Ghosts

by Eva Figes

As spare and elegant as her highly praised short novels Light and Waking, Eva Figes's Ghosts captures the experience of aging. In prose that seems to measure the very beat of passing time, we follow her heroine, an unnamed woman, through four seasons of a single year and watch her come to terms with her former lover, her grown children, and, finally, the ghostly self that she is slowly becoming. She moves through streets that have changed their contours, landscapes in constant flux, in a body slowly turning into her mother's.

As her character poignantly lets go of possessions, memories, and all that she holds dear, Figes turns the ordinary occurrences of daily life – eating breakfast, having tea, weeding a garden – into luminous events through the clarity and beauty of her writing.

Genres: Fiction, Feminism

150 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Eva Figes (born Eva Unger) is a German-born English author.

Figes has written novels, literary criticism, studies of feminism, and vivid memoirs relating to her Berlin childhood and later experiences as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany. She arrived in Britain in 1939 with her parents and a younger brother. Figes is now a resident of north London and the mother of the academic Orlando Figes and writer Kate Figes.

In the 1960s she was associated with an informal group of experimental British writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall, which included Stefan Themerson, Ann Quin and its informal leader, B. S. Johnson.

Figes's fiction has certain similarities with the writings of Virginia Woolf. The 1983 novel, Light, is an impressionistic portrait of a single day in the life of Claude Monet from sunrise to sunset.

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outside, with the wind blowing, the trees near the house bending, he puts my case in the car boot and slams it shut. The world, I think, looking up one last time ad the grey clouds scudding overhead, the world through which I am going is not the same world. Neither is the traveler.

Ghosts is a place where poetry meets prose. It is a feast of observation and consideration, overflowing with rich imagery and mournful with the feeling of time and experience passing, fading, ghost-like into transparency and non-existence.

Figes, born in Berlin in 1932 to secular Jewish parents, was brought to England in 1939. She is best known for Patriarchal Attitudes, an early book of feminist social analysis. Her 1984 novel, Light, illuminates a day in the life of impressionist master Claude Monet. The skill she had nurtured with that work returns in full flower here. If her dollops of verbiage were not so rich, one might be tempted to consider her work literary pointillism. There is not, I believe a paragraph in this book that exceeds eight lines in length.


Eva Figes - from The Guardian

An unnamed woman of a certain age observes her world through four seasons. She recalls her youth, visits her ailing mother, has some time with her father, her grown children, lets us in on the associations she has with the various sights and sounds of the places she visits, and with this or that object that carries the weight of her history. She remembers a lover, sees in the pedestrian sights and sounds of her day-to-day the ghosts of her past, memories.

the shadows multiply. They lurk in the texture of old bricks, faced stone, and gloomy basements. Where someone used to practice his violin, hour after hour, where I broke my heel on the kerb, where servant girls in uniform walked dogs, took messages, were she eloped with her poet. Where I walk.

I think of it, this continuum, as I walk along the pavement, one two, one two, crossing the lines, crossing the road where traffic thunders. And we shall all be changed utterly, in the twinkling of an eye.

I can certainly relate. It was not so long ago that I walked with my youngest through Greenwich Village, pointing out to her this or that place that was a part of my past—I dated a woman who lived on that street; I took classes in that building; I attended a frat party there that changed my life; Hendrix recorded there; I bought such and such in that store; we hung out there in that park—specific locations where ghosts reside, lying in wait for our presence to give them a bit more ectoplasm, however temporary. They do get dimmer with time.

This relates somehow to the book I read just prior, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, which, among other things, is a paean to a place, Manhattan, the associations one has, memories, the changes one sees over time. I am not sure Figes would consider her rendering the sort of love story that Whitehead tells. Hers has more to do with the individual perceiving the haunting of the past in the now and looking beyond that to an invisible tomorrow. For Whitehead, the city may or may not be taken over by zombies, but it is eternal. For Figes, all is fleeting.

Nothing comes back. The eye sees for a moment, the ear hears, but look, now it is gone.

And later,

At times I think I have no sense of the actual. Are things really here at all, I wonder, are any of us present? I think of my brain as a film negative that has been doubly, perhaps trebly exposed.

Ghosts is not so much a linear narrative. It is a fading vision of a life in the rearview, a glance here, a look there, and a consideration of where permanence might lie, or not, with each element beautifully crafted. You could open this book to any page and be dazzled. This is not a new book. It was published in 1988, and I came upon it accidentally. It merits attention. There is such beauty in the writing that it surely needs only to be seen by more readers for the images there to retain their substance. Eva Figes died at age 80 in 2012. The legacy she left will remain with us for a long time. Ghosts is a book that should definitely not be allowed to fade away.

=============================EXTRA STUFF

The wiki page for Eva Figes

An obit by her friend, Eva Tucker, in the Guardian

An interesting article on Figes in the Guardian

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ghosts has no frills, no wasted words; it doesn’t even have any named characters. It does, however, teem with prose-poetic goodness on each of its 150 pages. It’s bleak stuff, occasionally even brutally so (the narrator visiting her neglectful mother in the care facility comes immediately to mind). But it’s also a deeply moving book and I found it an absolute pleasure to read despite the weight of its pervasive gloom.

This is my third book by Eva Figes, and I’m now firmly convinced that she was one of the finest prose stylists of the 20th century. It’s a real shame that she seems to have been so thoroughly overlooked. This is gorgeous work and it deserves to be read (and appreciated) more widely.

Highly recommended.

[Theresa Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my beloved books. Its one I never loan out. In it, you'll find these odd meandering short passages, written much like poetry, about aging, missing your adult children and thinking back to when you were their mother, caring for them and loving the cozy feeling of motherhood, when every thing was assured, and your control of them and your life was never questioned. Then they grow up and leave you...that's what this lovely, sad book is about. Its a lovely book, like poetry and one of my absolute favorites. There are not enough stars to show how much I love this book....

[Cody]

WOW

ATT: You are reading a pro forma (At-Best Partial, Really) Transmission from the Godhead of Retroactive Reviews, 2025 ed.

I have no idea why I didn’t write anything about ______. It was _________ and _________ that, possibly, I was at a rare loss for words. Maybe? Or maybe I was halfway there and livin’ on a prayer? I can’t remember; hey, it’s been a few since ___________ and I crossed paths. JBJ still pretends like we weren’t a thing. Sigh…

(If you’re reading this, this is a form letter—a placeholder, if you must—done retroactively as a stop-gag corrective of historical wrongs I committed by failing to uphold my end of the book-reader compact. That compact, my own, dictates that I record SOMETHING/ANYTHING (not a Rundgren reference, but…) to mark my engagement with a given novel/work/etc. at a fixed time in my personal life history. These ‘reviews’ are not really reviews (no shit, I know) at all; their purpose is that they act as pretty accurate reflections of where my head/heart was at the time of engagement. It’s something between the book and I, and a good way to check your hubris from time-to-time. If you find any part of it enriching, that’s a wild compliment. If not, you can just feel free to move along—I can almost guarantee that no offense was genuinely intended. Almost.)

So, clearly, __________ pretty much made me _________ and, if pressed, _____________. I don’t know how much more obvious I can make this: _________ is so fucking _______ that it is, for want, ______________ and stridently at that. The _______? Yes/no. Absolutely/maybe. Good/bad times—ahhhh, this is really bringing back some sweet memories. Anyhow, _____________ by ____ _________ obviously deserves a reread to inform a proper write-up. In between now and whenever that reread happens (foregoing death or the unspeakable befalling New Jersey), all I can say is ___________________.

I know. That’s why I’ll be back. Sssshhhhhhh…(yes, my finger can be moved away from your lips; I’m sorry.)

X Cody
10.25

[Patricia_PS · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking. And so real, so close! Each and every word is exactly in the right place. One of my new favorite authors.

[Simon Slidders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary . Written as a prose poem really in short paragraphs of no more than seven or eight lines A chiaroscuro composition of memory and the passing of time in a year. Reminiscent of Eliot's Four Quartets at time - full of spirits, but without spirituality - ghosts. I have not read anything like it for years.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

A review -right now- would be unfair in one way or the other. Let’s see how it seems to me in a few months, a year. There is, in the narrative, something new. What?!? I don’t know. Give me a year, maybe 3. I was thrilled, I was bored. I’m still thinking about it…

[Jill · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was somewhat pretty and quite forgettable.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

The most interesting piece of writing in this book comes from John Berger who, on the back cover, enthuses: “This beautiful book is lunar...It has pharmaceutical precision and the poetry of the psalms.” Sounds good to me, if only it were true.

In Ghosts an elderly woman is continually reminded of the past which for her exists ghost-like within the present, whilst at the same time she feels herself becoming more ghost-like and remote in the eyes of her adult children. This could be a compelling theme – but in Eva Figes' hands it isn't.The book is written in short paragraphs, arranged almost in stanzas, and the vocabulary is simple – not deceptively so – just simple:

“The traffic roars and drops of rain begin to fall, soaking the billboard, blurring the mirage of metal and glass. Fly, says the billboard, though now the white paper is grey and soggy, but I know it says fly, something of the sort.”

Not gripped? Try the next paragraph on:

“Beyond it the car park, full of wet metal, rubbish of various sorts. I thought it was supposed to be temporary, how many years ago would that have been? Must be ten years at least, when the notice first went up: temporary car park.”

It seems to me that Eva Figes, at least in this novel, did not have an ear for plain English. Her prose evokes the poetry of Janet & John more closely than that of the psalms. This awkwardness of expression is combined with a gift for banality, which colours most of her reflections on age and memory. The book is at least short...but as the work of someone who was once associated with the British literary avant garde it is (in plain English) a disappointment.

[Fanny Fern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very nice , slow reading but wirth it.