The Life-Writer by David Constantine review – celebrating an ‘ordinary’ existence

A wonderfully accomplished novel about grief, obsession and the ineffable power of the past

In the opening chapter of David Constantine’s novel, 68-year-old Eric and his much younger wife, Katrin, a biographer of overlooked European Romantics, take differing approaches to the diagnosis of his terminal cancer. She wants him to fight it, while he sees his death as an ineluctable fact, “coming at me in slow motion, very fast”. When Eric dies, Katrin tries to stave off her feelings of loss by treating him as one of her biographical subjects, marshalling data and seeking to celebrate the importance of his ostensibly unremarkable life. Soon the quest becomes an obsession, and she gives up her usual work altogether. The very ordinariness of Eric’s life means there is nothing to distract from its essence: “she will have to say wholeheartedly what love is like”.

But love for whom? Among the dead man’s papers she finds 50-year-old letters, some unopened, from a Frenchwoman called Monique, whom Katrin met at the funeral, unaware of the nature of the bond she and Eric had shared. Transcribing and translating Monique’s letters, Katrin comes to feel as though she is, as she tells her shrink, “less than his life before”. The theme will be familiar to readers of Constantine’s story “In Another Country” and viewers of the recent film by Andrew Haigh based on it, 45 Years, in which a long-married couple have to review their relationship in the light of the discovery of a body found in a glacier, the perfectly preserved corpse of the husband’s first love. Nothing in The Life‑Writer has the drama of that situation, but Constantine’s preoccupation with the superior vitality of the past, and past youth in particular, draws out the best in his ardent and profoundly melancholy sensibility.

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