The Body Artist by Don DeLillo

The Body Artist

Don DeLillo

This is a moving and sad account of a woman's grief. It describes the texture of everyday living, simple actions like having breakfast with her husband, broken down into tiny freeze-frames. Heightened, spare, poetic, ghostly.

Extract
In sleep he was no more unknowable than anyone else. Look. The shrouded body feebly beating. This is what you feel, looking at the hushed and vulnerable body, almost anyone's, or you lie next to your husband after you've made love and breathe the heat of his merciless dreams and wonder who he is, tenderly ponder the truth you'll never know, because this is the secret that sleep protects in its neural depths, in its stages, layers and folds.
Parallels
  • The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
  • Women and Ghosts by Alison Lurie