This article is taken from the December-January 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
In 1960, determined to finish In Cold Blood before it finished him, Truman Capote exchanged the all-consuming social life he had concocted for himself in New York for the anonymity of Palamós on the Costa Brava. He had hoped his stay would be short-lived, like Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, the two murderers his book is ostensibly about, but because of various appeals the longed-for double execution which he intended to be the final chapter dragged out his exile for three years.
This period is now the subject of a strange and oddly insubstantial book by Argentinian journalist Leila Guerriero. In trying to find the fading memories of Capote, or the difficult ghost of the title, Guerriero is aware she is attempting the impossible: “there are almost no traces left of the ghost I came to find. And many of those that remain have been invented.” Even so, she perseveres, but we quickly begin to question the wisdom of her doing so.
This ghost trail is filled with false starts, speculative claims and made-up assertions, but it ultimately leads us nowhere. She conjures up other ghosts to populate her rather empty cast list: when visiting the mansion of 1930s film star, Madeleine Carroll, she wonders whether her ghost will be able to tell her why Capote came to Palamós (she didn’t get an answer).
The fellow writers who live in the same hired house as Guerriero start to believe that they are being haunted by Capote, and leave saucers of salt in corners to repel him. Pages are spent speculating on which bakery he bought his bread in, or which café he ate in, but we’re not told why we need to know this. The town has become a palimpsest, endlessly written over by time.
The Difficult Ghost is not the first book to take as its subject a writer’s struggle to write about another writer but ends up writing about themselves (or something else). It is a clever conceit which, if done well, can illuminate much more than a straightforward biography (Out of Sheer Rage, by Geoff Dyer, and The Silent Woman, by Janet Malcolm, immediately spring to mind). But Guerriero’s book is not done well, and at times it is so badly written (or translated) that you have to check that you have not misread, or misinterpreted, her words.
It is not clear whether her style is deliberately overblown in order to make some undefined impression on the page or, on a more prosaic level, because, given the paucity of material, the pages would otherwise be blank.
We may as well read about “the unpredictable volcano of reality” instead of something less exaggerated (but possibly more insightful). What are we to make of passages like this, which really don’t help us understand her mental state, Capote’s dilemma, or whether they are similar in any way?
As I wrote, I called up enormous things within myself. To do it, all I needed was the courage of a person unafraid of hurting herself, or of losing. Truman, on the other hand, needed two men to hang. There is a difference.
Is there a difference?
Perhaps we are expected to accept such gnomic questions as profoundly perceptive when, in reality, they are both pretentious and silly. There are so many of these that I begin to picture her, sitting on a bench, Forrest Gump-like, overlooking an azure sea, dispensing empty aphorisms to anyone who sits next to her. “Writing,” she intones, “consists of disappearing completely in order to appear completely somewhere else.”
Perhaps you would want to escape from your own prose if you are capable of introducing a character like this and still go ahead with publication: “His name was Rodolfo González Alcántara, and he was a fierce, elegant beast”; or, even more baffling, she says of herself that “only then did I realize I had moved blindly, like a tiger in heat”. Do tigers go blind when they are in heat? Would that not hinder finding a mate?
I could go on, and Guerriero does, juxtaposing two authors’ lives, their backgrounds, their fates but, most tellingly of all, their styles. However, only she is exposed, in every sentence, by the mismatch in ability and technique. Truman Capote is endlessly fascinating and many will have been praying for another book about him; and now we have one. But as he said himself, “more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones”. Amen to that.
