln bättre faktiskt.

[Soya · Rating 2 out of 5]

ഒരു ഫ്രഞ്ച് നോവലാണ് My phantom husband. സിസി ജേക്കബ് ആണ് ഇത് മലയാളത്തിലേക്ക് വിവർത്തനം ചെയ്തിരിക്കുന്നത്.

വിരസമായ ദാമ്പത്യ ജീവിതത്തിനിടയിൽ പൊടുന്നനെ അപ്രത്യക്ഷമാകുന്ന തന്റെ ഭർത്താവിനെ തിരയുന്ന യുവതിയുടെ കഥ. അസഹനീയമായ ഏകാന്തതയ്ക്ക് അടിപ്പെടുന്ന അവളുടെ ജീവിതം ഭീതിദമായ രാവുകളും വിഭ്രവാത്മക  രൂപങ്ങളും മാത്രമായി മാറുന്നു. വിഫലമായ നിരവധി തിരച്ചിലുകൾക്കൊടുവിൽ അവൾ യാഥാർത്ഥ്യത്തെ ഉൾക്കൊള്ളാൻ ശ്രമിക്കുന്നു. പക്ഷേ ബോധത്തിന്റെയും ഉന്മാദത്തിന്റെയും ഇടയിൽ തങ്ങിക്കിടക്കുന്ന തൻറെ ജീവിതത്തെ വീണ്ടെടുക്കാൻ അവൾ ബഹുദൂരം പോകേണ്ടതുണ്ട്.

ഈ നോവലിന്റെ വിവർത്തനം ഒട്ടും സുഖകരമല്ല. വേർഡ് ബൈ വേർഡ് ട്രാൻസിലേഷൻ ആണ് ചെയ്തിരിക്കുന്നത് എന്ന് തോന്നുന്നു. കഥയുടെ ആഴങ്ങളിലേക്ക് ഇറങ്ങിച്ചെന്ന് ഗ്രന്ഥകാരൻ എന്താണ് അർത്ഥമാക്കുന്നത് എന്ന് ലളിതമായി പറയാൻ വിവർത്തകൻ തീർത്തും പരാജയപ്പെട്ടു.



വായന - 74
എൻ്റെ മായാരൂപിയായ ഭർത്താവ്
വിവർത്തനം - സിസി ജേക്കബ്
ഡിസി ബുക്സ്
103p,65 rs

[Pauline Szulcski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Il ne faut pas s’attendre à lire une enquête sur la disparition d’un mari. Non non le mari on s’en fiche il a disparu mais on ne s’en inquiète pas plus que ça. Est-il mort ? Est-il parti à l’autre bout du monde refaire sa vie ? A t’il été kidnappé ? Ce n’est pas la question. Le sujet est la solitude de sa femme face à cette disparition. D’accord pourquoi pas. Mais c’est vraiment très lourd. Beaucoup de métaphores, de phrases à rallonge qui n’ont pas résonné en moi (pourtant Proust j’adore). Je n’ai pas compris grand chose. Je n’avais aucune sympathie pour cette femme (ni empathie d’ailleurs). Je pense que je n’aurais pas eu la même réaction si cela avait été mon cas.
Bref ce n’est pas un livre incroyable il est trop poétique et irréel ce qui ne m’a pas plus.