My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq

A lot of the books I’m reading this year are ones I bought in 2011 – and I’m remembering that I bought a lot of books that year, because I only bought 24 in 2010 and I was making up for last time. One of those was My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq, published in 1998 and translated from French by Helen Stevenson in 1999. I thought it would be good to pick up now, because August is ‘women in translation month’ in book blogging land.

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.

Did my husband disappear because that evening, after years of neglect on my part, irritated and tired at the end of a hard day’s work, he was suddenly incensed at having to go back down five flights of stairs in search of bread?

This is the opening paragraph of this short novel. I’m normally not at all drawn to books about people disappearing, because it seems such an overdone genre – but this is not a gritty crime novel. We don’t learn a great deal about the woman’s husband, as a person, nor about how the investigation is proceeding. Rather, we spend the 153 pages of this story in the mind of the unnamed narrator as she tries to understand the new world she is in. And as her perceptions start to splinter.

Darrieussecq’s writing, in Stevenson’s translation, is an impressive mixture of the spare and the poetic. Every sentence is beautiful and not at all showy. Whether it’s the narrator being momentarily distracted from her emotional turmoil by a sunset, or things on a kitchen counter, or reflections on what she misses most about her husband’s presence, Darrieussecq brings the perfect amount of weight and beauty to each observation. The writing becomes more fluid as the novel goes on, and felt positively Woolfean at times.

The same subtlety is seen in the way the novel progresses. The first sign of things not being quite ordinary are the horror tropes that recur. The narrator thinks about being stabbed in the shower, about being buried alive. Sometimes these thoughts are fears and sometimes they are warped comforts. And somehow this bleeds into her thinking about the nature of existence. She begins to wonder if her husband has somehow dematerialised.

I paced round the room, resigned. My husband had to be somewhere, maybe in form of a gas at the very outer edge of the universe, but he still had to be somewhere, leaning over the edge (what we have to image as its edge) and watching me now; like the dead, whom the living know are still present, stuck in the mist or under the table or behind the door, out in the barn rapping with their knuckles, in the kitchen bending the spoons, in the corridor rattling their chains and, for the more subtle among them, rippling the curtains when there’s no wind outside. My husband, in imitation of the dead, would send me a sign and bring me back to life.

As the days pass and she begins to hallucinate, it is not always clear what is happening and what is not. Being all in her voice, there is an evenness to it all – because she never questions her sanity, even as we see her confusion and unhappiness turn her mind.

The whole thing is mesmerically beautiful and quietly unsettling. The reader is always on shifting sand, and Darrieussecq is too clever a writer to let us stand firm even at the end.