David Constantine’s fiction is full of ghosts. Not the supernatural kind that lurk in gothic mansions or scare unwary visitors in graveyards; rather, his novels are haunted by people whose presence persists though they are absent, who are undead because they live on in memories or stories. Theirs is a quietly human, not divine or heroic, immortality: they have no fame, no public memorials, no grand accomplishments, only their own singular experience. In Constantine’s hands the poignancy of their passing is mitigated by their intangible persistence, which creates uncanny but often comforting continuities between past and present.
These continuities are at the heart of Constantine’s novel The Life-Writer, published in the U.K. in 2015 and just released in North America by Biblioasis. It begins abruptly, as Eric is dying—his identity and circumstances only gradually come into focus. Eric’s is a good death, as far as that is possible; he and his wife Katrin are able to spend the necessary time focusing “on where and who they were and what they were doing in the present tense.”
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