What I Loved: The International Bestseller

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Asbjorn Gronstad. "Ekphrasis Refigured: Writing Seeing in Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved," Mosaic, vol. 45, issue 3 (2012). He was one of those people in New York who was purported to "know everybody". "Knowing everybody" is a phrase that denotes not having many relations with people but having relations with a few people generally thought to be significant and powerful.” SIRI HUSTVEDT: We all do it! [Laughter] We don’t remember [being born], but we all do it! And yet Douglas doesn’t treat birth separately as maybe the most fundamental cultural event to be codified. The beginning of life outside. Scholarship and Western philosophy and Western science have suppressed the realities of gestation and birth in ways that just flabbergast me. I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.”

What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt | Hachette UK

Scholars Leo and his wife Erica admire, then befriend, artist Bill and his first and second wives. Their respective sons Matthew and Mark grow up together until the first in a series of tragedies strikes; a calamity which devastates the whole community and changes everyone’s lives forever.Hustvedt's real achievement is to push the boundaries of the novel further, by making something of such sheer, daunting and inspiring largeness. I can't remember the last time I finished a novel and truly believed I'd absorbed the taste and span of an artist's career as well as the pains and joys of 30 years of his sexual and emotional life, but this one convinced me I had. Hubert Zapf analysed the novel in "Narrative, Ethics, and Postmodern Art in Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved" which was published in a collection called The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media. [8] Weather Markings." The Paris Review 81(1981): 136–137 Reprinted. The Paris Review Anthology. Ed. George Plimpton. New York: Norton, 1990. 582–5833. The families live in the same New York apartment building, rent a house together in the summers and keep up a lively exchange of ideas about life and art, Reflections on a More or Less Hidden Being." Contemporary Psychoanalysis 46: Special Issue on Psychoanalysis and the Media (2010): 224–234.

What I Loved - Wikipedia

I was reading their work [including yours] and at the same time reading its critical reception over time. And you get this really clear sense of the gendered nature of the way [women’s] work is received. I think so often we vaguely notice aspects of gendered critique in passing. We sort of see little bits and pieces, but we don’t often have the opportunity to put the whole narrative together. If I could go anywhere: I'd revisit Maman, Louise Bourgeois' 9-metre spider at London's Tate Modern a sense that even if every scrap of a life were saved, thrown into a giant mound and then carefully sifted to extract all possible meaning, it would not add up to a life.”In May, she wrote to tell me that she was coming to New york or a week in June. She was going to stay with me, but her letters made it clear that the visit didnt mean a resumption for our old life. As the day approached, my agitation mounted. By the morning of her arrival, it had reached a pitch that felt something like an inner scream.The very thought that I would soon see Erica again didnt excite me as much as wound me. As I wandered around the loft trying to calm myself, I realized that I was holding my chest like a man who had just been stabbed. After sitting down, I tried to untangled that feeling of injury but couldnt do it - not fully.” 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.” SIRI HUSTVEDT: I’m trying to write a novel now. It’s a political novel. It’s a weird political novel. But yes, I think I’ve been galvanised. This is a book were the accretion of improbabilities also annoyed me, something else that probably should have stopped me reading. Really, I’m less annoyed with the book and the author, and more annoyed with myself for finished it, because I had no excuse for reading on. 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

WHAT I LOVED – Reading Group Choices WHAT I LOVED – Reading Group Choices

Set in a small Minnesota town whose entire population appears to consist of slightly ominous eccentrics, Hustvedt's second novel (after 1992's The Blindfold) presents a coming of age story with Continue reading » Hustvedt, Siri (February 6, 1986). "Figures of Dust: A Reading of Our Mutual Friend". Columbia University . Retrieved February 6, 2019– via Google Books. But he talks funny too, Dad." Matt stopped talking and I waited. I could see that he was thinking hard. My son thought with his face in those days. His eyes narrowed. He screwed up his nose and tightened his mouth. After several seconds he said,"He talks like me when I am pretending." Matt deepened his voice, "Like this - I'm Spiderman."

SIRI HUSTVEDT: Many people who are looking at ecological models now are theorising the fact that we’re all porous and interdependent beings. [That is, we are not self-contained individuals with firm boundaries between ourselves and other forms of life.] Finding food is vital, so is our reproductive drive, our sexual drive, but we also need to breathe, a passive need dependent on the outside. Western philosophy and Western science have really supressed the realities of gestation and birth in ways that just flabbergast me, says Siri Hustvedt. Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.” 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 Unfortunately, she chooses to probe her characters as if they were sliced up and put beneath a telescope. There’s little warmth in her characterization; she seems so intent on capturing her characters’ neuroses in fine detail that she forgets to make them compelling or likeable. The artwork that the protagonist directly engages with might be memorable and affecting, but the long descriptions of artwork that only tangentially relate to the plot become boring and repetitive. Reading a description of paintings you can’t see is a bit like hearing someone describe their favourite song – an ultimately empty experience.