The Blazing World

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I am heartbroken and in love with this book. It is raw and deeply emotional on the one hand and urbane and intellectual on the other. I want more books like this. I read it slowly just so that I could savor it a little longer. Hustvedt blends PhD-level theoretical analysis with an engrossing tale populated by wonderfully and grotesquely human characters. I identified with Harriet, with her lumpy old lady body, churning emotions, her constant grasping for more, and a brain too canny for her own good. I loved to hate that insufferable moron Oswald Case. I adored Rachel Briefman and Phineas Q. Eldridge and Bruno. I came to appreciate the central importance of the characters who seemed simple and marginal show more but who were really essential to the lived reality of the main characters all along - the Kirstens and Sweet Autumns of the world, and the Maisies suspended indefinitely between the ordinary and the artistic. Most of the book had an eerie, ominous vibe as the novel meandered towards Rune's artistic death - but then the story veered suddenly into the gnawing brutality of Harriet's all-too-recognizable end. I sobbed through the final chapters. Earlier, I laughed. I raged. I analyzed. I was moved, emotionally and intellectually. This book and its characters will stay with me for a very long time. I believe it is the best book I have ever read. It is perfect. show less

Some books baffle me as for whom they are written; what is their intended audience? This one seems to be written for the author’s co-citizens of her seemingly rarefied world; the New York Art Scene. Anyone outside of this sphere is made to feel it sharply. Those on the inside, and perhaps us rabble, are clearly meant to wonder at her grasp of the philosophically and the neurologically arcane. Granted, it is her background and authors are coached to write what they know and in light of that I shifted my approach to the book and came at it as if it were an anthropological project. To spend time among the strange people who glorify concepts that don’t have much rooted to the real world and to see what they’re like when they think no show more one’s watching.

The thing is, everyone in this book is convinced everyone else is watching. To some degree they’re right; their attendance at various openings, galas and shows is a chance for them to parade their newest personas and to view others’, not necessarily to take part in the event. To see and be seen is what it comes down to. The narcissism on display was quite amusing and I hope that Hustvedt did is on purpose. I especially liked how Phineas justified his sponging by becoming Harry’s administrator. As far as characters go, he was one of the most thorough and I wish that Rune’s innate sinister quality had been emphasized a bit more.

The premise and the construction are great though. The basic idea is that women’s artistic endeavors are ignored, belittled and under-valued. The construction is that an editor is gathering and presenting material about the life, achievements and potential downfall of the artist Harry Burden. I thought it would give the author a real challenge to alter her voice and she pretty much pulls it off although all the characters seem to need editorializing to explain obscure facts gleaned from their lofty intellectual heights. In one or two it could have played, but all of them?

It’s easy to wonder if Harry is a stand-in for Hustvedt herself. She is a woman of high-achievement, but frequently only described as Paul Auster’s wife; something that must be REALLY annoying. Harry’s agony and frustration are palpable and pitiable, but she spent more time axe-grinding than combating the source. It’s also an easy conclusion that the editor represents Hustvedt and she couldn’t help using it as a vehicle to show off. Not knowing her or any of her other books, I tried not to linger on these ideas long. Instead absorbing the story as distantly as I could; not interpreting or assuming.

Did I enjoy it? Not enough to read another of her books. The narrative kept me at arm’s length and I can’t say that I was enmeshed in the story; I put it down for days. When I use the word story I do it lightly. There was one in there somewhere, but it was so diluted by navel-gazing and intellectual claptrap that it got lost for dozens of pages, multiple narratives and sometimes months or years in the timeline. It was an intellectual exercise and an experience, but one I don’t intend to repeat. show less

I saw that Siri Hustvedt wrote a collection of essays about perception and identity, and I think there must be a great deal of her thinking expressed by the protagonist of this novel, Harriet “Harry” Burden. Harry is an artist in New York, who also had the possible misfortune of being married to a well-known art dealer. Her husband, Felix, has refused to show her work, and consequently the New York art world knows her as the hostess of Felix’s dinner parties rather than as an artist in her own right. Both Felix and Harry are dead at the start of the novel, which is told through Harry’s journals, academic and critical writing about her, and interviews with people who knew her.

After Felix’s death, Harry undertakes a project to show more create and show her art using “masks”—three male artists who will show the art as if it were their own. Not only are these shows far better received than Harry’s art was when shown under her own name, vindicating her belief that she has been disregarded as an artist because she is a woman, but it gives Harry (and us) insight into how what we think and believe affects how we perceive and, perhaps even more interestingly, how her “masks” affect the art she creates.

It’s clear from the onset of the novel that the art market has difficulty believing that Harry was really the creator of the projects shown under the names of her male “masks.” Rune, the final of her “masks” who was already an established artist in his own right, refuses after all to reveal that Harry was the artist behind the work. Her relationship with him is the most complex and thought-provoking in the book, though her relationships with every character shed light on the philosophical and psychological concerns about art, perception, sex, and identity that infuse the novel.

This is very much an intellectual novel of ideas. There’s a touch of “Rashomon,” in that we see Harry’s life and work from a variety of perspectives, though strictly speaking not many of the same individual incidents from different points of view. We see the broader picture of Harry as housewife, mother, virago, mentally disturbed obsessive, lover, and ultimately brilliant artist.

The title comes from the writing of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, a 17th-century philosopher and writer, and an icon to Harry. The title became particularly resonant at the very end of the novel, when we see Harry’s magnum opus through the eyes of the distinctly unintellectual Sweet Autumn, a New Age crystal healer. This final scene made the perfect frame, and there’s nothing I appreciate more than the perfect ending to a novel of ideas. show less

It was easy. It's still easy. You simply refuse to answer a woman. You don't engage in a dialogue. You let her words or her pictures die.

Harriet Burden is a talented artist who can't get any traction in the art world. Even her beloved husband, an important gallery owner, doesn't notice her art. So she comes up with a plan; she creates three stellar shows and has a different male artist take the credit for each one. Her plan is to then reveal herself and prove to the art world how sexist it is, but it doesn't work out as planned.

This is not a gentle or tactful novel. It is an angry, vibrant portrait about living as an artist in New York, about pushing against boundaries, about mental illness and genius. Were Hustvedt to have wanted to show more simply preach, she would not have created Harriet Burden. Harry is wonderful; chaotic, impulsive, angry and immensely talented. Her life blazes across the pages of the novel, which is told in the form of interviews, articles, diary entries and other biographical notes. It's an effective way to tell the story, with Harry's friends and family, as well as her detractors and other artists able to give their view of the events. Harry is as controversial and colorful as Francis Bacon or any other modern artist.

I was impressed by Hustvedt's writing and the depth of her knowledge. I'll certainly be reading more by this author. show less

The Blazing World is one of the 2014 Booker prize nominees that jumped out at me as something I would like to read. The premise is that a woman artist, Harriet "Harry" Burden, in her 60s who feels that her artwork has been under-appreciated because of her gender, creates 3 works of art and finds a different man to claim each of the exhibits as his own. After all three are exhibited and critiqued she plans to reveal herself as the artist behind them. Unfortunately, the last artist she chooses betrays her and refuses to admit that the work was hers. Many people believe him and the whole project is ruined for her.

The book is put together with different voices in Harriet's life trying to tell her story after her death. We get points of view show more from both of Harry's adult children, her second husband, her best friend, art critics, and others. This is very effective as a major theme of the book is perception. You see from the various points of view all of the ways the events are perceived. Also, Harriet leaves behind extensive journals where she discusses her life, her artwork, and her reading - she is esoteric, conceited, and vulnerable all at once. She reads philosophy and quotes it extensively. Luckily, the fictional editor of the book provides footnotes for the references Harriet makes.

You would assume from the description that a major theme of this book is going to be sexism in the art world. This is part of the book, certainly, but it is approached more as Harriet's perception of sexism. I would say that the theme is closer to exploring how the artist is part of the work of art. As such, gender, sexual orientation, race, and personality of the artist all factor in to a work of art. Part of Harriet's experiment with her art work was to demonstrate this, though I'm not sure if she intended that from the start. This theme really got me thinking about how much the name attached to a work of art influences my experience of the art itself. I think it's a great degree, personally.

Hustvedt does a great job of humanizing these philosophical themes, though. In fact, in some ways, when I finished this book I felt it was more about aging, death, and relationships with the art world as a back drop. As often happens with books with multiple narrators, there were some that I liked more than others and times where I felt the book got a bit bogged down and lost its focus. Overall, though, I thought this was a smart book with some important themes that manages to keep a human touch. That's not an easy balance to manage and why I think this was a worthy Booker nomination. show less

As several other reviewers have commented, the premise of this book — female artist adopts male personae in order to overcome art-world gender-bias — leads us to expect a good old-fashioned piece of reductionist feminist martyrology. But what we actually get is something a good deal more subtle than that. Hustvedt has fun provoking us to think about how the viewer's — and the artist's — perception of the artwork reflects the identity of the artist (and vice-versa), how factors like social status, age, gender, and money enter into the equation (on both sides), and how preconceptions about "intellectualism" and "madness" can also complicate the whole issue.

Of course, all this is happening not only within the story of Harriet show more Burden but also in the formal structure of the text, where we have a string of different narrators with different levels of status and authority (and some of whom are actually Harriet in disguise), and it's also implicitly happening in the interaction between the reader, the author and the text, since we know that Siri Hustvedt is a formidably intellectual middle-aged woman novelist writing in the character of a dim pedantic male professor who is supposed to be editing a collection of texts about a formidably intellectual (but possibly mad) middle-aged woman artist...

Fortunately, the whole thing is handled with a great deal of charm and humour. Hustvedt in the persona of Harriet enjoys blasting us out of the water with chunks of Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Lady Margaret Cavendish, but it's carefully set up so that any reader who has at least a vague general idea who Kierkegaard was should be able to keep up. (In one of her other personae, though, she undermines our self-confidence by drawing our attention to this journalistic trick and how it is done.) We don't necessarily understand Harriet and the artistic game she's been playing by the time we get to the end of the book, but we have definitely been made to think, and possibly shown just how much more complicated the real world can be than our nice theories would have it.

I know next to nothing about contemporary art, but I got the impression that at least some of the satire here must have been aimed at real targets that would be recognisable to anyone who knew the New York art world of the late nineties/early 2000s. Not exactly a roman à clef, perhaps, but certainly some in-jokes.

I've somehow managed to overlook Hustvedt up to now (obviously one of my many American blind spots), but she's someone I would certainly like to read more of. show less

Damn. Harriet Burden is angry. She's angry at her father who never showed any affection, her unfaithful art-dealer husband who refused to promote her work because he didn't want to be accused of nepotism. Since both of them are dead, she turns her anger on the art world as a whole for having undervalued her for being female, for being large and unfeminine, and now for being old. She hatches an elaborate plan to prove that she is a good artist and that she has been discriminated against for these reasons. She will exhibit her work under three young, male identities (using actual people) and then reveal the hoax, humiliating the art critics, agents, buyers, gallery owners, etc.

This novel is written under the premise that Harriet had show more died, having been unsuccessful in proving that the hoax really was a hoax in all but one of the cases. An editor has assembled excerpts of Harriet's prolific writing, as well as writing and interviews from her adult children, friends, critics, and various other players in the story. Of the three men who she says exhibited her work as their own, one has disappeared, one freely admits that it was Harriet's work, and the last has possibly commited suicide after publicly denying that his work was Harriet's. It's left to the reader to piece together who is telling the truth.

I don't usually read a lot of "angry woman lit," (Is that a genre? If so, does [b:Where'd You Go, Bernadette|13526165|Where'd You Go, Bernadette|Maria Semple|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1338822317s/13526165.jpg|17626728] also qualify?) but I also recently read [b:The Woman Upstairs|15701217|The Woman Upstairs|Claire Messud|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1345666863s/15701217.jpg|18450578]. There are certain parallels between the two novels, and while Harriet and Nora Eldridge are very different on the outside, I think these two work as interesting companion pieces. Both women have been unsuccessful in the art world and feel betrayed by people they've trusted. Both books deal with installation art with a lot of quirky little details.

The Blazing World has a much wider scope, with the many perspectives and a dazzling array of sources Harriet quotes from her extensive reading. Harriet is publicly angry, considered by more than a few to be mentally unstable. The Woman Upstairs is a quieter, more intimate novel, just as as Nora lives a life of quiet desperation. show less