Customer Reviews

Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a book to be read and re-read; Hilary Mantel's prose is so spare and sharp that at first glance it conceals the depths that unlie her descriptions of events and people throughout her life. The "ghost" takes many forms; her reactions to them become her life. Although she has led a life of hardships and pain, she tells of times of pleasure and inserts wry and very amusing lines as counterpoints to dark and dramatic moments. Women in particular will understand much of what Mantel has been through both physically and emotionally as she wrestles with disease and doctors. I recommend this highly to anyone who has read and enjoyed Mantel's novels.

I love the way Hilary Mantel writes. Her imagery and descriptions are so true, so evocative, sometimes I need to put on a sweater or snuggle deeper into the duvet just to cope. She strings me out and keeps me roped in. I have no other way of expressing just how fine her writing feels to me. When I'm reading her work, I feel that she has tapped into the great reservoir--the man-made basin brimming with pain and suffering, dreams and devils. This book is haunting and grim--yet one identifies so strongly with the author, risk and all.

Mantel's memoir seems to prove her own point when, just a few pages in, she writes, "I hardly know how to write about myself. Any style you pick seems to unpick itself before a paragraph is done." Much later in the book, she adds, "Writing about your past is like blundering through your house with the lights fused, a hand flailing for points of reference."

Indeed, Mantel is tentative about what to say about her life and how to say it which raises the question of what she was hoping to accomplish with this effort.

Aside from a few self-reflective comments, I found the first three-fourths of the book, covering her growing up years in England in the 1950's-60's and other biographical stories, to be rather tedious. I almost gave up.

Not until her illness manifests--misdiagnosed as a psychiatric illness--did I find her story compelling. At this point forward, I could grasp what she wanted to expose in this writing: the anger and regret from turning herself over to medical authorities, her Catholic faith's encouragement to deny pain, her sorrow over not having a child, and her conviction that she deserved very little in life. Those themes are encompassing enough for a worthy memoir.

Mantel may be much more accomplished as a fiction writer. I have not read any of her fiction. For this memoir, I wish she could have focused much earlier on the imperative elements of her story.

This memoir for me was what I look for in a memoir: revealing, analytical, self-deprecating and helping the reader come to know the author as a person. When the memoir is written by someone who has only been known to the reader as an admired author, but not at all on a personal level, and the memoir draws the character of the writer so indelibly, it can only be a very satisfying read. And that's exactly what it was for me. I wondered who in the world could write the novels she has written and now I find out a bit about the woman, her interior world and her life, in a very well wrought piece.

Only one review for this????
This is the first of hers I've read, but she's wonderful! Small (no denigration there), but wonderful. The details, the juxtapositions, the starkness, the pain, the wonder...

I've recently become hooked on Hilary Mantel novels and was therefore interested in her memoir. I came to see how parts of her life were incorporated into her fiction. But I was even more impressed at the amount of research that went into "A Safer Place" while she was struggling with her chronic illness and other stresses.

I can well understand the impulse to write memoirs, especially when one is a successful novelist with a built in public. What I find difficult is the reading of them. I am a great admirer of Hilary Mantel's novels, especially Wolf Hall and Beyond Black. I tried doggedly to read to the end of this memoir, beautifully written in the Mantelesque style. But one third through I felt I had made sufficient investment of time, with insufficient return in terms of story-telling power. I found her spinning her sentences along, indulging in soliloquies, singing arias of words. But the payoff was slim. The story line was meager. I needed more, and what I needed was a plot. The amount I read explains the ghostly theme of Beyond Black, but that novel has a taut story line and compelling characters. This memoir was crafted from spun air, and to me was unsatisfying. But Mantel's admirers might possibly have more staying power than I have.