Siri Hustvedt

“The recollections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.“

Leo Hertzberg is a professor of art history show more living in New York with his wife Erica, and son Matthew. Experimental artist Bill Weschler, his wife, Lucille, and their son, Mark, move into the apartment upstairs. Bill and Lucille divorce, and Bill marries his muse, Violet. Each character is an artist, academic, or writer. It begins in 1975 and covers a period of approximately twenty-five years. It is a psychological character study of a small number of people – primarily Leo, Bill, Mark, and Violet – revolving around the New York art scene. It is a book to be experienced, as a plot summary will not do it justice.

The story is told by Leo, looking back on what happened in the lives of these two families. It takes time to set the stage, but once everything is in place, it is an intriguing story that is hard to put down. The characters are strikingly well-drawn. The writing is erudite and expressive. The interactions among the characters are intense. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the artistic processes. It is a story of relationships, friendship, grief, art, narcissism, and wishful thinking. It is brilliant. I am adding it to my list of favorites.

“But spectacular lies don’t need to be perfect. They rely less on the liar’s skill than on the listener’s expectations and wishes.” show less

"a portrait of the artist as a young woman"
Siri Hustvedt has made us used to very thoughtful, beautifully composed novels and essays, and this surely once again is one like these. In essence, she describes the experiences of a 23-year-old girl S.H. moving to New York from the Midwest (Minnesota) to write a novel. The autobiographical slant is immediately clear, although Hustvedt in interviews has clarified that not everything is based on her own experiences, but a large part is. Inevitably, show more here we are confronted with the second layer of the novel: a writer who, at the age of 63, looks back on her 'pioneering time', and thus also focusses on the insidious workings of memory, on the inexorable work of time and on how narratives actively contribute to a person's life. Sounds familiar, and indeed, Hustvedt is far from the first to indulge in such a quest for lost time. Fortunately, she seasons her story with some suspense elements, such as the strange, constantly murmuring neighbor, the witch circle of which this neighbor is a part, and a terrifyingly described experience of sexual assault. By constantly harking back to a diary from that time, the book takes the form of a frame story. This is reinforced by the fact that Hustvedt also includes fragments from the first novel her main character was working on at the time, a kind of coming-of-age story about a young man with a Sherlock Holmes obsession. Naturally, there is a fascinating interaction between that diary, the real experiences from then (1979) and from now (2017), and those first writings, resulting in a wonderful whole of self-reflexive dialogue with past and present. I don't think this is her best book, but the thorough, thoughtful way in which Hustvedt writes continues to charm me. show less

This is a very smart novel about a very smart artist-protagonist by a very smart author. First off, I thoroughly enjoyed it and was engrossed by the journey of artist Harriet Burden, the recent widow of an famous art dealer, who decides to test and tease the NYC art world. The novel may be too clever by half for many readers who are impatient with stylistic devices and games, but I found Hustvedt's writing amusing and entertaining.

The novel is told from multiple perspectives, opening with an show more Editor's Introduction, which explains that the text is composed of a series of journals kept by Burden as well as as other commentary on and criticism of her work and testimony of significant people and family members in her life.

After her husband has died, Burden decides to present her installation works under a series of male pseudonyms -- she calls her work "Maskings." Each of the three installations garners increasing critical attention, until the third culminates in a crisis of identity and ownership. The relationships that Burden has with the three artists she hires or co-opts as fronts mirror certain aspects of her personality.

The Blazing World is probably not a novel for everyone, but if you're interested in the art world, feminism or literary experimentation, I highly recommend it. show less

A collection of Hustvedt's shorter writings from the last five years or so, written against the background of Trump, Covid, and the deaths of her parents. There are several essays about her parents and grandparents that fill in some extra pieces around the people she wrote about in her novel The sorrows of an American; there are analytical pieces about Jane Austen, Emily Brontë and Louise Bourgeois; a playful reworking of Sinbad's voyages and a two-hour stare at a Bellini painting in the show more Frick Collection; and there are reflections on death-practices, on mentoring, on misogyny, and on the absence of representations of childbirth in Western art.

As you would expect, it's all calm, clear and devastatingly logical, with more than a hint of a twinkle in the author's eye as she points out the inanities of what earlier writers have said about a given subject. She especially castigates critics who apply the teachings of Freud uncritically in inappropriate places, notably in her essay on Louise Bourgeois, where she clearly feels that people have taken the artist's own statements far too literally, as though a woman artist wasn't capable of using irony or leading critics up the garden path. Calling Hustvedt "a twenty-first century Virginia Woolf", as one of the blurbers on the back cover does, is maybe a bit overblown, but that's certainly the kind of space she's operating in. show less