Showing posts with label Siri Hustvedt. Show all posts

Friday, November 26, 2021

Siri Hustvedt / ‘I responded viscerally to De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’

Siri Hustvedt: ‘I loved Ann Petry’s biography, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad.’

The

Books

0f my

life

Siri Hustvedt: ‘I responded viscerally to De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’

The US author on becoming a feminist, growing into Gertrude Stein, and the comfort of folk tales

Siri Hustvedt
Friday 26 November 2021

My earliest reading memory
At six I became fascinated with the Lonely Doll books by Dare Wright that I found in the public library of my small town, Northfield, Minnesota. They used photographs, not drawings, as illustrations; they gave me an uncanny feeling of secrets lurking behind the words and images. It is a feeling I have never forgotten.

My favourite book growing up
I loved Ann Petry’s biography, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad. I found it in my school library in 1965, 10 years after it was first published. I was 10 years old and intensely aware of the civil rights movement, despite the fact that I lived in an all-white town and had seen black people only on forays to Minneapolis every Christmas. I was passionately attached to the story of this extraordinary, heroic woman.

The book that changed me as a teenager
When I was 14 or 15 I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Despite my lack of philosophical sophistication, I responded viscerally to the book. Rereading it later, I wonder exactly what I understood at the time. It is not an easy book. I suspect that, despite my struggles with the text, I gleaned its essential message – that women were treated as outsiders to history as the eternal feminine, had always been other to man, and that these injustices ran deep. I became a feminist.

The writer who changed my mind
I was in my early 30s when I first read the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose book Phenomenology of Perception reordered my thinking about the mind/body problem. His work changed my “mind” by bringing it into my body. He skewers the mind-body substance dualism in the philosophy of Descartes and his heirs. The philosopher’s interest in the science of the moment and its flawed assumptions, as well as his use of neurological case studies to illustrate his thought, have remained highly influential for my own thinking.

The book that made me want to be a writer
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I was 13. It was the summer of 1968, and I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, where my father was studying the Icelandic sagas. Political upheaval was dimly present in my consciousness, but I lived on and in novels. The sun never set, and my disturbed circadian rhythms kept me awake. I read and read, one novel after another, but it was that book that set my nerves on fire. One night, moved to tears by a particular passage, which I no longer remember, I walked to the window and made a vow – if this is what books could do, then this is what I wanted to do. I began writing. Years later, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Dickens. Although I sometimes tired of me and my insights while working on the thesis, I never lost a feeling of awe for the inimitable CD.

The book or author I came back to
I didn’t “get” Gertrude Stein as a teenager. I had to grow into an adult to feel the music, humour and rigour of her work.

The book I reread
I have read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights five times now. I read it first at 13 during the same Icelandic summer, and it scared me witless. The older I get, the more profound and radical the book has become. I have come to view it as an insurrectionist text that razes our assumptions about borders between this and that, I and you, life and death and grinds them into dust.

The book I could never read again
I am ashamed about Gone With the Wind. I read it that same fateful Icelandic summer. I checked it out of Reykjavik public library, didn’t understand that the author was writing about the Ku Klux Klan, and I had to ask my mother what the word “rape” meant. This horrible, cheesy book advanced the disgusting “lost cause” narrative still dear to the American south and parts of the north.

The book I discovered later in life
I did not read Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace until I was well into my 40s. I now think this was exactly the right moment for me because I was able to place the text in a broader context. At the same time, the lightning precision of Weil’s extraordinary mind would no doubt have bowled me over as a young person too.

The book I am currently reading
A wonderful recently published book, In Defence of the Human Being by Thomas Fuchs. Fuchs is a professor of philosophy and psychiatry at Heidelberg University and is a lucid, brilliant defender of a new form of humanism.

My comfort read
Fairy and folk tales – any kind from any country.

THE GUARDIAN

THE BOOKS OF MY LIFE

2021
The books of my life / Amanda Gorman / ‘I wanted my words to re-sanctify the steps of the Capitol’Mary Beard / ‘Virgil was a radical rap artist of the first century BC’
Stephen King: ‘I loved Lord of the Flies the way kids love Harry Potter’
Gabriel Byrne: ‘I’ve never played Hamlet, but in many ways I am him’
Curtis Sittenfeld / ‘Sweet Valley High is not respected – but I found the books riveting’
Elif Shafak / ‘Reading Orlando was like plunging into a cold but beautifully blue sea’
Jason Reynolds / “Reading rap lyrics made me realise that poetry could be for me”
Michael Rosen / ‘My comfort read? Great Expectations’
Siri Hustvedt / ‘I responded viscerally to De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’
Alan Garner / ‘The Chronicles of Narnia are atrociously written’
Rose Tremain / ‘My comfort reads are MasterChef cookbooks’
Oliver Jeffers / ‘Catch-22 was the first time I had a physical reaction to a book’
Penelope Lively / ‘Beatrix Potter seemed so exotic, unlike my world of palm trees’

2022
David Baddiel / The book that changed me? John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
David Baddiel / The book that changed me? John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
Edmund White / ‘My earliest reading memory is a lady toad with a nasty temper’
David Mitchell / ‘If I need cheering up, Jamie Oliver’s recipes usually help’
Isabel Allende / ‘I have been displaced most of my life’
Barbara Kingsolver / ‘Middlemarch is about everything, for every person, at every age’

2023
Richard Ford / ‘I don’t read for comfort. Comfort I source elsewhere’
Bret Easton Ellis: ‘I connected with Quentin Tarantino’
Lauren Groff / ‘Virginia Woolf’s Flush is delightfully bananas’
Natalie Haynes / ‘I couldn’t stop reading Stephen King - even at the top of the Eiffel Tower’
Richard Armitage / ‘I used to stand on the Lord of the Rings to reach the top shelf in my wardrobe’

2024
Mieko Kawakami / “Franz Kafka es mi lectura reconfortante”

2025
Niall Williams / ‘When I first read Chekhov, I thought: “He’s not so great”’
Graham Norton / ‘The Bell Jar changed how I felt about books’

Saturday, October 31, 2020

Paul Auster / ‘I'm going to speak out as often as I can, otherwise I can't live with myself'

Paul Auster

Interview

Paul Auster: ‘I'm going to speak out as often as I can, otherwise I can't live with myself'

The novelist on Trump’s America and publishing the book of his life at 70

Paul Laity
Friday 20 January 2017

‘I started the book at 66, which is the year my father died. Once I passed that boundary, I began to live in a very creepy world’ … Paul Auster Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian

When Paul Auster was 14, a boy just inches away from him was struck by lightning and killed. “It’s something I’ve never got over,” he tells me. He was at summer camp: “there we were, nearly 20 of us caught in an electric storm in the woods. Someone said we should get to a clearing, and we had to crawl, single file, under a barbed wire fence. As the boy immediately in front of me was going under, lightning struck the fence. I was closer to him than you are to me now; my head was right near his feet.”

Auster didn’t realise the boy had died instantly. “So I dragged him into the clearing. And for an hour, as we were pounded by intense rain, and attacked by lightning spears, I was holding on to the boy’s tongue so he didn’t swallow it”. Two or three other kids nearby had also been struck and were moaning; “it was like a war scene. Little by little, the boy’s face was turning blue; his eyes were half open, half shut, the whites were showing.” It took Auster a little while to absorb that, had the strike occurred just a few seconds later, it would have been him. “I’ve always been haunted by what happened, the utter randomness of it,” he says. “I think it was the most important day of my life.”A similar incident occurs in Auster’s new novel, 4321. Archie Ferguson, a 13-year-old full of promise, enthralled by The Catcher in the Rye and his first kisses, runs under a tree during a storm at summer camp. When lightning strikes, he is killed by a falling branch: “as his inert body lay on the water-soaked ground … thunder continued to crack, and from one end of the earth to the other, the gods were silent”.

Writers' rooms / Siri Hustvedt

Photo by Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt / El cuarto del escritor

Friday 26 October 2007 16.59 BST

A room to write in isn't like other rooms, because most of the time the person in it doesn't see it. My attention is on the page in front of me, on what the people in the book are doing or saying, and my awareness of the things near me is muted, part of the vague sensual information that comes and goes as I mull over the next sentence. I do feel the light in my room, however. My study is on the top floor of our house, which has four storeys, and the windows face south, so the sunshine streams through the panes, and even on a bleak winter day my workplace is luminous.

I usually sit down at my desk around eight o'clock in the morning and write until my brain begins to dim - around two o'clock. My morning mind is far better than the blearier one that arrives in the afternoon so I take advantage of the early hours. I have lots of reference books near me, various kinds of dictionaries - bilingual, medical and psychiatric, 34 volumes of the Grove Dictionary of Art, style manuals and handbooks, the Bible, Gray's Anatomy, some poetry anthologies, and when I'm deep in a project there are often piles of books on the floor to which I refer when needed.

Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster

I have an eclectic mix of photographs and objects tacked up on the bulletin board behind my desk and placed on the shelves above it. Aside from images of my husband, daughter, sisters and parents, my favorite things are: a picture of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot's most photogenic hysteric, Augustine, from the Salpetrière hospital archives in Paris given to me by my sister, Asti; seven keys I found in my father's study after he died, which he had labelled "Unknown Keys"; his last passport, that expired six months after his death; a wind-up toy monkey I've had since my childhood; and a rubber brain that sits on a little stand and which can be taken apart. Even though I don't spend much time looking at these odd treasures, I like knowing they are there.

THE GUARDIAN

Writers' rooms / Roald Dahl

Writers' rooms / Geoff Dyer
Writers' rooms / Antonia Fraser
Writers' rooms / JG Ballard
Writers´rooms / Sarah Waters
Writers' rooms / Siri Husteved
Writers' roms / Jane Austen
Writers' rooms / Esther Freud
Writers' rooms / Michael Frayn

Siri Hustvedt's Top Ten List

Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt's Top Ten List

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Reader Bio

Siri Hustvedt (born 1955) is an American novelist and essayist of Norwegian descent whose wide-ranging writings explore various themes including the world of art, the intersection of the humanities and science, the nature of identity, selfhood and perception. She has published six novels: The Blindfold(1992), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl(1996), What I Loved (2003), The Sorrows of an American (2008), The Summer Without Men (2011) and The Blazing World, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Her five works of nonfiction include the essay collections Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (2005) and Living, Thinking, Looking (2012) and the neurological memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2009). She is an internationally acclaimed lecturer whose honors include the Gabarron International Award for Thought and Humanities and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Oslo. In 2015 she was appointed lecturer in psychiatry at the Weill Medical School of Cornell University. She married the writer Paul Auster on Bloom’s Day in 1982. For more information, visit her official website.

If one takes a lesson from the various literary frauds that have been perpetrated over the last couple of centuries—the “masterpieces” that have been typed up word-for-word and sent to publishers under other names and been rejected or the novels published under pseudonyms by celebrated authors that have been ignored—then one must approach all lists of greatness with skepticism. If one further believes, as I do, that every book is animated by its reader, that reading is a collaboration between reader and text, then that same skepticism increases rather than decreases. Moreover, if one knows that the very idea of greatness creates an implicit bias in the reader, which enhances the physiological experience of said great work and activates reward systems in the brain that are not activated without that contextual bias, then caution is in order. And, finally, if all literary works are held in sway to the beliefs of a particular culture (its prejudices about masculinity and femininity, for example) and to the changing whims of time, then one may be left scratching one’s head about what it all means.

Americans in particular are keen on competition, on the dogged reinvigoration of a mythical biggest and best, whether their object is a hotdog or a work of art. That said there seem to be books in a given culture at a given time that many writers share as beloved works. And there are not ten, of course. There are hundreds. In my list, I detect an obvious bias for nineteenth century books written in English. There is nothing rigid about either my order or my choices. Tomorrow they might be different.

1. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847). First published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell in 1847, the novel both shocked and confused its reviewers, many of whom regarded its author as a rough, unrefined man of brutal character. Slowly, the book grew in stature among scholars, but its subtle structure and diffuse, complex meanings are still fought over. For me, it remains a book of almost incomprehensible power, both in thought and in feeling.

2. Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667) There would be noWuthering Heights without Milton. That is certain. I remain in awe of the poet’s dense, rich meanings and his music. The two are inseparable.

3. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871–72). Like a number of books on this list, I have read it four times, and with each reading, it generates new thoughts and emotions in me, a tribute to both its intellectual rigor and immense sympathy for human weakness.

4. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life by Søren Kierkegaard (1843). This is either the novel as philosophy or philosophy as the novel by the master of irony himself. It is, in all events, a long work of prose fiction, written under a pseudonym with a fictional editor’s introduction. Diabolical in its wit, passionate, and sly, it is a book at once immensely difficult and deeply pleasurable to read.

5. Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817). As I get older, this is the book of Austen’s I return to, not because it is her most perfect book, but because the psychological acumen of its narrative continues to haunt me.

6. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (1864–65). The author’s last finished book is for me his best, a book that explores the fragmented nature of human identity in his inimitable prose.

7. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927). I loved this book when I was nineteen, but I had to grow up and read it again to understand its profundity.

8. Stories of Franz Kafka (1883–1924)—because Kafka’s work is irreducible.

9. The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904). Nobody dissects the muddle of human feeling and desire with greater subtlety than James.

10. Sorry, but I resist. This one could be Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, O’Connor, Proust, Tolstoy, Wharton, Dante, Bachman, or an eccentric choice, chosen because it is a book so spectacularly ignored, that brilliant small novel by Djuna Barnes, Nightwood.

THE TOP TEN

Sunday, October 1, 2017

Life and style / Siri Hustvedt / ‘Perhaps I could time travel as a man or a ghost’

Siri Hustvedt

LIFE AND STYLE

Q&A

Siri Hustvedt: ‘Perhaps I could time travel as a man or a ghost’

The novelist on going back in time, bringing back mourning clothes and how she would edit the past

Rosanna Greenstreet
Saturday 19 August 2017 09.30 BST

orn in Minnesota, Siri Hustvedt, 62, has a PhD from Columbia University. Having published her first novel, The Blindfold, in 1992, she went on to write several novels including What I Loved, The Summer Without Men and The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2014. Her latest book is A Woman Looking At Men Looking at Women: Essays On Art, Sex And The Mind. She is married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a daughter, and lives in New York.

Siri Hustvedt: ‘The writer who has a favourite word is in trouble.’
Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian

When were you happiest?

I have a penchant for happiness. I have experienced euphoria before a migraine, which may not count, but I have also felt immense happiness leaning back in a chair in sunlight, puttering in my garden, reading, dancing, immediately after giving birth and when writing.

What is your greatest fear?

I’m afraid I will die before I finish whatever book I am working on.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

Pride, the deadliest sin.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?

I cannot bear the person who cannot listen. It is distressingly common after lectures for people to ask questions (or worse, make comments) that make it clear they heard absolutely nothing.

What was your most embarrassing moment?

Years ago, I was invited to an elegant dinner party in New York. I didn’t know the hosts well, and I was going to meet my husband at the apartment. A handsome man opened the door. I shook his hand and introduced myself. He looked embarrassed. The people watching me enter looked embarrassed. I was embarrassed. I think he was the butler.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?

No 62-year-old person should be asked to choose.

What or who is the greatest love of your life?

“Reader, I married him.”

Which living person do you most despise and why?

Donald Trump. I am still reeling from the fact that we Americans have an ignorant, vicious, vulgar, narcissistic, racist, woman-hating, xenophobic buffoon as president.

Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?

The three James siblings: William, Henry and Alice.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?

Mourning clothes. I think grief deserves an outward sign.

Who would play you in the film of your life?

I’d take Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck or Bette Davis. We are in the realm of pure fantasy, after all.

What makes you unhappy?

Surreptitious cruelty.

What is your most unappealing habit?

My husband would say I never turn off lights, and leave doors ajar.

What is your favourite word?

The writer who has a favourite word is in trouble.

Which book changed your life?

After I read David Copperfield at 13, I decided to become a writer.

What is the worst thing anyone’s said to you?

“I have breast cancer.” My mother was in her early 50s. She survived, but I didn’t know that she would. She is now 94.

To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why?

The man who asked me directions on the subway seven years ago: I am so sorry for sending you to Queens rather than to the Bronx.

What is the worst job you’ve done?

I was a floor model briefly at Bloomingdale’s in New York in 1979. I hated it. When no one was watching, I would lock myself in the toilet and read.

If you could edit your past, what would you change?

I would have articulated aloud the comments I too often suppressed out of deference to arrogant, condescending, sexist bores.

If you could go back in time, where would you go?

It is sad but true that to send any woman back in time more than 100 years would strip her of suffrage and reduce her to marital property in most countries. And yet I am fascinated by the intellectual and artistic climates of the late 19th and early 20th century in America and Europe. Perhaps I could do my time travelling as a man or a ghost.

How often do you have sex?

Do people actually answer this question? And if they do, do you believe them?

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

The Blazing World.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

A single perspective is not enough.

THE GUARDIAN