Eva Figes fue una autora cuya obra profundizó en las profundidades de la memoria e identidad humanas. Sus novelas, estudios críticos y vívidas memorias exploraron temas como el estatus de la mujer, el trauma de guerra y la búsqueda de pertenencia. Con afinidades a Virginia Woolf, la prosa de Figes se caracterizó por un estilo impresionista, capturando los sutiles matices de los momentos individuales y desarrollando retratos de individuos a lo largo de un espectro de experiencias.
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.