Ghosts by Daylight: Love, War, and Redemption

Di Giovanni, an American-born war correspondent (Madness Visible) who’s covered conflicts from Sarajevo to Afghanistan, met Bruno Girodon, a French photographer, whom she eventually married after a long, passionate, tortuous courtship, and they settled in Paris to raise their son, Luca, born prematurely after a difficult pregnancy. In beautifully deliberative passages, Di Giovanni depicts the elaborate concoction of her marriage, the renovation of a choice apartment, and the accoutrements of a privileged Parisian life—yet Bruno, her modern-day Ulysses, could not settle down. Obsessed by the safety of his family, by survival fears inculcated during wartime, he began drinking heavily, was plagued by depression, and eventually needed hospitalization. Conversely, while her husband seemed to be losing himself, Di Giovanni began to find autonomy for the first time in the strange country of the prickly, exacting French. (Her portrayals of perfectionist Frenchwomen who don’t breastfeed because “it ruins your breasts” is priceless.) Her rather scrambled, touching work is about trying to habituate herself within a mad, chaotic world where even love cannot be fixed in place—inviting enormous sorrow along with the joy. (Oct.)