These days of intense heat I have read Ghost Stories, the book that Siri Hustvedt wrote just after the death of her husband, the also writer Paul Auster, with whom she had shared 43 years of marriage (Edicions 62 / Seix Barral; Catalan translation by Jordi Martín Lloret). It is a hybrid book, made up of letters, diary entries and texts by Auster himself, such as the unfinished letters to his grandson Miles, born a few months before the grandfather's death.In the interview that Jordi Nopca gave her when she came to present the book in our country, Hustvedt says she started writing the book the same day as the funeral and finished it in nine months. In the book, she talks about the "third man syndrome", that invisible companion that explorers and climbers notice beside them when death brushes against them, and wonders if there isn't a connection between this presence and the sudden return of the dead. She herself noticed the presence of her husband in the marital bedroom when she lay down on the bed to rest, on her return from the cemetery. And she often explains that she can smell the scent of the cigarettes he used to smoke. Write the dead so as not to let him go

The ghost, in this book, therefore, is not what is frightening: it is what remains. And almost the entire book is an attempt to understand how it remains there. Marriage, Hustvedt writes, is not a machine of reliable repetitions, but a living organism that grows and adapts, like a tree. The death of the other would be a cut branch, but the tree does not die, rather it must reconfigure itself. To survive means to change form, which is what the author attempts through words. Hustvedt and Auster corrected each other's manuscripts, read them aloud before sleeping, and even ended up becoming characters in each other's novels. When you have written yourself into someone, that someone remains alive as long as you continue reading and writing them. Ghost Stories is an act of writing the dead so as not to let them go. Although it can be a comfort, the author misses her husband's body and does not hide one of the harshest aspects of grief, which is the loss of physical contact with the loved one.The book also features other stories of love and loss, which reconfigure the tree of Hustvedt and Auster: the author's eldest son, the deceased granddaughter, the daughter they had in common, the sisters, the young man, the grandson, the friends. Each love is different, writes the author, each love has its own past, its own patterns and its repetitions. She quotes Kierkegaard when he says that "repetition and recollection are the same movement, but in opposite directions, because what is recollected has already been, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward".Remembering forward is precisely what Hustvedt does and it can hardly be a coincidence (she, a deep reader of psychoanalytic texts) that it took her nine months to write the book: a gestation in which she writes about her dead husband, not to look back, but to give birth to a future in solitude, but now with that third man, the invisible Auster who will walk by her side until her own death.

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Siri Hustvedt's faithful followers filled L’Auditori and, as if we were at mass – in concentrated silence – followed the conversation the writer had with Anna Guitart.

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"I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead." Thus begins Ghost Stories (Edicions 62 / Seix Barral, 2026; translated by Jordi Martín Lloret), the memoir that Siri Hustvedt (Minnesota, 1955) has needed to write after the "horrible years" that followed the diagnosis of lung cancer in the author of The New York Trilogy and Leviathan. The volume reconstructs the 43 years of relationship between Siri and Paul in chapters that advance and retreat in time to show the difficult moment the author was going through. Hustvedt's urgent yet reflective narrative combines with the last texts Auster wrote, a series of letters intended so that his grandson Miles –born months before the writer's death– can one day know what kind of family he has grown up in.

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Ghost Stories, by Siri Hustvedt (Northfield, 1955), is not just a book about loss: it is also a work written from the room that absence leaves when a shared life is broken forever, a book capable of making grief a habitable place. The love letter that is Ghost Stories reflects on the disappearance of love with the clarity of one who knows that pain cannot be tamed with grand gestures, but rather settles into the tiny crevices of everyday life: in an empty chair, in an interrupted sentence, in the unexpected weight of an object that once meant nothing and that, suddenly, becomes a relic. The title is of excellent precision: the ghosts that haunt these pages are not literary specters in the classic sense, but persistent presences of memory, reverberations of an intimacy that resists disappearing. The love for her husband, the writer Paul Auster (1947-2024), is not a memory embellished by art, but a living matter that continues to breathe within loss. The great virtue of the book is its ability to turn intimacy into a universal experience without losing a shred of uniqueness. Hustvedt writes from the wound, but she does so with emotional intelligence, thus avoiding the temptation of grandiloquence or gratuitous melodrama: "I feel Paul's voice". The author's prose, precise and profound, advances with serenity, and analyzes in detail the mechanisms of memory, the traps of recollection, the way the past bursts into the present with devastating force. Every page seems written with the awareness that remembering is, at the same time, an act of love and a condemnation. The presence of Paul Auster's unpublished writings adds a moving dimension, because they do not function as a mere editorial hook or a sentimental appendix, but as an organic extension of the narrative. The voice of the author of Leviathan emerges as a form of continuity that crosses the text and turns it into a posthumous dialogue, into an interrupted conversation resumed by literature. There is a very deep emotion in this inclusion: the feeling that writing is the last place where two lives can continue to find each other. It is also remarkable how Hustvedt reflects on identity when the loving bond disappears. Who are we when the other, who had helped us define ourselves, is no longer there? What remains of the self after annihilation? These questions run through the book like an underground current and give it a philosophical density that goes far beyond personal chronicle. Grief is not just the loss of a loved one; it is also the loss of a version of oneself, of shared time, of an intimate language built in two voices.A stunning, elegant, and profoundly human book

Ghost Stories is a work of painful beauty, the kind that doesn't just explain an experience, but makes it resonate within the reader. Hustvedt demonstrates that great literature is capable of entering the most vulnerable areas of existence without simplifying them. The author writes a book about grief, yes, but above all she gives us a book about the persistence of love, about memory as a form of resistance, and about the word as a space where the dead continue to speak with us. Striking, elegant, and profoundly human, it leaves a mark that is difficult to erase.Beyond the strictly autobiographical dimension, Ghost Stories also reads as a profound meditation on the very nature of literature. Hustvedt seems to ask what writing can do in the face of the irreparable. Literature does not console in an easy sense, it does not heal or restore what has been lost, but it does offer a verbal architecture where pain can take shape. Writing is a way of not letting oneself be swallowed by the void. Each sentence seems to be sustained by this tension between silence and the need to speak, between the abyss of loss and the urgency of giving it a grammar. Hustvedt has written a marvelous book that is at once an elegy, an emotional essay, and a piece of memory, with a narrative maturity worthy of the great voices who know that the word is the only possible form of survival.

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A little overshadowed by the enormous Carson McCullers and those teenage girl characters who wander through dusty towns full of criminal secrets while on the cusp of adulthood, Siri HustvedtFor her second novel, so far unpublished in Catalan, she created a nineteen-year-old Lily Dahl and placed her in a town in Minnesota (which couldn't have been very different from her own) where she serves coffee in the money that lies beneath her house as she observes the behavior of the regular customers. She's an aspiring actress, dreams of running away to the big city and making it big, but her reality is making scrambled eggs for Franck and Dick, a pair of brothers who are farmers and barely speak, or some bacon for Martin Petersen, a former childhood playmate who has become an ex-con. She has a neighbor who is a retired actress who helps her prepare for a role in a local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream And, above all, a tenant in the hotel across the street named Ed Shapiro, who is famous and incredibly handsome. At night, Lily secretly watches him paint, driven by his creative fever, and the erotic game soon begins.

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