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Memories of the Future
Memories of the Future tells the story of a young Midwestern woman’s first year in New York City in the late 1970s and her obsession with her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite.
As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, S.H., aka “Minnesota,” transcribes her neighbor’s bizarre and increasingly ominous monologues in a notebook, along with sundry other adventures, until one frightening night when Lucy bursts into her apartment on a rescue mission.
Forty years later, S.H., now a veteran author, discovers her old notebook, as well as early drafts of a never-completed novel. S.H. measures what she remembers against what she wrote that year and has since forgotten to create a dialogue between selves across decades.
As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, S.H., aka “Minnesota,” transcribes her neighbor’s bizarre and increasingly ominous monologues in a notebook, along with sundry other adventures, until one frightening night when Lucy bursts into her apartment on a rescue mission.
Forty years later, S.H., now a veteran author, discovers her old notebook, as well as early drafts of a never-completed novel. S.H. measures what she remembers against what she wrote that year and has since forgotten to create a dialogue between selves across decades.
318 pages, Hardcover
First published March 19, 2019
About the author
Siri Hustvedt
69 books2,263 followersHustvedt was born in Northfield, Minnesota. Her father Lloyd Hustvedt was a professor of Scandinavian literature, and her mother Ester Vegan emigrated from Norway at the age of thirty. She holds a B.A. in history from St. Olaf College and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University; her thesis on Charles Dickens was entitled Figures of Dust: A Reading of Our Mutual Friend.
Hustvedt has mainly made her name as a novelist, but she has also produced a book of poetry, and has had short stories and essays on various subjects published in (among others) The Art of the Essay, 1999, The Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991, The Paris Review, Yale Review, and Modern Painters.
Like her husband Paul Auster, Hustvedt employs a use of repetitive themes or symbols throughout her work. Most notably the use of certain types of voyeurism, often linking objects of the dead to characters who are relative strangers to the deceased characters (most notable in various facits in her novels The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl) and the exploration of identity. She has also written essays on art history and theory (see "Essay collections") and painting and painters often appear in her fiction, most notably, perhaps, in her novel, What I Loved.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, writer Paul Auster, and their daughter, singer and actress Sophie Auster.
Hustvedt has mainly made her name as a novelist, but she has also produced a book of poetry, and has had short stories and essays on various subjects published in (among others) The Art of the Essay, 1999, The Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991, The Paris Review, Yale Review, and Modern Painters.
Like her husband Paul Auster, Hustvedt employs a use of repetitive themes or symbols throughout her work. Most notably the use of certain types of voyeurism, often linking objects of the dead to characters who are relative strangers to the deceased characters (most notable in various facits in her novels The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl) and the exploration of identity. She has also written essays on art history and theory (see "Essay collections") and painting and painters often appear in her fiction, most notably, perhaps, in her novel, What I Loved.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, writer Paul Auster, and their daughter, singer and actress Sophie Auster.
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March 20, 2019
By the time I'm halfway through a book, I can usually tell what I'm going to think of it – whether it's going to be a fun-but-flawed throwaway read I'll forget in a couple of weeks (three stars) or a wonderful new favourite (five, obviously) or something in between. But with Memories of the Future I constantly vacillated between my love of Siri Hustvedt's writing and irritation or, worse, boredom at the book's rambling approach.
It's one of those semi-autobiographical novels in which it's hard to separate memoir from fiction. It is framed thus: while sorting through her elderly mother's possessions, a writer (S.H.) rediscovers a notebook she previously believed to be lost. It was written 40 years earlier, when S.H. was a student in New York City; it chronicles her first, bewildering year away from home, her friendships and affairs, early attempts to write a novel. The focus of her attention is often her neighbour, Lucy Brite, who spouts lengthy, loud, bizarre monologues. From the flat next door, the lonely and imaginative S.H. listens attentively and transcribes what she can, eventually building a sort of mythology around Lucy.
The broad facts of the narrator's life match Hustvedt's – Norwegian heritage, Minnesota childhood, a move to NYC in the late 1970s – but the specific details often don't (the S.H. in this book has a scientist husband named Walter and a daughter named Freya, unlike Hustvedt, who is married to the novelist Paul Auster and mother to Sophie). It becomes difficult to discern whether elements like Lucy are invented or remembered; whether the story is supposed to be compelling in its own right, as fiction, or whether we are meant to be interested in the life of the narrator because we are assumed to be interested in the life of the author.
The blurb describes Memories of the Future as a 'dialogue between selves across decades'. It is perhaps also a dialogue between fact and fiction. Some of the most compelling scenes from the notebook are written with a level of recall that would be impossible for real events, implying at least some embroidery on S.H.'s part. (An eccentric dinner party is brought vividly to life, but it grates that the thoroughly realised detail and dialogue, including the narrator's triumphant speech, distinctly lack the ring of authenticity). She remembers beginning each journal entry 'Dear Page', but, when she rediscovers the notebook, finds her memory has magnified the affectation, which she actually only used a couple of times. Yet the entries we read mention 'Page' constantly. Has she rewritten the notebook entirely? Has there ever been a notebook, in either Hustvedt's history or S.H.'s? This is the sort of story that acknowledges these questions but doesn't answer them.
Memories of the Future touches on many fascinating ideas and would no doubt be wonderful to study or otherwise dissect (e.g. in a book club). However, its constituent parts are often frustrating or just not that interesting. The novel the younger S.H. is trying to write, about precocious teenagers named Ian and Isadora, is mind-numbingly dull. The couple of 'twists' in Lucy Brite's story are obvious to the reader well before S.H. picks up on them. The book is perhaps most successful as a memoir about writing – a thing I personally am just not that interested in reading.
Beautifully written as always, and a small part of me feels bad and stupid for not appreciating it properly, but this was my least favourite of Hustvedt's novels so far. I would recommend What I Loved, The Blazing World or The Blindfold as better places to start.
I received an advance review copy of Memories of the Future from the publisher through Edelweiss.
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It's one of those semi-autobiographical novels in which it's hard to separate memoir from fiction. It is framed thus: while sorting through her elderly mother's possessions, a writer (S.H.) rediscovers a notebook she previously believed to be lost. It was written 40 years earlier, when S.H. was a student in New York City; it chronicles her first, bewildering year away from home, her friendships and affairs, early attempts to write a novel. The focus of her attention is often her neighbour, Lucy Brite, who spouts lengthy, loud, bizarre monologues. From the flat next door, the lonely and imaginative S.H. listens attentively and transcribes what she can, eventually building a sort of mythology around Lucy.
The broad facts of the narrator's life match Hustvedt's – Norwegian heritage, Minnesota childhood, a move to NYC in the late 1970s – but the specific details often don't (the S.H. in this book has a scientist husband named Walter and a daughter named Freya, unlike Hustvedt, who is married to the novelist Paul Auster and mother to Sophie). It becomes difficult to discern whether elements like Lucy are invented or remembered; whether the story is supposed to be compelling in its own right, as fiction, or whether we are meant to be interested in the life of the narrator because we are assumed to be interested in the life of the author.
The blurb describes Memories of the Future as a 'dialogue between selves across decades'. It is perhaps also a dialogue between fact and fiction. Some of the most compelling scenes from the notebook are written with a level of recall that would be impossible for real events, implying at least some embroidery on S.H.'s part. (An eccentric dinner party is brought vividly to life, but it grates that the thoroughly realised detail and dialogue, including the narrator's triumphant speech, distinctly lack the ring of authenticity). She remembers beginning each journal entry 'Dear Page', but, when she rediscovers the notebook, finds her memory has magnified the affectation, which she actually only used a couple of times. Yet the entries we read mention 'Page' constantly. Has she rewritten the notebook entirely? Has there ever been a notebook, in either Hustvedt's history or S.H.'s? This is the sort of story that acknowledges these questions but doesn't answer them.
Memories of the Future touches on many fascinating ideas and would no doubt be wonderful to study or otherwise dissect (e.g. in a book club). However, its constituent parts are often frustrating or just not that interesting. The novel the younger S.H. is trying to write, about precocious teenagers named Ian and Isadora, is mind-numbingly dull. The couple of 'twists' in Lucy Brite's story are obvious to the reader well before S.H. picks up on them. The book is perhaps most successful as a memoir about writing – a thing I personally am just not that interested in reading.
Beautifully written as always, and a small part of me feels bad and stupid for not appreciating it properly, but this was my least favourite of Hustvedt's novels so far. I would recommend What I Loved, The Blazing World or The Blindfold as better places to start.
I received an advance review copy of Memories of the Future from the publisher through Edelweiss.
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June 14, 2021
The title of this novel describes it well - it is a portrait of a young writer, written as a memoir by a 60ish woman looking back at her 23 year old self in 1978 Manhattan. SH is finding her way in the city, trying to write and unearthing clues about her strange neighbor. The terrain felt familiar, almost synchronous, as I as moved to NYC in 1982 as a 25 year old and am now in my 60s.
Hustvedt brilliantly plays with time and memory and imagination. We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward, too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable. Reading this required close attention; Hustvedt layers her pages with ideas and gently prodded my brain into overdrive. I found it trickier and more effort than her last two novels but still remarkable.
Hustvedt brilliantly plays with time and memory and imagination. We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward, too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable. Reading this required close attention; Hustvedt layers her pages with ideas and gently prodded my brain into overdrive. I found it trickier and more effort than her last two novels but still remarkable.
January 4, 2020
I promised myself that 2020 would include far more re-reads of books than previous years because I do love to re-visit a good book and I rarely make time for it with all the new books pouring in.
Where better to start than with a second look at one of my favourite books of 2019. I have read several of Hustvedt's novels and thoroughly enjoyed all of them. This one might just be top of my list.
I've left my original review below and I'm not going to add to that except for a couple of additional quotes from the book:
Back in my apartment, I remembered Simone Weil’s sentence "Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."
And, I think, my favourite:
Let us not forget that each time we evoke a memory, it is subject to change, but let us also not forget that those changes may bring truths in their wake.
---------------
ORIGINAL REVIEW
---------------
What was is and what is was.
The narrator of Siri Hustvedt’s novel is S.H., a novelist who hails from Minnesota and moves to New York to develop her writing career. For those who know about Siri Hustvedt, that sentence will ring several bells.
At the time of the novel, S.H. is 61 and an established author with several novels to her name. When we meet her, she is sorting through her mother’s possessions and comes across a journal she kept at age 23 when she first arrived in New York.
In this way, one of the main themes of the book is introduced: how do memory and imagination interact. In two strands of the book, S.H. writes from the novel’s present about her memories of that time (and the times before and after it) and, in parallel, she reproduces and muses on entries from the journal.
The more I focus on remembering, the more details I am likely to provide, but those particulars may well be invented.
We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward, too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable.
The book is an episodic novel, a work of fiction as all autobiography is, and yet I am suspicious of the woman’s memories.
I have always believed that memory and the imagination are a single faculty.
And so we learn about S.H.’s life in New York. Her neighbour who she listens to through the paper thin walls and the mysterious ramblings that suggest criminality or witchcraft or something (but all S.H.’s friends have different interpretations of the monologues she reports: who, if anyone, is right?). Her circle of friends. Her romantic (or just lustful) encounters that occasionally end badly. Her struggles to write her first novel.
But just one topic isn’t enough for Siri Hustvedt. This is a book that is also about literary criticism, about a patriarchal society that refuses to allow women to be creative, about America in 2017 and after. It is a book packed with literary references:
A cockroach the size of Gregor Samsa just ran across the floor.
The young S.H. reads maniacally, consuming books like there is no tomorrow. She is passionate and intelligent. The novel draws parallels between literary criticism and criminal investigations, and, to that end (perhaps) a third strand appears in the narrative in which we get to read some of the novel S.H. begins to write in New York: it is a detective story about a young man who models himself on Sherlock Holmes (S.H. - get it?) and a girl he meets who becomes his Watson. This assumption that the girl will be the secondary character feeds into the discussion of art.
Like Ali Smith in her seasonal quartet, a female artist takes a leading role. In the case of this book, it is the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Dadaist artist and poet perhaps most famous for being the possible/probable creator of Fountain, normally ascribed to Marcel Duchamp and acknowledged as one of the most influential pieces of art of all time (it’s a urinal - that probably means you now know which one it is even if you didn’t know the name of it).
She knew she was a fist in the face, a knee in the groin, a laughing bomb. She was art aggressive. She knew that the world loves powerful men and hates powerful women. Is it true? Yes, it’s true. The Baroness was written out of the story, and that, my friend, is murder. No blood. No broken bones, just an art crime, one that takes years and years to accomplish, a slow and terrible death—the Tears of Eros.
These three threads weave around one another. There is no straightforward linear narrative here. There are excursions into political commentary:
“Have you forgotten that this is November 2017 in the United States of America? This is the age of hatred. This is the age of a powerful man yowling obscenities about Muslims and blacks and immigrants and women to vast crowds of adoring white people.”
And, if you like Siri Hustvedt’s writing style, then that is the icing on the cake here. It is captivating to read.
My favourite book of 2019 so far. I loved it!
Where better to start than with a second look at one of my favourite books of 2019. I have read several of Hustvedt's novels and thoroughly enjoyed all of them. This one might just be top of my list.
I've left my original review below and I'm not going to add to that except for a couple of additional quotes from the book:
Back in my apartment, I remembered Simone Weil’s sentence "Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."
And, I think, my favourite:
Let us not forget that each time we evoke a memory, it is subject to change, but let us also not forget that those changes may bring truths in their wake.
---------------
ORIGINAL REVIEW
---------------
What was is and what is was.
The narrator of Siri Hustvedt’s novel is S.H., a novelist who hails from Minnesota and moves to New York to develop her writing career. For those who know about Siri Hustvedt, that sentence will ring several bells.
At the time of the novel, S.H. is 61 and an established author with several novels to her name. When we meet her, she is sorting through her mother’s possessions and comes across a journal she kept at age 23 when she first arrived in New York.
In this way, one of the main themes of the book is introduced: how do memory and imagination interact. In two strands of the book, S.H. writes from the novel’s present about her memories of that time (and the times before and after it) and, in parallel, she reproduces and muses on entries from the journal.
The more I focus on remembering, the more details I am likely to provide, but those particulars may well be invented.
We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward, too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable.
The book is an episodic novel, a work of fiction as all autobiography is, and yet I am suspicious of the woman’s memories.
I have always believed that memory and the imagination are a single faculty.
And so we learn about S.H.’s life in New York. Her neighbour who she listens to through the paper thin walls and the mysterious ramblings that suggest criminality or witchcraft or something (but all S.H.’s friends have different interpretations of the monologues she reports: who, if anyone, is right?). Her circle of friends. Her romantic (or just lustful) encounters that occasionally end badly. Her struggles to write her first novel.
But just one topic isn’t enough for Siri Hustvedt. This is a book that is also about literary criticism, about a patriarchal society that refuses to allow women to be creative, about America in 2017 and after. It is a book packed with literary references:
A cockroach the size of Gregor Samsa just ran across the floor.
The young S.H. reads maniacally, consuming books like there is no tomorrow. She is passionate and intelligent. The novel draws parallels between literary criticism and criminal investigations, and, to that end (perhaps) a third strand appears in the narrative in which we get to read some of the novel S.H. begins to write in New York: it is a detective story about a young man who models himself on Sherlock Holmes (S.H. - get it?) and a girl he meets who becomes his Watson. This assumption that the girl will be the secondary character feeds into the discussion of art.
Like Ali Smith in her seasonal quartet, a female artist takes a leading role. In the case of this book, it is the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Dadaist artist and poet perhaps most famous for being the possible/probable creator of Fountain, normally ascribed to Marcel Duchamp and acknowledged as one of the most influential pieces of art of all time (it’s a urinal - that probably means you now know which one it is even if you didn’t know the name of it).
She knew she was a fist in the face, a knee in the groin, a laughing bomb. She was art aggressive. She knew that the world loves powerful men and hates powerful women. Is it true? Yes, it’s true. The Baroness was written out of the story, and that, my friend, is murder. No blood. No broken bones, just an art crime, one that takes years and years to accomplish, a slow and terrible death—the Tears of Eros.
These three threads weave around one another. There is no straightforward linear narrative here. There are excursions into political commentary:
“Have you forgotten that this is November 2017 in the United States of America? This is the age of hatred. This is the age of a powerful man yowling obscenities about Muslims and blacks and immigrants and women to vast crowds of adoring white people.”
And, if you like Siri Hustvedt’s writing style, then that is the icing on the cake here. It is captivating to read.
My favourite book of 2019 so far. I loved it!
February 26, 2020
This book is a portrait of the artist as young woman, the artist who came to New York to live and to suffer and to write her mystery, Like the great detective who shares her initials S.H., the writer, sees, hears and smells the clues. The signs are everywhere, in a face, in the sky, in a book. A letter is slipped under the door. A knife arrives in the mail. Footsteps sound in the street and in the hallway. She turns her key in the lock. The woman are chanting in the next room. Unlike Holmes, however Minnesota cannot depend on Conan Doyle to arrange a perfect world for her ..
This is a fiercely intelligent, stimulating and unconventional novel, which examines the concepts of time, memory, narration and ownership of narration and female subjugation.
The book is effectively framed as a dialogue – between an older self, S.H., writing in 2017 and her younger self in 1978-79, having moved to New York for the first time and aiming to write her first novel - a detective mystery, there after initial loneliness she meets a group of brilliant young friends (When we were together, what we had not yet done but surely would do had the power of enchantment. We were raw youths, and we had swallowed the future whole, which is to say that we were depended on what we imagined we would become and because we impressed one another, we were illuminated by our mutual adoration) and is intrigued by the monologues and chants of older women she hears through the walls of her basic apartment – a group who later are revealed to be coven and who in the suffering they have faced almost the antithesis of the optimistically, naïve youngsters.
The younger S.H.’s thoughts are contextualized by two sources (shown in different type face) – a journal she kept and the text of her embryonic novel (both of which her older self finds after clearing out her dying mother’s effects), and the older self uses these sources to explore her younger self and her motivations and feelings and to compare her current memories to her recorded experiences. At one point the younger self invents another self to examine her own thoughts – The Introspective Detective (a nod to Freud’s id) and later the same imaginary character, now aged, reappears to dialogue with the older self.
Much of the book explores time, memory, narrative …
Temporal coexistence is true of every single book . You can hop to page 137 and then back to 7 twenty times over, but the story or the argument is fixed, determined from the first word to the last. And in this particular book, the book you are reading now, the young person and the old person live side by side in the precarious truths of memory. Here I am free to dance over decades in the small white space between paragraphs or longer over one bright minute of my life for page after page or toy with tenses that point backwards of forwards. I am free to follow the earlier self with interruptions from the later self because the old lady has perspective the young person cannot have.
We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backwards too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the capricious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable.
We keep company with an inner voice, one that began long ago in early childhood and falls silent in unconsciousness, in dreamless sleep, and in death. When we are alive and awake it is the mouthpiece of the self, and he or she is the chattering person we know best, often deluded it is true, but endlessly explicating events as they happen.
Can the past serve as a hiding place from the present? Is this book you are reading now my search for a destination called Then? Tell me where memory ends and invention begins. Tell me why I need you with me as my fellow traveller, my variously dear and crotchety other, my spouse before the book’s duration ……… Every book is a withdrawal from immediacy into reflection. Every book includes a perverse wish to foul up time, to cheat its inevitable pull …… Am I vainly searching for the moment when the future that is now the past beckoned me with its vast, empty face
Another recurring theme is male subjugation of women – among other things the book explores:
the invasive gaze and remarks of men on the street; the unthinking respect given to “great old men” of literature and academia; there is a boyfriend who insists the (already extremely well read) young SH reads all of his favourite books, but read none of hers; a cutting memory of a casually dismissive remark from her Doctor father after she had proudly memorised all the bones in the body that she would “make a fine nurse”; the academic father (in the detective story) is referred to as “the Professor” and his wife as “Mrs Simon”; the French condescension towards female writers echoed in a chance remark by a friend dismissing her as a romantic, the male gaze – from a height, aimed at the chest, lustful; men on dates who talk about themselves but ask no questions; male ownership of narration – with literature I think standing in for academia and even politics – “Sherlock Holmes is always right because Conan Doyle, his maker, has arranged a fictional universe [in which his guesses lead to the solution]”; male ownership of art, with a key recurring idea being the author’s firm belief that Marcel Duchamp’s famous “Fountain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountai...) was in fact produced by the avant garde poet and artist “The Baroness” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsa_vo...).
Imagery is important – the book is carefully illustrated with a small number of line drawings by the author which play an important part and illustrate key ideas from the text. And two images re-appear through the text – a knife and a key. We have an actual knife, a switchblade that the young self is given for protection, one which she fantasises about using to avenge an attempted rape that she suffers, one she names after the Baroness. But we also have the idea of traumatic memories (particularly of the assault) as a knife, how memories cut through time, how the Baroness herself cut through the conventions of society and of acceptable female behaviour. We see remembering also as a key – as something which can unlock past experiences, in the detective novel the key to the cellars plays a crucial role, the keys of the computer on which the novel is written also play a role in unlocking time and memories.
The book also examines and criticises the appropriation of the technique of the novel in memoires, the veracity of “memoirs filled with impossibly specific memories, I have this to say: those authors who claim perfect recall of their hash browns decades later are not to be trusted.”. Although much of the book is based on the author’s experiences much is not and the novel is also designed to confront the idea that women novelists are necessarily more autobiographical and confessional in their writing.
The importance of literature as an escape and as intellectual stimulation is examined in a passage which can stand as a concluding remark on the privilege of being a reader of such stimulating novels as this one:
I read for hours and felt as if I have become a being of pure potential, a body transformed into an enchanted space of infinite expansion .. I found refuge in the cadances of whichever mind I was borrowing for the duration, immersed in sentences I couldn’t have written or imagined
December 29, 2019
A Christmas present I couldn't resist reading immediately. Siri Hustvedt is one of my favourite writers, and her novels don't come along very often.
Appropriately for a book so largely about memory, this one often blurs the lines between fact and fiction - the heroine S.H. shares many biographical similarities with Hustvedt but there are some obvious differences, notably the physicist husband. This gives Hustvedt the space to talk about very personal subject matter while adopting a fictional cloak to protect those around her.
The foreground story of a young woman finding her feet in New York takes some time to rise above the humdrum, but it becomes compulsive halfway through when S.H. is rescued from a sexual assault by the neighbour whose strange utterances she has been eavesdropping on and her friends, who turn out to be modern day witches.
As always Hustvedt is full of interesting ideas and observations. The older woman's narrative is interspersed with diary entries and excerpts from an attempted first novel, which attempts to subvert the Holmes-Watson relationship. There is also plenty of comedy.
All in all this is a stimulating and entertaining read, which stands comparison with Hustvedt's best work. Highly recommended.
Appropriately for a book so largely about memory, this one often blurs the lines between fact and fiction - the heroine S.H. shares many biographical similarities with Hustvedt but there are some obvious differences, notably the physicist husband. This gives Hustvedt the space to talk about very personal subject matter while adopting a fictional cloak to protect those around her.
The foreground story of a young woman finding her feet in New York takes some time to rise above the humdrum, but it becomes compulsive halfway through when S.H. is rescued from a sexual assault by the neighbour whose strange utterances she has been eavesdropping on and her friends, who turn out to be modern day witches.
As always Hustvedt is full of interesting ideas and observations. The older woman's narrative is interspersed with diary entries and excerpts from an attempted first novel, which attempts to subvert the Holmes-Watson relationship. There is also plenty of comedy.
All in all this is a stimulating and entertaining read, which stands comparison with Hustvedt's best work. Highly recommended.
Read
July 29, 2021Quite a fun novel, with illustrations by the author.
The idea is that the narrator S.H - who is not the author Siri Hustvedt, and who is not to be confused with S.H. as in Sherlock Holmes - revisits in her 60s the diary of a year that she spent in her 20s in New York attempting to write a novel - which is something of a parody of detective fiction and features S.H. as in Sherlock Holmes regularly - before beginning a Post graduate course at Columbia University. The novel consists of three layers of text each indicated with a separate font - the commentary of the older woman, those diary entries, and fragments of the novel of the younger woman.
The initials suggest from the first the kinds of games that Kafka plays in some of his writing of both distance and identification with the central character , during her year in New York the young woman gets a job as an assistant, typist and ghostwriter to a wealthy woman who wants her memoirs written allowing the fictional younger woman to comment that ' all autobiography is fiction', which struck me as being like that Cretan saying that all Cretans are liars.
There is further playing with ideas of identity, once S.H acquires friends, they take to calling her Minnesota because that is where she comes from and possibly because it is shorter than S.H., as the novel progresses she develops another character Introspective Detective or I.D. who works away in the background puzzling out various mysteries. When writing her diary she frequently addresses it as Page . One person thus becomes a crowd: Page, I.D, Minnesota, S.H., she has many roles: friend, daughter, sister, wife, mother, writer, student, employee, neighbour, and apparently not enough names for each role.
There may well be a subgenre of novels or memoirs featuring young people coming to New York from rural areas or small towns, of such books I know none, and so I can't comment, but being supremely educated, the general idea did remind me of 'the town mouse and the country mouse', S.H is not quite so naive on the page, but coming from Minnesota she does misread situations and persons when maybe a city slicker wouldn't?
Equally that relates to the role played by The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Don Quixote and The Female Quixote all of which are mentioned both by name and indirectly and all share themes of misreading situations and people, and madness. This is a novel set in the era after the asylums have been closed down and their inhabitants released on to the streets, in Britain this policy was unironicaly 'called care in the community', what it was called in New York I don't know but the situation seems similar - vulnerable people with complex needs left to moulder on their own. Madness in this novel seems to be a reasonable response to imbalances of power and inequality between men and women. The narrator herself is troubled by an incident in her childhood the memory of which causes her to boil with rage when she sees men putting down women , rather like the incredible Hulk but quoting Wittgenstein in German rather than turning green . After a violent incident a friend gives her a knife and S.H. imagines herself like Errol Flynn slashing her way out of all difficult situations, the reader though imagines Don Quixote, while Errol Flynn is an interesting choice of idol to protect women given that he wasn't the kind of man that it was safe to leave your daughter with, but maybe I mentioned naivety already - unsurprisingly the presence of Donald Trump, and whatever else can be said about him the "fictional character of Donald trump, successful businessman" as Tim Synder puts it in the road to unfreedom is a gift to anyone who needs an archetype of toxic masculinity, lies heavily on parts of the book.
During the book, the older S.H is confronted by her her own inability to remember all the things that she recorded in her diary and this is paralleled by her mother's fading memory. Writing is fiction both because of the fallibility of memory, our inability to correctly understand ourselves or what is going on around us, and our desire to tell a good story - which for S.H's wealthy employer means mentioning Dior more frequently.
It is a cat book - first it licks you, then it bites you, but not so hard.
The idea is that the narrator S.H - who is not the author Siri Hustvedt, and who is not to be confused with S.H. as in Sherlock Holmes - revisits in her 60s the diary of a year that she spent in her 20s in New York attempting to write a novel - which is something of a parody of detective fiction and features S.H. as in Sherlock Holmes regularly - before beginning a Post graduate course at Columbia University. The novel consists of three layers of text each indicated with a separate font - the commentary of the older woman, those diary entries, and fragments of the novel of the younger woman.
The initials suggest from the first the kinds of games that Kafka plays in some of his writing of both distance and identification with the central character , during her year in New York the young woman gets a job as an assistant, typist and ghostwriter to a wealthy woman who wants her memoirs written allowing the fictional younger woman to comment that ' all autobiography is fiction', which struck me as being like that Cretan saying that all Cretans are liars.
There is further playing with ideas of identity, once S.H acquires friends, they take to calling her Minnesota because that is where she comes from and possibly because it is shorter than S.H., as the novel progresses she develops another character Introspective Detective or I.D. who works away in the background puzzling out various mysteries. When writing her diary she frequently addresses it as Page . One person thus becomes a crowd: Page, I.D, Minnesota, S.H., she has many roles: friend, daughter, sister, wife, mother, writer, student, employee, neighbour, and apparently not enough names for each role.
There may well be a subgenre of novels or memoirs featuring young people coming to New York from rural areas or small towns, of such books I know none, and so I can't comment, but being supremely educated, the general idea did remind me of 'the town mouse and the country mouse', S.H is not quite so naive on the page, but coming from Minnesota she does misread situations and persons when maybe a city slicker wouldn't?
Equally that relates to the role played by The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Don Quixote and The Female Quixote all of which are mentioned both by name and indirectly and all share themes of misreading situations and people, and madness. This is a novel set in the era after the asylums have been closed down and their inhabitants released on to the streets, in Britain this policy was unironicaly 'called care in the community', what it was called in New York I don't know but the situation seems similar - vulnerable people with complex needs left to moulder on their own. Madness in this novel seems to be a reasonable response to imbalances of power and inequality between men and women. The narrator herself is troubled by an incident in her childhood the memory of which causes her to boil with rage when she sees men putting down women , rather like the incredible Hulk but quoting Wittgenstein in German rather than turning green . After a violent incident a friend gives her a knife and S.H. imagines herself like Errol Flynn slashing her way out of all difficult situations, the reader though imagines Don Quixote, while Errol Flynn is an interesting choice of idol to protect women given that he wasn't the kind of man that it was safe to leave your daughter with, but maybe I mentioned naivety already - unsurprisingly the presence of Donald Trump, and whatever else can be said about him the "fictional character of Donald trump, successful businessman" as Tim Synder puts it in the road to unfreedom is a gift to anyone who needs an archetype of toxic masculinity, lies heavily on parts of the book.
During the book, the older S.H is confronted by her her own inability to remember all the things that she recorded in her diary and this is paralleled by her mother's fading memory. Writing is fiction both because of the fallibility of memory, our inability to correctly understand ourselves or what is going on around us, and our desire to tell a good story - which for S.H's wealthy employer means mentioning Dior more frequently.
It is a cat book - first it licks you, then it bites you, but not so hard.
July 25, 2021
“Maybe you and the others are writing her back into the story,” says the Introspective Detective to S.H., the book’s narrator (who is absolutely not the author of this book and, in arguably superficial ways, is the author of this book). With that sentence, I.D. (initials are important) articulated one of my thoughts as I'd been reminded of those "others" while reading, for example, Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet and my more recent read of A Ghost in the Throat. S.H.’s “her” is the artist and poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
The Baroness was written out of the story, and that, my friend, is murder. No blood. No broken bones, just an art crime, one that takes years and years to accomplish, a slow and terrible death—the Tears of Eros.
The book is also a mediation on and illustration of female anger; on why and how it’s suppressed; the repercussions because of its sublimation; and what happens when it’s finally (even partially) released.
The narrator says of her younger self that she always wanted to break the rules with her writing. As a young woman, she wasn’t able to finish her first novel; but as an “old woman,” she does so. And here it is: a novel-within-a-novel and arguably another novel within that one. A story becomes another story; nothing is wasted.
More than anything, this book had me thinking of and wanting to reread Hustvedt’s own first novel, The Blindfold.
The Baroness was written out of the story, and that, my friend, is murder. No blood. No broken bones, just an art crime, one that takes years and years to accomplish, a slow and terrible death—the Tears of Eros.
The book is also a mediation on and illustration of female anger; on why and how it’s suppressed; the repercussions because of its sublimation; and what happens when it’s finally (even partially) released.
The narrator says of her younger self that she always wanted to break the rules with her writing. As a young woman, she wasn’t able to finish her first novel; but as an “old woman,” she does so. And here it is: a novel-within-a-novel and arguably another novel within that one. A story becomes another story; nothing is wasted.
More than anything, this book had me thinking of and wanting to reread Hustvedt’s own first novel, The Blindfold.
February 6, 2022
This book is a gem on so many levels. This is my third novel by Siri Hustvedt, and I have enjoyed them all immensely. She is definitely a really strong writer, and quite versatile as well. This one is definitely the most complex and creative of the three, and for the first time she seems to be influenced by her partner, one Paul Auster. This is a novel of metafiction, the lead character being called S.H., as well as other nicknames such as Minnesota. She is a budding writer, attempting to write her first novel after having moved to New York City in 1978 from a small town in Minnesota. She meets a group of people with whom she forms the "gang of 5" and becomes totally obsessed with her neighbor, a woman named Lucy. S.H. gets a stethoscope sent by her father who is a doctor so that she can listen better through the walls of the rantings of Lucy. This eventually leads to a meeting with Lucy and others who have formed a coven of witches. S.H. also has an awful encounter with a man that she meets, and much of the novel is her coming to terms with this encounter.
The narrative is somewhat scattered here, this being as much a polemic on the usurping of power by men over women as it is a novel that tells a story. One of the characters mentioned throughout is "The Baroness" a real life poet and artist who apparently was possibly responsible for the urinal sculpture that has been attributed to Marcel Duchamp. This is essentially a springboard for the author to ruminate on how men have often overtaken women in pretty much all fields, taking credit for the accomplishments and inventions of the women.
This novel is extremely well-written by a seasoned, very intelligent novelist. Never pedantic or overly obvious, it effectively addresses the issue of how women can take back their power and stand on an equal footing with men. It is somewhat difficult to read at times, but it is always compelling and fascinating.
The narrative is somewhat scattered here, this being as much a polemic on the usurping of power by men over women as it is a novel that tells a story. One of the characters mentioned throughout is "The Baroness" a real life poet and artist who apparently was possibly responsible for the urinal sculpture that has been attributed to Marcel Duchamp. This is essentially a springboard for the author to ruminate on how men have often overtaken women in pretty much all fields, taking credit for the accomplishments and inventions of the women.
This novel is extremely well-written by a seasoned, very intelligent novelist. Never pedantic or overly obvious, it effectively addresses the issue of how women can take back their power and stand on an equal footing with men. It is somewhat difficult to read at times, but it is always compelling and fascinating.
January 19, 2023
3.5. Por momentos brillante, erudita. Aborda el tema del patriarcado en nuestra sociedad desde su propia experiencia y desde su erudición de forma magistral, a mí entender, sin caer en un feminismo militante.
Entiendo que este es el hilo conductor de las varias historias que constituyen este libro, donde se entremezclan pasado y futuro, experiencias personales que llevan a la autora a intentar comprender su presente como escritora y como persona.
El libro no me ha enganchado ( de ahí el 3.5 ), por momentos se hace muy pesado, difícil, cuando entra en el marasmo de las corrientes de vanguardia y filosóficas de la Nueva York de los 70-80, quizá porque mis conocimientos sobre ello son limitados.
Su estilo me ha parecido muy original, pero quería darle una oportunidad a la ganadora del Premio Princesa de Asturias de 2019.
Creo que debería haber empezado con alguno de sus primeros libros para comprender mejor su estilo.
En cualquier caso recomiendo su lectura.
Entiendo que este es el hilo conductor de las varias historias que constituyen este libro, donde se entremezclan pasado y futuro, experiencias personales que llevan a la autora a intentar comprender su presente como escritora y como persona.
El libro no me ha enganchado ( de ahí el 3.5 ), por momentos se hace muy pesado, difícil, cuando entra en el marasmo de las corrientes de vanguardia y filosóficas de la Nueva York de los 70-80, quizá porque mis conocimientos sobre ello son limitados.
Su estilo me ha parecido muy original, pero quería darle una oportunidad a la ganadora del Premio Princesa de Asturias de 2019.
Creo que debería haber empezado con alguno de sus primeros libros para comprender mejor su estilo.
En cualquier caso recomiendo su lectura.
June 11, 2021
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 such a book. In essence, she describes the experiences of a 23-year-old girl S.H., in 1978 moving to New York from the Midwest (Minnesota) to write a novel. The autobiographical slant immediately is clear, but Hustvedt in interviews has clarified that not everything is based on her own experiences, although a large part is. Inevitably, 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 experience.
Sounds familiar, and indeed, Hustvedt is not 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 that neighbor is a part, and a terrifyingly 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, 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 (1978-9) 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 Hustvedt's best book, but the thorough, thoughtful way in which she writes continues to charm me.
Siri Hustvedt has made us used to very thoughtful, beautifully composed novels and essays, and this surely once again is such a book. In essence, she describes the experiences of a 23-year-old girl S.H., in 1978 moving to New York from the Midwest (Minnesota) to write a novel. The autobiographical slant immediately is clear, but Hustvedt in interviews has clarified that not everything is based on her own experiences, although a large part is. Inevitably, 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 experience.
Sounds familiar, and indeed, Hustvedt is not 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 that neighbor is a part, and a terrifyingly 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, 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 (1978-9) 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 Hustvedt's best book, but the thorough, thoughtful way in which she writes continues to charm me.
April 18, 2019
If I had started reading the printed book rather than listening to the audiobook, I probably would have stopped after a hundred pages. I liked Siri Hustvedt's sophisticated language and vast knowledge, but the story of her younger alter ego did not captivate me beyond the somewhat voyeuristic insight into the life of a young provincial woman in New York. What made me persevere was Iris Berben's voice and the curiosity into what was behind the strange behaviour of S.H.'s neighbour Lucy. So maybe, the story was not that bad after all?
May 30, 2019
«Cuanto más lee uno, más promiscuo es el viaje de un libro a otro».
🥀
Leer a Siri Hustvedt es como ir a visitar una exposición: hay que entrar en ella con actitud receptiva y con tiempo para dedicarle. Una vez dentro, comprobarás que hay salas por las que sólo paseas, echas un vistazo, «hueles el arte», anotas un nombre por aquí, una pintura por allá, avanzas rápido; de repente, te detienes. Algo te ha llamado la atención. Observas ese cuadro, desde un ángulo, desde el otro, te fascina e intentas poner palabras a lo que sientes ante él. Avanzas, regresas a verlo, y luego con otro, y así hasta el final. Y, cuando sales, te das cuenta de que no eres la misma que cuando entraste en ella.
🥀
Hustvedt ha escrito una obra deslumbrante e intensa en la que ahonda en la frágil línea que separa memoria e imaginación. ¿Cómo nos recordamos a nosotras mismas de jóvenes? Esa imagen que tenemos, ¿es real o la hemos creado después? ¿Qué entendemos por «real»?
🥀
En esta obra, Hustvedt relaciona arte, literatura, filosofía, escritura, memoria y todos los tiempos: presente, pasado y futuro, en un ejercicio hipnótico enriquecedor y profundamente feminista.
🥀
No soy objetiva. S.H. me apasiona y, en otra vida, me encantaría escribir como ella. Así que sólo puedo decir una cosa: si algún día tienen tiempo y curiosidad, cojan este libro, hojéenlo, abran su mente y déjense llevar por su ritmo narrativo. Ojalá tengan una #felizlectura y concluyan también que, casi siempre, «una historia se convierte en otra».
#SiriHustvedt #Recuerdosdefuturo #leoautorastodoelaño #misautorasreferentes #librosmuyespeciales #enmitop
🥀
Leer a Siri Hustvedt es como ir a visitar una exposición: hay que entrar en ella con actitud receptiva y con tiempo para dedicarle. Una vez dentro, comprobarás que hay salas por las que sólo paseas, echas un vistazo, «hueles el arte», anotas un nombre por aquí, una pintura por allá, avanzas rápido; de repente, te detienes. Algo te ha llamado la atención. Observas ese cuadro, desde un ángulo, desde el otro, te fascina e intentas poner palabras a lo que sientes ante él. Avanzas, regresas a verlo, y luego con otro, y así hasta el final. Y, cuando sales, te das cuenta de que no eres la misma que cuando entraste en ella.
🥀
Hustvedt ha escrito una obra deslumbrante e intensa en la que ahonda en la frágil línea que separa memoria e imaginación. ¿Cómo nos recordamos a nosotras mismas de jóvenes? Esa imagen que tenemos, ¿es real o la hemos creado después? ¿Qué entendemos por «real»?
🥀
En esta obra, Hustvedt relaciona arte, literatura, filosofía, escritura, memoria y todos los tiempos: presente, pasado y futuro, en un ejercicio hipnótico enriquecedor y profundamente feminista.
🥀
No soy objetiva. S.H. me apasiona y, en otra vida, me encantaría escribir como ella. Así que sólo puedo decir una cosa: si algún día tienen tiempo y curiosidad, cojan este libro, hojéenlo, abran su mente y déjense llevar por su ritmo narrativo. Ojalá tengan una #felizlectura y concluyan también que, casi siempre, «una historia se convierte en otra».
#SiriHustvedt #Recuerdosdefuturo #leoautorastodoelaño #misautorasreferentes #librosmuyespeciales #enmitop
September 8, 2019
This is the fourth Siri Hustvedt novel I have read. It sounds hyperbolic but I pretty much worship this author for her intelligence and her well formed feminist views. My top two favorites are What I Loved and The Blazing World. I think Memories of the Future is her most tricky and complex novel yet and don't expect everyone to like it. In fact, possibly many readers I know would not like it at all.
What she has done is created a fictional memoir. In the process she examines memory, the female in the arts, a #MeToo incident, and the power of imagination, anger and rebellion to lead a woman to freedom despite all.
Since I am trying, and mostly failing, to write an account of my own life, I found gems in Hustvedt's novel as to how it can be done. I have thought of taking a class in memoir writing but have a horror of someone else telling me how to do it before I have made all my own mistakes first.
I have been reading through a self-created syllabus of actual memoirs and autobiographies. Each time I read one I am given illuminations. Probably not the most efficient way to go about getting the project done but I learn the most about writing by reading.
Here in Siri Hustvedt's ficitonal memoir is another clue: writing memoir is a dialogue among one's various selves over the decades. I was beginning to realize that on my own but I got a brilliant example of how to do it.
What she has done is created a fictional memoir. In the process she examines memory, the female in the arts, a #MeToo incident, and the power of imagination, anger and rebellion to lead a woman to freedom despite all.
Since I am trying, and mostly failing, to write an account of my own life, I found gems in Hustvedt's novel as to how it can be done. I have thought of taking a class in memoir writing but have a horror of someone else telling me how to do it before I have made all my own mistakes first.
I have been reading through a self-created syllabus of actual memoirs and autobiographies. Each time I read one I am given illuminations. Probably not the most efficient way to go about getting the project done but I learn the most about writing by reading.
Here in Siri Hustvedt's ficitonal memoir is another clue: writing memoir is a dialogue among one's various selves over the decades. I was beginning to realize that on my own but I got a brilliant example of how to do it.
September 4, 2019
A perfect set up. So how could I be disappointed in one of my favorite authors?
Hustvedt provides us a writer in 2017 coming upon her notebooks, journals, and novel from 1978-79, the year she left the plains of Minnesota to live in New York. How phenomenal to be able to read about herself through that expanse of time. Watching that incredibly well read young woman entering the big city in order to write a detective novel about two youngsters playing Sherlock Holmes where there is always an answer. This is the main theme not just of the 17 y/o’s novel but she herself so well versed in the cascading volumes of literature, the sciences, philosophy, poetry. Reading is life. It is a comfort for the wounded, the frightened and scared.
This theme, while not time-worn is often written about here in GR. But no fears Siri. You have that writers magic that helped you compose novels that soared. Here your imagination flows with a next door neighbor suffering from a Psychotic illness. A coven of witches. A heroin addict. A….a…It does expand but it’s okay Siri, you have made it clear that the narrator has so much in common with you that whether this is fiction or autobiography is blurred. I am willing to believe these things happened to you during your younger journey. What they all add is that they have different beliefs in how life is to be approached and will unfold. She is introduced to them like a smorgasbord. Fortunately she does have her group of friends for some stability. Fortunately I kept the paper that slipped out of the book and dropped to the floor; a list of characters. This was especially helpful since the characters were so thin and static yet so bountiful. On the other side I found what looked like a map legend. But so far Siri you’ve got it. Your elegiac prose, your erudition still keeps me entranced, as always.
So now the older Siri…I mean narrator, is riffling through her younger journals, inviting us to read over her shoulder at the first person entries in the journal, log, her novel in progress, interwoven with the grown narrators memories. We see many different things from many different people through time and space. Ah, this is what that map legend thing was all about and all its intertwining, bisecting, multicolored lines. It only made me dyspeptic and I didn’t even know what dyspeptic was. I had to google it. Also it tried to tie together the different themes; what is knowledge, truth, time passing, identity, reality or realities, the historic discrimination against women by white males.
I decided on an easier way to approach the book Siri since it was obvious that I was lagging. So, I set up a bulletin board where I could tack up pictures and ideas, as a police detective trying to solve a crime. This way I could move things around, connect them and reconnect them.
In the end Siri, I don’t even know how to say this, but there is just too much. At least half of my precious papers fell from the bulletin board or possibly leaped in a swan like suicide. It felt like your finding of post modern writing in this book was convoluted. At some point, and I know you could not have meant it, it seemed that the chicanery of style out-trum…ed the depth of character and story.
What did I mean by, you couldn’t have meant it? Here’s what I think. You, as I, are in your latter stage of life as we turn 70. Will you be able to write another novel? Will I be able to read another? Who knows? As you say in this book there is a horizon line in sight. Therefore I believe this book took a decidedly turn into the advantages and disadvantages of autobiography. You want to tell your life. You want to see it and understand it. The potential of any autobiographical work is the lure to say too much, include too much, to create havoc though so well intentioned. I question if this would have happened if you wrote this book as straight autobiography. Mixing in from your pallet your fictional skills lofted the book beyond not the borders of writing but of understanding.
In the end it is so difficult to capture time, space, in ones hand. Grasp it for a precious moment. It is constantly moving, inventing and reinventing. Even looking back it is marred by faulty memory and our desperate need to maneuver the past so that it makes sense; so that our patchwork identities stand up to the necessary threaded illusions we count on. Wait a second. I get it. No, I mean I got it all along. It was right there. Kind of obvious. You sneaky devil Siri. This is what it was about all the time; the different planes and angles of post-post-modern writing, the multitude of characters, the swarm of themes. I knew it; I mean it was the only way it could be told. You built the entire edifice, this piece of architecture to portray The Theme, to explicate it in its full form. That Siri is absolutely remarkable, closing in on the impossible. Here. Please. Take the three stars I was going to give you and the two I was hiding deep in my pocket. As a matter of fact before you get to your car take all of them, as many as you need. Yes, I will get rid of the bulletin board and pins.
I was going 5 stars all along you just didn’t see the two buried in my pocket.
Hustvedt provides us a writer in 2017 coming upon her notebooks, journals, and novel from 1978-79, the year she left the plains of Minnesota to live in New York. How phenomenal to be able to read about herself through that expanse of time. Watching that incredibly well read young woman entering the big city in order to write a detective novel about two youngsters playing Sherlock Holmes where there is always an answer. This is the main theme not just of the 17 y/o’s novel but she herself so well versed in the cascading volumes of literature, the sciences, philosophy, poetry. Reading is life. It is a comfort for the wounded, the frightened and scared.
This theme, while not time-worn is often written about here in GR. But no fears Siri. You have that writers magic that helped you compose novels that soared. Here your imagination flows with a next door neighbor suffering from a Psychotic illness. A coven of witches. A heroin addict. A….a…It does expand but it’s okay Siri, you have made it clear that the narrator has so much in common with you that whether this is fiction or autobiography is blurred. I am willing to believe these things happened to you during your younger journey. What they all add is that they have different beliefs in how life is to be approached and will unfold. She is introduced to them like a smorgasbord. Fortunately she does have her group of friends for some stability. Fortunately I kept the paper that slipped out of the book and dropped to the floor; a list of characters. This was especially helpful since the characters were so thin and static yet so bountiful. On the other side I found what looked like a map legend. But so far Siri you’ve got it. Your elegiac prose, your erudition still keeps me entranced, as always.
So now the older Siri…I mean narrator, is riffling through her younger journals, inviting us to read over her shoulder at the first person entries in the journal, log, her novel in progress, interwoven with the grown narrators memories. We see many different things from many different people through time and space. Ah, this is what that map legend thing was all about and all its intertwining, bisecting, multicolored lines. It only made me dyspeptic and I didn’t even know what dyspeptic was. I had to google it. Also it tried to tie together the different themes; what is knowledge, truth, time passing, identity, reality or realities, the historic discrimination against women by white males.
I decided on an easier way to approach the book Siri since it was obvious that I was lagging. So, I set up a bulletin board where I could tack up pictures and ideas, as a police detective trying to solve a crime. This way I could move things around, connect them and reconnect them.
In the end Siri, I don’t even know how to say this, but there is just too much. At least half of my precious papers fell from the bulletin board or possibly leaped in a swan like suicide. It felt like your finding of post modern writing in this book was convoluted. At some point, and I know you could not have meant it, it seemed that the chicanery of style out-trum…ed the depth of character and story.
What did I mean by, you couldn’t have meant it? Here’s what I think. You, as I, are in your latter stage of life as we turn 70. Will you be able to write another novel? Will I be able to read another? Who knows? As you say in this book there is a horizon line in sight. Therefore I believe this book took a decidedly turn into the advantages and disadvantages of autobiography. You want to tell your life. You want to see it and understand it. The potential of any autobiographical work is the lure to say too much, include too much, to create havoc though so well intentioned. I question if this would have happened if you wrote this book as straight autobiography. Mixing in from your pallet your fictional skills lofted the book beyond not the borders of writing but of understanding.
In the end it is so difficult to capture time, space, in ones hand. Grasp it for a precious moment. It is constantly moving, inventing and reinventing. Even looking back it is marred by faulty memory and our desperate need to maneuver the past so that it makes sense; so that our patchwork identities stand up to the necessary threaded illusions we count on. Wait a second. I get it. No, I mean I got it all along. It was right there. Kind of obvious. You sneaky devil Siri. This is what it was about all the time; the different planes and angles of post-post-modern writing, the multitude of characters, the swarm of themes. I knew it; I mean it was the only way it could be told. You built the entire edifice, this piece of architecture to portray The Theme, to explicate it in its full form. That Siri is absolutely remarkable, closing in on the impossible. Here. Please. Take the three stars I was going to give you and the two I was hiding deep in my pocket. As a matter of fact before you get to your car take all of them, as many as you need. Yes, I will get rid of the bulletin board and pins.
I was going 5 stars all along you just didn’t see the two buried in my pocket.
May 9, 2019
I have to give it to Siri Hustvedt. She packs a lot into this book. It’s my first Hustvedt experience; I was expecting deep thinking, and complicated cerebral writing. That’s exactly what she delivers. It’s very good indeed for the most part and Hustvedt’s own reflection on life as she wraps up the book could be applied to the reading experience:
“ the whole is other than the sum of its parts”(295) taken from psychologist,Kurt Koffka .
References to great writers and thinkers occur throughout the book and it can be intimidating at times. Siri Hustvedt is a self declared searcher out of knowledge from a wide range of sources.
I’ve read three Paul Auster novels and there’s no getting away from the fact that there are significant parallels in their story telling styles. Lots of autobiographical detail, a deep interest in time shifts, forwards and backwards. (Karl Popper world 3 is referenced.)Both S.H. and P.A. appear as themselves in their novels; metaphysical playfulness is de rigeur.
Memories of the Future clearly divides into separate sections. The overlap isn’t always obvious, and this is not a book for those looking for linear progression.
1. S.H. as her self in 1978 and in 2017. This is a Brooklyn, New York, novel.
S.H. writes convincingly, chillingly, compellingly about the moment of being attacked, and the consequent effects. It’s uncomfortable reading and written in a way that combines lasting hurt and fierce determination to fight back. Great writing.
Men in general; lovers, casual acquaintances, come out badly.
2. An imagined detective story featuring Ian Feathers and his accomplice Isadora Simon. The story itself is a vehicle for the four “Dora” daughters and two professors that make up the Simon family. What a superb group they make; Chaucer specialists “thy stubbel goos”(46) and much much more.
3. A feminist appraisal of this male world S.H. inhabits.
“the world loves powerful men and hates powerful women” (241/252)
The central character that personified both the opportunity for a woman to strike out regardless of social convention, and also the injustice prevailing in the male orientated world is Baroness Elsa Von Freytag - Loringhoven (Elsa Hildegard Plotz).
The baroness is the subject of S.H.’s own drawings and is featured on the dust sleeve. (intriguingly a different version for the USA and British publications).
The baroness and her legacy supporters have ruffled a few feathers (and continue to do so). S.H. In her end book acknowledgements speaks directly about Marcel Duchamp and the controversy about the correct provenance for Fountain. A look on Wikipedia indicates that this still irritates a lot of people on both sides of the discussion.
4. A study of friendship groups. Two of them, both central to S.H., intriguingly different. One conventional, enviable, high achieving. Whitney Tilt; the world of the Mudd Club, CBGBs, Studio 54. The other group a reclusive, socially awkward mixture. Centred around Lucy Brite, this coven of witches seek out “the other side of things”
“ the magic happens between and among us”(280)
“You forget Madame, that we are the masters- go by our rules” (304)
The intellectual put down of the intellectual bully Martin Blume, is a highlight of the book.
“In my world Wittgenstein is still a knife. In fact my library is chock full of verbal weaponry” (306)
This is a book that I finally came to appreciate fully when I sat down to write a review. I never really got a reading flow going (the reach page seventy bounty), but reflecting on what I had read I admire Siri Hustvedt’ s writing, and her ambition, greatly.
“ the whole is other than the sum of its parts”(295) taken from psychologist,Kurt Koffka .
References to great writers and thinkers occur throughout the book and it can be intimidating at times. Siri Hustvedt is a self declared searcher out of knowledge from a wide range of sources.
I’ve read three Paul Auster novels and there’s no getting away from the fact that there are significant parallels in their story telling styles. Lots of autobiographical detail, a deep interest in time shifts, forwards and backwards. (Karl Popper world 3 is referenced.)Both S.H. and P.A. appear as themselves in their novels; metaphysical playfulness is de rigeur.
Memories of the Future clearly divides into separate sections. The overlap isn’t always obvious, and this is not a book for those looking for linear progression.
1. S.H. as her self in 1978 and in 2017. This is a Brooklyn, New York, novel.
S.H. writes convincingly, chillingly, compellingly about the moment of being attacked, and the consequent effects. It’s uncomfortable reading and written in a way that combines lasting hurt and fierce determination to fight back. Great writing.
Men in general; lovers, casual acquaintances, come out badly.
2. An imagined detective story featuring Ian Feathers and his accomplice Isadora Simon. The story itself is a vehicle for the four “Dora” daughters and two professors that make up the Simon family. What a superb group they make; Chaucer specialists “thy stubbel goos”(46) and much much more.
3. A feminist appraisal of this male world S.H. inhabits.
“the world loves powerful men and hates powerful women” (241/252)
The central character that personified both the opportunity for a woman to strike out regardless of social convention, and also the injustice prevailing in the male orientated world is Baroness Elsa Von Freytag - Loringhoven (Elsa Hildegard Plotz).
The baroness is the subject of S.H.’s own drawings and is featured on the dust sleeve. (intriguingly a different version for the USA and British publications).
The baroness and her legacy supporters have ruffled a few feathers (and continue to do so). S.H. In her end book acknowledgements speaks directly about Marcel Duchamp and the controversy about the correct provenance for Fountain. A look on Wikipedia indicates that this still irritates a lot of people on both sides of the discussion.
4. A study of friendship groups. Two of them, both central to S.H., intriguingly different. One conventional, enviable, high achieving. Whitney Tilt; the world of the Mudd Club, CBGBs, Studio 54. The other group a reclusive, socially awkward mixture. Centred around Lucy Brite, this coven of witches seek out “the other side of things”
“ the magic happens between and among us”(280)
“You forget Madame, that we are the masters- go by our rules” (304)
The intellectual put down of the intellectual bully Martin Blume, is a highlight of the book.
“In my world Wittgenstein is still a knife. In fact my library is chock full of verbal weaponry” (306)
This is a book that I finally came to appreciate fully when I sat down to write a review. I never really got a reading flow going (the reach page seventy bounty), but reflecting on what I had read I admire Siri Hustvedt’ s writing, and her ambition, greatly.
October 23, 2021
Tak długo czekałam na tę powieść, że zaczęłam się obawiać moich wybujałych oczekiwań. Ale o matko i córko, jak ja się na niej NIE ZAWIODŁAM ! To moja ukochana książka Siri - doskonałość!
„I w tej konkretnej książce, książce, którą czytacie teraz, młoda osoba i stara żyją obok siebie w niepewnych prawdach pamięci”.
Narratorką jest uznana pisarka o inicjałach S.H. (tak, znowu narratorką w powieści Hustvedt jest piasarka ♥️). Jest po sześćdziesiątce i sprząta mieszkanie swojej matki. Znajduje w nim swoje zapiski sprzed prawie czterdziestu lat i zaczyna je czytać.
O tym jak jako aspirująca literatka przeprowadziła się do Nowego Jorku i w swoim mieszkaniu podsłuchuje sąsiadkę zza ściany, która co wieczór prowadzi głośne monologi, zawodzi i wypowiada dziwne mantry. O tym jak pisze swoją pierwszą książkę, której fragmenty czytamy razem z narratorką. S.H. czytając o swojej przeszłości zastanawia się nad tym ile zapamiętujemy, ile w naszych wspomnieniach jest prawdy, a ile wyobraźni. Dlaczego zapamiętujemy osobę X pozornie nic nieznaczącą dla naszego życia, a w pamięci zatarli się inni napotkani ludzie? I to właśnie wspomnienia i współdziałająca z nimi wyobraźnia są głównymi motywami tej powiesci. „(…) wiem także, że noszę w sobie niezliczoną mnogość wspomnień, które chyba są nieprawdziwe, wspomnień przyozdobionych przeze mnie życzeniami”.
Ale pamięć to nie jedyny temat podejmowany przez Hustvedt. Znajdziecie tu też (jak zwykle u Siri) feminizm i to jak patriarchat przez lata umniejszał osiągnięcia kobiet czy nawet je zagarniał - przytoczona przez S.H. postać Baronowej, poetki i autorki rzeźby, której wykonanie przypisuje się innemu (męskiemu) artyście! Ach i to co książkoholicy lubią najbardziej - masa literackich odniesień!
Mogłabym pisać o niej jeszcze długo, o tym jak pięknie jest napisana, o tym jak jej nielinearna, rozproszona narracja potrafi wciągnąć czytelniczkę, mogłabym tu przytoczyć masę cytatów i wkleić moje wszystkie notatki z lektury. Ale po prostu ją przeczytajcie, a ja już planuje reread bo to książka do wielokrotnego czytania.
„I w tej konkretnej książce, książce, którą czytacie teraz, młoda osoba i stara żyją obok siebie w niepewnych prawdach pamięci”.
Narratorką jest uznana pisarka o inicjałach S.H. (tak, znowu narratorką w powieści Hustvedt jest piasarka ♥️). Jest po sześćdziesiątce i sprząta mieszkanie swojej matki. Znajduje w nim swoje zapiski sprzed prawie czterdziestu lat i zaczyna je czytać.
O tym jak jako aspirująca literatka przeprowadziła się do Nowego Jorku i w swoim mieszkaniu podsłuchuje sąsiadkę zza ściany, która co wieczór prowadzi głośne monologi, zawodzi i wypowiada dziwne mantry. O tym jak pisze swoją pierwszą książkę, której fragmenty czytamy razem z narratorką. S.H. czytając o swojej przeszłości zastanawia się nad tym ile zapamiętujemy, ile w naszych wspomnieniach jest prawdy, a ile wyobraźni. Dlaczego zapamiętujemy osobę X pozornie nic nieznaczącą dla naszego życia, a w pamięci zatarli się inni napotkani ludzie? I to właśnie wspomnienia i współdziałająca z nimi wyobraźnia są głównymi motywami tej powiesci. „(…) wiem także, że noszę w sobie niezliczoną mnogość wspomnień, które chyba są nieprawdziwe, wspomnień przyozdobionych przeze mnie życzeniami”.
Ale pamięć to nie jedyny temat podejmowany przez Hustvedt. Znajdziecie tu też (jak zwykle u Siri) feminizm i to jak patriarchat przez lata umniejszał osiągnięcia kobiet czy nawet je zagarniał - przytoczona przez S.H. postać Baronowej, poetki i autorki rzeźby, której wykonanie przypisuje się innemu (męskiemu) artyście! Ach i to co książkoholicy lubią najbardziej - masa literackich odniesień!
Mogłabym pisać o niej jeszcze długo, o tym jak pięknie jest napisana, o tym jak jej nielinearna, rozproszona narracja potrafi wciągnąć czytelniczkę, mogłabym tu przytoczyć masę cytatów i wkleić moje wszystkie notatki z lektury. Ale po prostu ją przeczytajcie, a ja już planuje reread bo to książka do wielokrotnego czytania.
May 2, 2021
Compré este libro de afán, el día de navidad, 12 días después de haber nacido mi primer hijo. Recuerdo que mi esposo se quedó en el carro con él mientras yo corría (a medias, cargando aún el dolor de la operación) a comprar en una librería los regalos de navidad. Le compré a mi suegra una novela de amor, a mi esposo un libro de Mafalda, a mi recién nacido una historia de un gorila y luego me quedé sin saber qué llevar para mí... Tenía afán por volver al carro, al niño, me dolía además caminar. Le dije al librero que me recomendara algo, lo que fuera. Sin conocerme demasiado, me pasó este libro y yo lo pagué.
Cuento esto porque al abrirlo, el día después de Navidad, luego de una noche de llantos y sin dormir, me abrumó lo diferente que era la historia a mi vida actual. Qué lejos estaba de mi misma esa yo que, como la protagonista, se fue alguna vez a otra ciudad a escribir. Me pesó comenzar a leerlo...
Pero qué bonito fue darle su tiempo, dejar que la autora conectara con paz todas las escritoras/personas que somos a medida que va pasando la vida, y cómo elegimos narrar esa vida cuando estamos ahí o cuando ya ha pasado, cómo afecta esta nuestra ficción.
Este es un libro extraño: un tercio novela, otro diario, otro reflexión. Pero se encariña uno con los personajes, los reales y los ficticios... Queda uno con ganas de sentirse de nuevo "Brutal y frío" una vez más.
Cuento esto porque al abrirlo, el día después de Navidad, luego de una noche de llantos y sin dormir, me abrumó lo diferente que era la historia a mi vida actual. Qué lejos estaba de mi misma esa yo que, como la protagonista, se fue alguna vez a otra ciudad a escribir. Me pesó comenzar a leerlo...
Pero qué bonito fue darle su tiempo, dejar que la autora conectara con paz todas las escritoras/personas que somos a medida que va pasando la vida, y cómo elegimos narrar esa vida cuando estamos ahí o cuando ya ha pasado, cómo afecta esta nuestra ficción.
Este es un libro extraño: un tercio novela, otro diario, otro reflexión. Pero se encariña uno con los personajes, los reales y los ficticios... Queda uno con ganas de sentirse de nuevo "Brutal y frío" una vez más.
March 31, 2019
4.5, rounded down
The only other Hustvedt I've read is her last novel, Booker-nommed The Blazing World, which I enjoyed tremendously and gave a 5 star rating. Although this also has much to offer (and ponder), I was not QUITE as enthralled, hence the 4.5, rounded down to 4. Perhaps in retrospect (memory... in the future?) I might up it to a full 5.
While Hustvedt's writing and references aren't always clear (to me, at least), I find many of her thoughts and expressions of such enchanting and insightful ... and though I sometimes labored to 'connect-the-dots', or even remember who some of the peripheral characters even were, it did more or less, coalesce in the end - to the extent the writer intended, that is.
There are actually four strands at work here, thankfully each with its own font, so as to differentiate them: the first section is an 'at present' (or, at least, set in 2017) overview of writer S.H. (obviously a stand-in for the author herself), narrating how she has come to look back on her first years as a budding author in NY in 1978, and how that connects to the woman she has become. The second strand is a narration of that year from the perspective of her 24 year old self. The third is selections from a notebook she kept during that year, while the fourth are excerpts from the rather innocuous mystery she is writing that may or may not stem from what is happening back then. This isn't as muddled as I am making it sound, and while reading it, the connections become clearer.
Regardless of my minor qualms, this was a refreshingly intelligent and thought-provoking read, one I wouldn't be surprised to see also garnering several award nominations, and perhaps a win or two.
The only other Hustvedt I've read is her last novel, Booker-nommed The Blazing World, which I enjoyed tremendously and gave a 5 star rating. Although this also has much to offer (and ponder), I was not QUITE as enthralled, hence the 4.5, rounded down to 4. Perhaps in retrospect (memory... in the future?) I might up it to a full 5.
While Hustvedt's writing and references aren't always clear (to me, at least), I find many of her thoughts and expressions of such enchanting and insightful ... and though I sometimes labored to 'connect-the-dots', or even remember who some of the peripheral characters even were, it did more or less, coalesce in the end - to the extent the writer intended, that is.
There are actually four strands at work here, thankfully each with its own font, so as to differentiate them: the first section is an 'at present' (or, at least, set in 2017) overview of writer S.H. (obviously a stand-in for the author herself), narrating how she has come to look back on her first years as a budding author in NY in 1978, and how that connects to the woman she has become. The second strand is a narration of that year from the perspective of her 24 year old self. The third is selections from a notebook she kept during that year, while the fourth are excerpts from the rather innocuous mystery she is writing that may or may not stem from what is happening back then. This isn't as muddled as I am making it sound, and while reading it, the connections become clearer.
Regardless of my minor qualms, this was a refreshingly intelligent and thought-provoking read, one I wouldn't be surprised to see also garnering several award nominations, and perhaps a win or two.
July 5, 2020
My Litsy post 5-days ago:
Now it's even worse. I wish I could capture just that, above. Instead I'm drifting into thinking about an author's self-awareness - awareness of what they are doing with their writing, and what they are not doing and can't do, and how they manage and acknowledge this. It's not new. Shakespeare shows it in his plays. But I've personally begun to see I really want this in my authors and Hustvedt here gives us a joyful contemporary master course on this, working on many layers.
This is the story of a failed novel - Hustvedt's first real attempt. The sort of preface here is that as Hustvedt was going through her mother's stuff, her mother's increased dementia requiring a move and downsizing, when she discovered a long lost and deeply missed journal from roughly the school year of 1978 and 1979. Hustvedt was 23 in 1978. She had just moved to New York City after growing up in a small-town in Minnesota. She was hungry to write and learn and experience New York City and she had a year before starting post-graduate classes in Columbia. Her novel, sitting in this journal, began as a play on Sherlock Holmes, and this author embracing the initials, SH, that they shared.
As she goes through this journal, she wonders about her younger self, she struggles to reacquaint herself with her, to remember who she was. She talks to her, criticizes her, berates her. The nostalgia of this lost vibrant world of a crime-ridden, hopping, AIDS-free, hyper-sexual New York City combined with this fascinated young woman, oozing with youthful intelligence, wafting down contemporary philosophy super charges and charms the background. Mind you there's a foreground too - her philosophical but also silly novel running away from her, and her ranting crying neighbor who she can hear through the paper thin walls of her tiny flat. The sleuth uses a stethoscope, a real medical one from her MD father, to improve her spying. She mixes with all types, some dangerous. When a friend calls her cold and beastly, she embraces the characterization as a personal goal. Later in the book she will have a moment where she tells us she felt "cold and beastly" and it was "wonderful" (the switchblade was out).
Hustvedt's first major success as an author was her novel, [What I Loved], which came in 2003 - 25 years after the failed novel in this journal. This is the underlying and unspoken tragedy in this book. Hustvedt, a very talented writer, was beaten down, and she blames the patriarchy, the men who disregarded her, who found her beautiful and wanted to impress or control her, but who also presumed she could not offer any serious contribution to intellectual life. She includes maybe the best fainting scene I've ever read as she rants and tears apart of Columbia professor. (Could it possibly have been true? Seems too perfect...and this is a novel, and it does play on the unreliability of memory.)
I certainly won't tell anyone this is a great novel, or tell anyone they must read this and will love it. It's actually a strange thing that still works. But, this is a terrific author doing terrific stuff and gives us window view into something that was really special, or at least I found it so. It's within that context I would recommend it.
-----------------------------------------------
34. Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt
reader: Katherine Fenton
published: 2019
format: 12:38 audible audiobook (318 pages in hardcover)
acquired: June 4
listened: Jun 4-22
rating: 4
locations: New York City
about the author born 1955 in Northfield, MN
Wish I could capture this. Playful and clever like Ali Smith, but more philosophy, Hustvedt is just really enjoyable to spend time with. Here she talks to her 23 yr old self alone in New York City in 1978, beautiful, intelligent, awash in poetry and philosophy, disregarded for her gender, writing a failed novel, flashing a switchblade. Somewhere I saw this described as a rage against the patriarchy. It‘s also fun. Really happy I finally read her.
Now it's even worse. I wish I could capture just that, above. Instead I'm drifting into thinking about an author's self-awareness - awareness of what they are doing with their writing, and what they are not doing and can't do, and how they manage and acknowledge this. It's not new. Shakespeare shows it in his plays. But I've personally begun to see I really want this in my authors and Hustvedt here gives us a joyful contemporary master course on this, working on many layers.
This is the story of a failed novel - Hustvedt's first real attempt. The sort of preface here is that as Hustvedt was going through her mother's stuff, her mother's increased dementia requiring a move and downsizing, when she discovered a long lost and deeply missed journal from roughly the school year of 1978 and 1979. Hustvedt was 23 in 1978. She had just moved to New York City after growing up in a small-town in Minnesota. She was hungry to write and learn and experience New York City and she had a year before starting post-graduate classes in Columbia. Her novel, sitting in this journal, began as a play on Sherlock Holmes, and this author embracing the initials, SH, that they shared.
As she goes through this journal, she wonders about her younger self, she struggles to reacquaint herself with her, to remember who she was. She talks to her, criticizes her, berates her. The nostalgia of this lost vibrant world of a crime-ridden, hopping, AIDS-free, hyper-sexual New York City combined with this fascinated young woman, oozing with youthful intelligence, wafting down contemporary philosophy super charges and charms the background. Mind you there's a foreground too - her philosophical but also silly novel running away from her, and her ranting crying neighbor who she can hear through the paper thin walls of her tiny flat. The sleuth uses a stethoscope, a real medical one from her MD father, to improve her spying. She mixes with all types, some dangerous. When a friend calls her cold and beastly, she embraces the characterization as a personal goal. Later in the book she will have a moment where she tells us she felt "cold and beastly" and it was "wonderful" (the switchblade was out).
Hustvedt's first major success as an author was her novel, [What I Loved], which came in 2003 - 25 years after the failed novel in this journal. This is the underlying and unspoken tragedy in this book. Hustvedt, a very talented writer, was beaten down, and she blames the patriarchy, the men who disregarded her, who found her beautiful and wanted to impress or control her, but who also presumed she could not offer any serious contribution to intellectual life. She includes maybe the best fainting scene I've ever read as she rants and tears apart of Columbia professor. (Could it possibly have been true? Seems too perfect...and this is a novel, and it does play on the unreliability of memory.)
I certainly won't tell anyone this is a great novel, or tell anyone they must read this and will love it. It's actually a strange thing that still works. But, this is a terrific author doing terrific stuff and gives us window view into something that was really special, or at least I found it so. It's within that context I would recommend it.
-----------------------------------------------
34. Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt
reader: Katherine Fenton
published: 2019
format: 12:38 audible audiobook (318 pages in hardcover)
acquired: June 4
listened: Jun 4-22
rating: 4
locations: New York City
about the author born 1955 in Northfield, MN
May 24, 2019
A pastiche of pretentiousness and self-indulgence.....
Ugh. Just ugh. I had to wait an entire day to write my reaction to this book because I needed to make sure I was as annoyed by it as I thought I was, not just irritable because of some ridiculously unseasonable hot temperatures.
I was.
If I could give it 1.5 stars I would. It's like the author dipped into first drafts of everything she'd ever written and threw bits and pieces of each onto the pages of a new document, along with a few political screeds, a bit about later-in-life female wisdom and empowerment, and some idiocy about witches. (Note: The witches were not idiots. The way she wrote about them?? Sigh.)
Now, credit to Siri Hustvedt, of course, for actually writing a book instead of just mouthing off online about one. And shame on me for continuing to read something I wasn't enjoying just because I wanted to see how in the holy hell she would tie everything together in the end. I am quite sure that there are loads of people out there who have enjoyed or will enjoy this book, and that they – unlike I – are quite the aficionados of Serious Literature. Peace be unto them.
Ugh. Just ugh. I had to wait an entire day to write my reaction to this book because I needed to make sure I was as annoyed by it as I thought I was, not just irritable because of some ridiculously unseasonable hot temperatures.
I was.
If I could give it 1.5 stars I would. It's like the author dipped into first drafts of everything she'd ever written and threw bits and pieces of each onto the pages of a new document, along with a few political screeds, a bit about later-in-life female wisdom and empowerment, and some idiocy about witches. (Note: The witches were not idiots. The way she wrote about them?? Sigh.)
Now, credit to Siri Hustvedt, of course, for actually writing a book instead of just mouthing off online about one. And shame on me for continuing to read something I wasn't enjoying just because I wanted to see how in the holy hell she would tie everything together in the end. I am quite sure that there are loads of people out there who have enjoyed or will enjoy this book, and that they – unlike I – are quite the aficionados of Serious Literature. Peace be unto them.
April 2, 2019
This gets a single star for the cover illustration. Nothing that comes after is worth a star.
Shelved as 'unfinished'
April 17, 2019I read the first 112 pages and then skimmed up to page 174. “I am writing not only to tell. I am writing to discover. … I have always believed that memory and the imagination are a single faculty.” S.H. moved from Minnesota to New York City in 1978. Young and idealistic, she deferred her studies for a year to write a neo-Dickensian novel starring a 14-year-old would-be detective. Like Ian Feathers, her protagonist, she fancies herself a Sherlock Holmes (also S.H.!) type, investigating her past through her memories and the written record – her diary from the time and her manuscript, which she’s found while moving her 92-year-old mother. Along with breaking into the literary scene, her obsession at the time was deciphering the weird ranting coming through the wall from her next-door neighbor, Lucy Brite. As clever a meditation as this is on identity and memory, at a certain point I found it a chore to pick up. I have no objection to autofiction, but I wanted more current wisdom than twentysomething folly, and what I’ve read about the later #MeToo theme suggests that it is unfortunately heavy-handed. I still plan to read the three Hustvedt novels I haven’t read yet, as well as her memoir; I’ll also dip into her essays and poetry. I think she’s an immense talent; this one just wasn’t for me.
Favorite lines:
“The past is fragile, as fragile as bones grown brittle with age, as fragile as ghosts seen in windows or the dreams that fall apart upon waking and leave nothing behind them but a feeling of unease or distress or, more rarely, a kind of eerie satisfaction.”
“We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward, too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable.”
Favorite lines:
“The past is fragile, as fragile as bones grown brittle with age, as fragile as ghosts seen in windows or the dreams that fall apart upon waking and leave nothing behind them but a feeling of unease or distress or, more rarely, a kind of eerie satisfaction.”
“We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward, too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable.”
January 27, 2019
“I have always believed that memory and the imagination are a single faculty”
Siri Hustvedt’s forthcoming Memories of the Future is an intellectual and emotional powerhouse. In the most engaging form of meta-narrative, Hustvedt acts as both narrator, interlocutor, and responder to her 23-year-old self. Reflecting upon a long-lost journal, Memories of the Future combines Hustvedt’s own journal entries, from her year spent in New York trying to write her first novel, with her current self. Along the way are rigorous philosophical contemplations regarding the fallibility of memory, the violent patriarchy that she has unconsciously based much of her work on, self-hood and identity, and so much more. What shines through is Hustvedt’s profound capability as a novelist, confirming herself as the writers’ writer. Funny, provocative, and simply remarkable. Too early to call a favourite of 2019? Who cares, this book is it.
Siri Hustvedt’s forthcoming Memories of the Future is an intellectual and emotional powerhouse. In the most engaging form of meta-narrative, Hustvedt acts as both narrator, interlocutor, and responder to her 23-year-old self. Reflecting upon a long-lost journal, Memories of the Future combines Hustvedt’s own journal entries, from her year spent in New York trying to write her first novel, with her current self. Along the way are rigorous philosophical contemplations regarding the fallibility of memory, the violent patriarchy that she has unconsciously based much of her work on, self-hood and identity, and so much more. What shines through is Hustvedt’s profound capability as a novelist, confirming herself as the writers’ writer. Funny, provocative, and simply remarkable. Too early to call a favourite of 2019? Who cares, this book is it.
January 19, 2021
A pick by my book club that I would likely not have finished if not for that motivation (and being able to find it on audio). This is a rambling type memoir of a young woman's first year in NYC. She moves to the city in 1978 a year before she is to start graduate school with the idea that she will take this year to write a novel. She moves into a dismal apartment with paper thin walls on the upper west side at about 109th and begins her new exciting living and writing life. Early on she begins to hear her neighbor through the walls in her apartment and slowly becomes very alarmed by what she over hears at various times.
It was an interesting premise and because I lived in NYC during these years as well and hoped to write a novel it should have really resonated with me. It did keep me reading at first but I soon found the story was told from so many varied points of view that it felt very disjointed. The author in 2017 finds her notebooks from those years so in one part of the story she is reflecting back on the events of that long ago year in her youth, then the story will switch to her 1978 self and the unfolding of events, then there is sections that are the novel she is writing in its original form and then there is background information for characters that the author learned later. This jumble of points of view made the first half of the book quite a challenge and it was very difficult to engage with the characters. I think I was almost 70% in before the book started to take off. This is a long time to wait and to slog through a story that seems to have little plot. I can imagine many readers would not persevere to get to the point.
I did feel I was more than well rewarded as the last 25% of the book was very good and tied so much together but boy was it hard to get to that point. I did overall feel that there were really some gems in the story and felt in the end that I was very glad to have gotten to the rewarding part of this manuscript but still do not know if I can recommend it.
Two different points really struck home for me. The first had to do with memory.
The fact that we live our lives in a linear time line, day to day, year to year--a horizontal progression but our memories are always vertical, we remember in the now and each time we bring back a memory we are in a different place in our lives and this effects the way we remember and what we remember, so a memory is never really stagnant but always is changed by our present even if only a little.
Also she talks about grief and how we go on when a horrible event occurs that rattles who we are. That the event is like an open a hole in our lives and that the only way to live is to admit that the hole exists and we may fall into it at times but the only way out and on is to slowly though time, distance ourselves from the hole and make a life .
Actually I found the last chapter of the book the best as the author openly reflects on what she went through and her present day reflections in 2017 and how that year influenced who she is and her writing. I'm still a little on the fence about the rest of my reading experience but in all I'm very glad to have finished is book, and I mean that in more ways than one.
It was an interesting premise and because I lived in NYC during these years as well and hoped to write a novel it should have really resonated with me. It did keep me reading at first but I soon found the story was told from so many varied points of view that it felt very disjointed. The author in 2017 finds her notebooks from those years so in one part of the story she is reflecting back on the events of that long ago year in her youth, then the story will switch to her 1978 self and the unfolding of events, then there is sections that are the novel she is writing in its original form and then there is background information for characters that the author learned later. This jumble of points of view made the first half of the book quite a challenge and it was very difficult to engage with the characters. I think I was almost 70% in before the book started to take off. This is a long time to wait and to slog through a story that seems to have little plot. I can imagine many readers would not persevere to get to the point.
I did feel I was more than well rewarded as the last 25% of the book was very good and tied so much together but boy was it hard to get to that point. I did overall feel that there were really some gems in the story and felt in the end that I was very glad to have gotten to the rewarding part of this manuscript but still do not know if I can recommend it.
Two different points really struck home for me. The first had to do with memory.
The fact that we live our lives in a linear time line, day to day, year to year--a horizontal progression but our memories are always vertical, we remember in the now and each time we bring back a memory we are in a different place in our lives and this effects the way we remember and what we remember, so a memory is never really stagnant but always is changed by our present even if only a little.
Also she talks about grief and how we go on when a horrible event occurs that rattles who we are. That the event is like an open a hole in our lives and that the only way to live is to admit that the hole exists and we may fall into it at times but the only way out and on is to slowly though time, distance ourselves from the hole and make a life .
Actually I found the last chapter of the book the best as the author openly reflects on what she went through and her present day reflections in 2017 and how that year influenced who she is and her writing. I'm still a little on the fence about the rest of my reading experience but in all I'm very glad to have finished is book, and I mean that in more ways than one.
February 5, 2022
Moje pierwsze spotkanie z twórczością Siri Hustvedt mogę zaliczyć do nad wyraz udanych. Zostałam całkowicie urzeczona. Hustvedt czaruje słowem! Zatapiając się w „Wspomnienia przyszłości” przenosiłam się do magicznej krainy, mimo, że akcja głównie osadzona jest w jak najbardziej realistycznie przedstawionym Nowym Jorku.
Proza Hustvedt uwodzi i hipnotyzuje, jest kobieca - ale pozytywnym tego słowa znaczeniu - subtelna i delikatna, oniryczna, pełna wrażliwości, ale kiedy trzeba to bohaterki autorki i nogą tupną i krzykną głośno i stanowczo się postawą. „Wspomnienia przyszłości” zręcznie i zgrabnie splatają ze sobą kilka na pierwszy rzut oka kompletnie różniących się od siebie wątków. Hustvest stworzyła intrygującą, enigmatyczną, niełatwą fabułę, którą umiejętnie doprawiła grozą i niejasnościach. Fikcja w bardzo oryginalny i nieoczywisty sposób miesza się tu z rzeczywistością i postaciami oraz zdarzeniami historycznymi. Głównym trzonem opowieści jest historia starszej pisarki (pojawia się tylko pod inicjałami S.H.), która porządkując mieszkanie po śmierci matki odkrywa swój pamiętnik z lat młodzieńczych, zaciekawiona zagłębia się w pokryte kurzem zapiski - i tu niczym gałęzie od pnia drzewa odchodzą kolejne pokręcone mniejsze historie. Poznajemy m.in. szaloną sąsiadkę, „wewnętrzną detektywkę”, a także będąca realnie żyjąca osobą intrygująca baronessę. Te liczne wątki są w rzeczywistosci przyczynkiem do rozważan o wspomnieniach, kondycji pamięci i jej stopniowym zacieraniu się, sile wyobraźni, miejscu kobiety w patriarchalnym społeczeństwie, a rownież i o sztuce! Powieść Hustvedt skrzy się nawiązaniami literackimi i kulturalnymi. Z tytułów wymienionych w powieści mogłaby powstać długa lista lektur.
Wspaniała to proza - przesiąknięta subtelnym feminizmem, bardzo kobieca i szalenie inteligentna.
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Proza Hustvedt uwodzi i hipnotyzuje, jest kobieca - ale pozytywnym tego słowa znaczeniu - subtelna i delikatna, oniryczna, pełna wrażliwości, ale kiedy trzeba to bohaterki autorki i nogą tupną i krzykną głośno i stanowczo się postawą. „Wspomnienia przyszłości” zręcznie i zgrabnie splatają ze sobą kilka na pierwszy rzut oka kompletnie różniących się od siebie wątków. Hustvest stworzyła intrygującą, enigmatyczną, niełatwą fabułę, którą umiejętnie doprawiła grozą i niejasnościach. Fikcja w bardzo oryginalny i nieoczywisty sposób miesza się tu z rzeczywistością i postaciami oraz zdarzeniami historycznymi. Głównym trzonem opowieści jest historia starszej pisarki (pojawia się tylko pod inicjałami S.H.), która porządkując mieszkanie po śmierci matki odkrywa swój pamiętnik z lat młodzieńczych, zaciekawiona zagłębia się w pokryte kurzem zapiski - i tu niczym gałęzie od pnia drzewa odchodzą kolejne pokręcone mniejsze historie. Poznajemy m.in. szaloną sąsiadkę, „wewnętrzną detektywkę”, a także będąca realnie żyjąca osobą intrygująca baronessę. Te liczne wątki są w rzeczywistosci przyczynkiem do rozważan o wspomnieniach, kondycji pamięci i jej stopniowym zacieraniu się, sile wyobraźni, miejscu kobiety w patriarchalnym społeczeństwie, a rownież i o sztuce! Powieść Hustvedt skrzy się nawiązaniami literackimi i kulturalnymi. Z tytułów wymienionych w powieści mogłaby powstać długa lista lektur.
Wspaniała to proza - przesiąknięta subtelnym feminizmem, bardzo kobieca i szalenie inteligentna.
April 1, 2019
Wildly imaginative and challenging, both personal and universal, this is the latest work by Siri Hustvedt writing at the top of her game. Her character (S.H.) comes across a journal kept during her first year in New York, and her 61-year-old self becomes reacquainted with her 22-year-old self. The reader, who is addressed now and again ("There is no story without a listener...) is shifted between the two time periods, seamlessly. Dubbed "Minnesota" after her home state, S.H. makes her way around New York of the late 1970's in all its grubby seediness shedding her naivete and gaining lifelong friends and experience.
As I sometimes do before adding to the dialogue, I skimmed random reviews of others in order not to be repetitive, and was amazed at the wild range of opinions. Ms. Hustvedt has mined her own life and come up with a work of true originality, and I find that most of my underlined passages concern her observations on memory and how the passage of time can warp it in its fragility ("We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward too, not only forward and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable." "Hindsight gives a shape to what is shapeless as you live it."). The weakest element for me was a third transcription of her inchoate novel she was working on back in 1978-79, but I understand its inclusion is to illustrate the way real life can influence an artist's creation.
As I sometimes do before adding to the dialogue, I skimmed random reviews of others in order not to be repetitive, and was amazed at the wild range of opinions. Ms. Hustvedt has mined her own life and come up with a work of true originality, and I find that most of my underlined passages concern her observations on memory and how the passage of time can warp it in its fragility ("We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward too, not only forward and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable." "Hindsight gives a shape to what is shapeless as you live it."). The weakest element for me was a third transcription of her inchoate novel she was working on back in 1978-79, but I understand its inclusion is to illustrate the way real life can influence an artist's creation.
August 17, 2019
this worked well for me right now - inspiring on many levels. the story of one year in new york (1978/79) when « the writer as a young woman » comes to nyc - the city she has dreamed of - to find the hero if her first novel.
she will not find what she imagined - but of course other stories, people, insight, many things. including, many years later - this novel.
there are different levels of the narration - present time, the « old writer » looking back, looking inside, remembering, reconstructing, understanding, putting things into perspective, commenting on them from her pov, even conversing with her younger self, whom she calles minnesota.
there is a notebook from then that she found at her old mothers house - and it containes a story - the story of lucy brite - the neighbour she listens to through the wall with a stethoscope. this story is interesting and complex, and i found these fragments the most interesting - but also enjoyed the comments of the older (present) writer on them and on what was happening. and there are also fragments of the novel she was trying to write at the time (a crime mystery...) - those i found less interesting per se - but working on that manuscript was part of what she was doing that year in nyc and in that context i liked it.
many flaws, sure - but i don’t think she cares so much about perfection - and there is grace and honesty and wisdom in it. for me it worked well, i enjoyed it - like talking to an inspiring friend.
she will not find what she imagined - but of course other stories, people, insight, many things. including, many years later - this novel.
there are different levels of the narration - present time, the « old writer » looking back, looking inside, remembering, reconstructing, understanding, putting things into perspective, commenting on them from her pov, even conversing with her younger self, whom she calles minnesota.
there is a notebook from then that she found at her old mothers house - and it containes a story - the story of lucy brite - the neighbour she listens to through the wall with a stethoscope. this story is interesting and complex, and i found these fragments the most interesting - but also enjoyed the comments of the older (present) writer on them and on what was happening. and there are also fragments of the novel she was trying to write at the time (a crime mystery...) - those i found less interesting per se - but working on that manuscript was part of what she was doing that year in nyc and in that context i liked it.
many flaws, sure - but i don’t think she cares so much about perfection - and there is grace and honesty and wisdom in it. for me it worked well, i enjoyed it - like talking to an inspiring friend.
August 12, 2020
Metafiction and feminism. So up my alley.
September 14, 2019
Mi primera incursión en el universo Hustvedt, y salgo con sensaciones encontradas. En primer lugar, hay que decir que no es una lectura fácil, pues requiere especial concentración. Por un lado, he ganado una gran escritora, poseedora de una narrativa prodigiosa, pero por otro, algo decepcionado con el interés de la historia en cuestión, bajo mi punto de vista, con demasiados altibajos. Por momentos parecía que iba cogiendo buen ritmo, y de pronto, caía en alguna parte que, siendo sincero, me aburría soberanamente, consiguiendo que desconectara por momentos. Todo arranca a finales de los 70 en Nueva York, cuando una joven Hustvedt llega a la ciudad en busca de los protagonistas de su próxima novela. La historia navega constantemente entre la realidad y la ficción. Me ha gustado especialmente la narrativa feminista de Hustvedt, dando en el clavo en muchas de sus reflexiones.
"Quería arder de inteligencia. Eso me da risa ahora. Los hombres pueden arder de inteligencia. A las mujeres no se les permiten esas sutilezas, pero yo era ingenua, e imaginé que, además de mirarme, me escucharían, oirían en mis frases la cadencia de una mente poderosa en funcionamiento. Tardé años en comprender que ésa era una premisa falsa, al menos en la mayoría de los casos, que las expectativas son lo mejor de la percepción, y que la cara de una joven es un obstáculo para que se la tome en serio sobre todo cuando va acompañada de una actitud agresiva."
"Quería arder de inteligencia. Eso me da risa ahora. Los hombres pueden arder de inteligencia. A las mujeres no se les permiten esas sutilezas, pero yo era ingenua, e imaginé que, además de mirarme, me escucharían, oirían en mis frases la cadencia de una mente poderosa en funcionamiento. Tardé años en comprender que ésa era una premisa falsa, al menos en la mayoría de los casos, que las expectativas son lo mejor de la percepción, y que la cara de una joven es un obstáculo para que se la tome en serio sobre todo cuando va acompañada de una actitud agresiva."
October 30, 2021
audiolibro
No olvidemos que un recuerdo está siempre en el presente, no olvidemos que cada vez que evocamos un recuerdo este está sujeto a cambios, pero tampoco olvidemos que esos cambios pueden traer consigo verdades.
El pasado es cambiante cada vez que se recuerda.
¿Cuánto hay de real en lo que recordamos, cuánto hay de imaginado?
La importancia del recuerdo, del pasado impregna las páginas de esta obra. Y es precisamente esto lo que me he preguntado muchas veces al evocar un recuerdo compartido y que las personas que lo vivieron conmigo lo recordaran distinto.
La obra me ha atrapado por las reflexiones de la autora/protagonista, de cómo rememoramos el pasado, un relato que me ha deslumbrado por su modo de escribir, de enlazar las secuencias del presente y el pasado, con un hilo narrativo inexistente, fragmentos de un diario, fragmentos de vivencias, experiencias, historias, de como la protagonista espía la vecina que poco a poco se transforma en una obsesión hasta el clímax del capítulo 9, del que es mejor no contar nada, que transforma de nuevo el pasado de la protagonista, ¿o es el presente?, ¿o lo que transforma es el recuerdo del pasado?
No es una obra fácil, tiene un ritmo lento y reflexivo, en algún momento demasiado centrada en la vida neoyorkina que me desconecta un poco de la narración, pero que para mí y en su conjunto es fascinante. (9/10)
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