Tag Archives: siri hustvedt

November 12, 2014 · 8:53 pm

The Blindfold – Siri Hustvedt

I really like Siri Hustvedt’s writing. When I saw this at the library I had to get it out.

Here is the blurb …

Iris Vegan is a graduate student, living alone and impoverished in New York City. In the course of the novel, she encounters four strong characters, each of whom fascinates and in some way subordinates her to alter the shape of her identity.

I have to say my favourite Hustvedt novel is still The Summer without Men. This is a short novel and I would describe it as a series of connected short stories. It is an exploration of one women’s mental state and how interactions with others change her. This is one of her earlier novels (possibly the first?) and it is interesting to see how her interest in her character’s interior drama has grown and expanded in later works. It is slow moving and I found Iris to be quite frustrating – she seemed determined to make her own life difficult and more complicated than in needed to be.

Another review …

http://hungrylikethewoolf.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/the-blindfold-by-siri-hustvedt/

The Blazing World – Siri Hustvedt

I have read The Summer without Men and The Sorrows of an American – loved the first and was not so taken with the second. I was keen to read this new novel sort of like a tie breaker.

Here is the blurb …

With The Blazing World, internationally bestselling author Siri Hustvedt returns to the New York art world in her most masterful and urgent novel since What I Loved. Hustvedt tells the provocative story of the artist Harriet Burden. After years of watching her work ignored or dismissed by critics, Burden conducts an experiment she calls Maskings: she presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity.
The three solo shows are successful, but when Burden finally steps forward triumphantly to reveal herself as the artist behind the exhibitions, there are critics who doubt her. The public scandal turns on the final exhibition, initially shown as the work of acclaimed artist Rune, who denies Burden’s role in its creation. What no one doubts, however, is that the two artists were intensely involved with each other. As Burden’s journals reveal, she and Rune found themselves locked in a charged and dangerous game that ended with the man’s bizarre death.
Ingeniously presented as a collection of texts compiled after Burden’s death, The Blazing World unfolds from multiple perspectives. The exuberant Burden speaks—in all her joy and fury—through extracts from her own notebooks, while critics, fans, family members, and others offer their own conflicting opinions of who she was, and where the truth lies.
From one of the most ambitious and internationally renowned writers of her generation, The Blazing World is a polyphonic tour de force. An intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle, it explores the deceptive powers of prejudice, money, fame, and desire.

As you can tell from the blurb, there is a lot going on in this novel. Multiple points of view, multiple literary styles, stuff on gender, art, love, loyalty, parenting, creativity and I am sure there is more that I have forgotten. It is very complicated and literary, but eminently readable. I am in awe of Ms Hustvedt’s ability to plan and construct something so intricate and yet to make it seem easy. This novel is for people who enjoy reading – it is not a light or fluffy escapist read. Having said that, it is not hard to read, but there are many threads and it does require concentration on the part of the reader.

So this makes two of her novels that I like and one that I don’t. I will definitely read another.

More reviews …

http://bookssnob.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/the-blazing-world-by-siri-hustvedt/

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/15/blazing-world-siri-hustvedt-review

The Sorrows of an American – Siri Hustvedt

As I enjoyed the The Summer without Men, I was keen to read this one.

Blurb …

When Erik Davidsen and his sister, Inga, find a disturbing note from an unknown woman among their dead father’s papers, they believe he may be implicated in a mysterious death. The Sorrows of an American tells the story of the Davidsen family as brother and sister uncover its secrets and unbandage its wounds in the year following their father’s funeral.

Returning to New York from Minnesota, the grieving siblings continue to pursue the mystery behind the note. While Erik’s fascination with his new tenants and emotional vulnerability to his psychiatric patients threaten to overwhelm him, Inga is confronted by a hostile journalist who seems to know a secret connected to her dead husband, a famous novelist. As each new mystery unfolds, Erik begins to inhabit his emotionally hidden father’s history and to glimpse how his impoverished childhood, the Depression, and the war shaped his relationship with his children, while Inga must confront the reality of her husband’s double life.

A novel about fathers and children, listening and deafness, recognition and blindness; the pain of speaking and the pain of keeping silent, the ambiguities of memory, loneliness, illness, and recovery. Siri Hustvedt’s exquisitely moving prose reveals one family’s hidden sorrows through an extraordinary mosaic of secrets and stories that reflect the fragmented nature of identity itself.

I struggled quite a bit with this one, which is probably due to the circumstances when I read it – I went to Singapore with a group of friends and read it in the ‘down’ time. Not really conducive to concentration and following a complicated story. I didn’t warm to Erik I found him too analytical and judgemental. I would have preferred the story from his sister’s view point.

The writing was superb and the characters brilliant (I didn’t like him, but that doesn’t make him poorly written).

I have What I Loved on my Kindle and will move onto it shortly.

More reviews …

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/01/fiction2

http://www.theage.com.au/news/book-reviews/the-sorrows-of-an-american/2008/03/03/1204402339658.html

The Summer Without Men – Siri Hustvedt

I read this while in Paris (how exotic that sounds). I enjoyed it and will read more of Ms Hustvedt’s work. It was a slow moving story more about character development than plot.

Here is the description …

Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia’s husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a “pause.” This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia’s release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people’s home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her—her mother and her close friends,”the Five Swans,” and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband—and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own.
From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes.

This is a novel about women of all different ages: from Mia (our narrator), her mother and her mother’s friends, her daughter and the adolescent girls she teaches. I have to say, as a mother of girls, I loved the section where she got the girls to write from each others’ perspective.

Mia’s husband requests a pause (which turns out to be his lab partner!) and Mia spirals into a break down. After she leaves hospital (yes it was that kind of break down) she returns to her childhood town for the summer to teach poetry to a small group of girls. She plans to spend time with her aging mother – who lives in an old people’s home – and simply be. I am sure that sounds like a very simple story, but it is packed full of all sorts of fascinating bits: information on creative writing, how to read Jane Austen, the different stages in the lives of women. This novel is written for people who love to read. I know that sounds quite strange, but it conveys the joy (education, sense of connection, etc) that comes with reading.

More reviews …

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/12/siri-hustvedt-summer-without-men-review

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/books/woman-back-from-nervous-breakdown/story-e6frg8nf-1226018180046

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Tagged as siri hustvedt, the summer without men