Eva Figes was an author whose work delved into the depths of human memory and identity. Her novels, critical studies, and vivid memoirs explored themes of women's status, wartime trauma, and the search for belonging. With affinities to Virginia Woolf, Figes's prose was characterized by an impressionistic style, capturing the subtle nuances of individual moments and developing portraits of individuals across a spectrum of experiences.
Provides a portrait of a day in the life of an artist at work and at home. This novel features Monet, his wife, Alice, grieving for a lost daughter; a living daughter, Germaine, fretting that she will not be able to marry the young man she loves; their friend, and the abbe, eating and drinking with them.
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.