Hubert Zapf, "Narrative, Ethics, and Postmodern Art in Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved", in Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning, et al The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 2008, pp. 51-63 Is it possible for a marriage to survive the death of a child? Discuss how Erica and other characters handle the grief of Matt’s death. How are parents to deal with the heartache of raising troubled children? These wonderful essays capture Hustvedt's thoughtful, intensely personal and aesthetically charged responses to art. At first, Hustvedt's choice of artists seems random or disjointed, but it becomes Continue reading »

What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt | Hachette UK

Anselm Kiefer: The Truth is Always Gray." Essay for catalogue of the Eli Broad Collection of Art in Los Angeles (2013). Heaven's Alphabet" (on Russian avant-garde book exhibition at MoMA) Art on Paper, July, August 2002.JULIENNE VAN LOON: This reminds me of another line from “Both-And”. You write: “Perception is conservative.” What do you mean? Perception, prejudice and the story of feminism Do you remember when you told me I had beautiful knees? I never like my knees. In fact, I thought they were ugly. But your eyes have rehabilitated them. Whether I see you again or not, I'm going to live out my life with these two beautiful knees.” I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.” This isn't helped by the sense of foreboding that haunts the early section. But then the anticipated death occurs and the novel takes off. There is a long description of grief, moving without being mawkish, which combines intellectual rigour with wild feeling; after this, the characters' need to make sense of the world is more than an academic challenge: it is psychologically overwhelming.

What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt | Waterstones

In some cultures, faeces are just a joke and in other cultures they’re considered really dangerous. So, Douglas is not saying that we all share the same kinds of pollution concerns, but she’s saying that pollution concerns exist in all cultures. And the blur, the mush – especially the bodily mush we all experience, the fluids or substances that cross over the thresholds of the body – are particularly liable to being considered dangerous. After finishing her dissertation, Hustvedt began writing prose. Two stories of the four that would become her first novel, The Blindfold, were published in literary magazines [5] and later included in Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991. [6] Since then she has continued to write fiction and publish essays on the intersections between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. She also writes regularly about visual art. Hustvedt gave the third annual Schelling lecture on aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. I already opposed the Vietnam War. I marched against it. I became a feminist young. That’s when I first read Kate Millett’s Sexual Politicsand Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. A great book. The twinning of narrative pleasure with intellectual rigor isn’t rare. In fact, it’s easy to find if you’re plowing through, say, the Modern Library, engaging with classics that come to you already canonized and annointed. But to stumble into such a relationship with a contemporary. . .writer is a heady feeling. Those of us who read new fiction dream of finding such a book.”— Newsday Christine Marks, I am Because You Are: Relationality in the Work of Siri Hustvedt (Winter: Heidelberg University Press, 2014).We first met seven years ago, when she agreed to be interviewed for my essay collection, The Thinking Woman (2019). I spent two mornings in Hustvedt’s home in Brooklyn that northern winter of 2014, as we talked at length about the nature of play. Johanna Hartmann, Christine Marks, and Hubert Zapf, Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt Works: Interdisciplinary Essays (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). Hustvedt writes like a critic, assessing, analysing, interpreting. (This is not unapt: her narrator, Leo Hertzberg, is a professor of art history who has written a book called A Brief History of Seeing in Western Painting.) Her characters inhabit a rarefied world of SoHo art galleries and universities and are so preoccupied with interpreting their lives that you wonder how they manage to live them. SIRI HUSTVEDT: A lot of the gendered response is unconscious, implicit forms of prejudice that appear in the criticism. There are overtly hostile responses too, but I’m not sure even those critics know why they’re so angry. Noonie Minogue, "What I Loved" OCLC Number 96226456, TLS, the Times literary supplement, 7 February 2003

What I Loved - Wikipedia

I had a hard time at first deciding if this novel was largely a character study or plot driven but so much happens and there is such depth in these relationships that I just stopped analyzing and became fully invested in how Hustvedt tell this story, she really does a most interesting tale justice. Yes, looking authoritarianism in the face, listening to racist, misogynistic, anti-immigrant rhetoric was like hearing Goebbels again, and it has lit a fire under my butt. When Trump was still president and running for re-election, my husband and I and several others started an organisation, Writers Against Trump, now called Writers for Democratic Action. And in whatever way we can, we’re trying to mobilise writers to write political pieces and get out the vote. I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.” Essay on Bohumil Hrabel's I Served the King of England. Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost. Eds. Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Linda and Esta Spalding. London: Bloomsbury, 2001.

Weather Markings." The Paris Review 81(1981): 136–137 Reprinted. The Paris Review Anthology. Ed. George Plimpton. New York: Norton, 1990. 582–5833. I have begun to wonder what actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?”