What I Loved

'Todo cuanto amé', de Siri Hustvedt, es una de las novelas más inteligentes que he leído últimamente. ¿Cómo calificar un libro de inteligente, por su erudición, por su estructura narrativa, por las ideas y pensamientos que desarrolla, por la trama...? Sin duda, 'Todo cuanto amé' cumple todos estos requisitos y algunos más.

¿De qué trata? Es una historia de amor, como bien indica el título, pero no sólo de amor entre personas, también de amor por el arte y la creación. Leo es un profesor de historia del arte que rememora parte de su vida cuando casi es un anciano. Un buen día encuentra por casualidad cinco cartas en el interior de un libro que perteneció a su buen amigo Bill Wechler, un pintor al que conoció hace años, show more cuando compró uno de sus primeros cuadros. Es entonces cuando decide escribir su historia, tanto la suya propia, como la de su mujer Erica, también proferora, como la de Bill y sus mujeres, Lucille, poetisa, y Violet, modelo del artista y autora de las cartas. Pero esto no es todo, ya que un trágico suceso desencadenará los acontecimientos en ambas familias, y desvelará oscuros secretos.

Siri Hustvedt tiene una prosa de gran sensibilidad, agudeza y sabiduría, que te va calando poco a poco hasta que te absorbe por completo, y que descubrí en su último y maravilloso libro, 'Elegía para un americano'. En 'Todo cuanto amé', la historia se desarrolla despaciosamente, sin prisas, y aún así hay veces que vuelves atrás para releer alguna frase de gran profundidad. No exagero si afirmo que Siri Hustvedt es una grandísima escritora. show less

Ugh. I couldn't finish this one: too much self-important chatter, too many navel-gazing characters in a plotless morass of reminiscence, too many hyper-detailed descriptions of works of art that we're told for pages on end are truly great and impressive and all the 1980s NYC yuppies loved them. Hustvedt seems to think that belonging to the class of the intelligentsia is such Serious Business that it renders her characters emotionless and unlikeable even when they are talking about the things that fascinate them.

I persevered until the first pages of the second part, and still the navel gazing and the self-absorption simply would not stop. That's when I realized I'd much rather be cleaning the flat than force myself to continue reading show more this boring melodrama.

I still gave this book two stars because it was clear to me that Hustvedt can write: she has insights and ideas and can convey them (at least part of the time) succinctly and poignantly. The execution of this book, however, is just one poor choice after another, and there is too little in the way of style, contents or framing to make this any more than a failed novel. show less

“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 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 show more 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

What I loved reads disconcertingly like a revival of the ageing-male-Jewish-New-York-professor novel meme of the fifties and sixties (Saul Bellow and co.). The narrator, art historian Leo Hertzberg, is recording a phase of his life in which he has lost or been rejected from just about every connection that he has invested emotional energy in: his wife and son, his close friend the artist Bill Wechsler, and Bill's son and two wives. And through an incurable eye disease he's even lost his ability to look at pictures other than in memory's eye.

But this isn't a novel about Leo. He's there as an observer and reporter, and as a kind of calibration standard for the normality of his reactions to the things that go on in his life. What we are show more interested in are all the other characters around him, who react to emotional stress in much more varied ways. Especially, the three main female characters and the artists Bill and Matt, who are all characterised to the reader chiefly through the projects they are working on, but also the mentally-ill brother and the teen-from-hell... Along the way, we get a certain amount of emotional bashing ourselves, as well as some fairly demanding discussions about aesthetics and the role of fashion in both psychiatry and the New York art world.

I didn't enjoy this quite as much as The burning world and The summer without men, but it's still a very impressive novel. show less

I am late to the party with this novel; I am sorry I waited so long to read this ~2003 critically acclaimed novel about friendship, tragedy, grief, duplicity and how easy it is for everything you've ever loved to slip away. Our narrator is a middle age art historian who befriends an enigmatic young author; they both marry and have sons at about the same time and their families are pleasantly intertwined. Through divorces, deaths, fortune, fame and aging we follow their friendships to the end. Although my description sounds perhaps like a hokey family drama - this was much more than that. I was hooked immediately and stayed up late every evening reading this compelling story and was heartbroken at its conclusion.

Alot of the book does show more focus on art. What makes something art; the art scene in Manhattan in the 1980's; complicated descriptions of the fictional modern works of art in the story. In fact, all of the protagonists are artists or writers and we are privy to rather detailed descriptions of their scholarly or artistic endeavors. For the most part, this added gravitas and interest to the novel and really fleshed out the characters. I did however find myself a bit bored with William Weschler's cubes. Enough already. Really though, this was just a tiny criticism of an otherwise brilliant novel.

Hustvedt's prose is elegant and poignant. Her characters alive with all their flaws, eccentricities, gestures. I loved Mr. Bob's blessings; Matthew's drawings; Leo's drawer of keepsakes; the Legos the raver teens carried around with them. I cried out loud at certain parts and I am not typically one who does that. I was perhaps a tiny bit disappointed by the end. I expected maybe one more closing event with Mark, or Lucille - some secret or some hidden event to surface. I felt as if the narrative foreshadowed something it never revealed, or maybe I just missed it. But I do think aesthetically the ending worked, although it left this reader wanting more.

Highly recommended for lovers of literary fiction; good story-telling & dramatic tension coupled with a lot to say about love, art, and life and our tenuous hold on it all. show less

This is a hard book for me to review. I read Hustvedt's brand new book, The Blazing World last year and loved it so I've been looking forward to trying more of Hustvedt's work. What I Loved has a lot in common with The Blazing World; both books revolve around the contemporary art world and show Hustvedt's vast knowledge of art and literary scholarship. But where I thought this knowledge served the story well in The Blazing World, I ended up feeling like the long art descriptions and academic discourses disrupted the plot and made me dislike the pretentious characters.

[What I Loved] is told from the point of view of Leo Hertzberg, an art history professor who is looking back on his adult life. He starts his story with meeting a artist show more named Bill Weschler. Bill is unhappily married to Lucille and Leo is just married to Erica. The four become friends and both have sons around the same time. Bill ends up leaving Lucille for Violet, a woman he has used in his paintings. Leo and Erica embrace Violet as Lucille was always hard to deal with. The first part of this book is filled with their adult relationships and academic endeavors. It is the part that I found a bit pretentious.

The second part begins with a tragedy. Leo and Erica's son, Matt, dies in a boating accident while he's away at camp. This part of the book almost did me in. The way that Hustvedt writes about and dwells in grief was too intense for me. I had to put the book aside for a few days and seriously contemplated not returning to it. I suppose the realism says something positive about her writing but it was almost too much for me. I made it through the heart of that section though, and it got easier to read from there.

The third part focuses of Bill's son, Mark. Mark is a troubled youth - lying constantly, taking drugs, and in with the wrong crowd, including an adult artist who produces highly violent and graphic art and is something of a sensation in the art world. Mark's character is never fully revealed; it remains a bit murky whether he is evil at heart or has fallen in to the wrong crowd. The relationships between Leo, Bill, Violet, and Erica really have fallen apart by the end of the book, in part due to the tragedy in part 2 and in part due to Mark's behavior. (I'm being a bit oblique here to not give away some plot elements)

As I write about this book, I realize that there is a lot to think about here and that I did appreciate the quality of the writing and the ideas Hustvedt develops. Unfortunately, I didn't really connect with this book and found some of the plot elements too sad to let me enjoy the book. I also think I didn't really ever like Leo, which doesn't help in a first person narrative.

I will read more of Hustvedt's work, but wouldn't really recommend this one as a starting point. show less

A fascinating book about life, love, art, bereavement, creativity and psychosis, set in New York's global art, literary and media community from the 60s to the 90s. Hustvedt's bold choice in using a first person male narrative voice works for me and delivers some interesting ambiguities - her narrator is a critic and an observer, someone who experiences emotions but cannot properly externalise and deal with them. Other characters create worlds through art, and we can see the character of their art in the way they live their lives - often fractured, complex, intractable. While this may seem rarified, the book deals with harrowing bereavement, family life in all its complexities and pleasures, and also has a narrative that drives the show more reader on. Hustvedt's descriptive powers lead the reader into very close reading of a deceptive simply prose style. In all, not just a fascinating description of a particular world, but also a book that digs deep into all of our insecurities and emotions. Well worth reading. show less