Siri Hustvedt
1) Her Biography and Main Works:
Siri Hustvedt (born February 19, 1955) is a novelist and essayist from the United States. Hustvedt is the author of a poetry collection, seven novels, two collections of essays, and a number of nonfictions. The Blindfold (1992), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), What I Loved (2003), for which she is best known, A Plea for Eros (2006), The Sorrows of an American (2008), The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2010), The Summer Without Men (2011), Living, Thinking, Looking (2012), The Blazing World (2014), A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women – Essays (2016), and Memories of the Future (2017) are some of her books. The Summer Without Men and What I Loved were both international bestsellers. Over thirty languages have been used to translate her work.
Siri Hustvedt, the daughter of professor Lloyd Hustvedt, went to public school in Northfield, Minnesota, and graduated from the Cathedral School in Bergen, Norway, in 1973. She began writing at the age of 13 after a family trip to Reykjavik, where she read a variety of classic works. After reading Dickens’ David Copperfield, she decided that after finishing it, she wanted to pursue literature as a career. Hustvedt earned a B.A. in history from St. Olaf College in 1977. In 1978, she moved to New York City to pursue her graduate studies at Columbia University. Her first poem was published in The Paris Review. Hustvedt struggled to make ends meet during her college years, relying on an emergency loan from the university to get by.
Reading to You, a small collection of poems, was published by Station Hill Press in 1982. She earned her Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1986. Figures of Dust: A Reading of Our Mutual Friend, her dissertation on Charles Dickens, is an examination of language and identity in the novel, with a focus on Dickens’ fragmentation metaphors, pronoun use, and their relationship to a narrative, dialogical conception of self. Soren Kierkegaard, Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Mary Douglas, Paul Ricoeur, and Julia Kristeva are among the thinkers she mentions in her dissertation as having influenced her later writing.
Hustvedt began writing prose after completing her dissertation. Two of the four stories that would eventually become her first novel, The Blindfold, were published in literary magazines and later included in the Best American Short Stories anthologies in 1990 and 1991. She’s continued to write fiction and essays about the intersections of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience since then. She also writes about art on a regular basis. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Hustvedt delivered the third annual Schelling lecture on aesthetics. She has also given talks at the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as published Mysteries of the Rectangle, a collection of essays on painting. She was one of the distinguished list of speakers who delivered the annual Sigmund Freud lecture in Vienna in 2011, including Leo Bersani, Juliet Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin, Mark Solms, and Judith Butler.
Hustvedt is a philosopher and academic who works on fundamental issues in contemporary ethics and epistemology. She has given readings from her works at European and German universities, contributing to the interdisciplinary dialogue between the humanities and the sciences. Hustvedt has contributed to academic journals such as Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Seizure: European Journal of Epilepsy, Neuropsychoanalysis, and Clinical Neurophysiology with essays and papers. Her collection of essays, Living, Thinking, Looking, demonstrates her intellectual breadth across a wide range of subjects. She won the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities in 2012. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo for her novel The Blazing World, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
2) Main Themes in her Works:
Her work raises issues surrounding identity, selfhood, and perception. Hustvedt writes about her seizure disorder in The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, stating that she needs to look at her symptoms “from all angles” rather than “through a single-window.” These divergent viewpoints do not coalesce into a single point of view, but rather create an atmosphere of ambiguity and flux. Hustvedt introduces the reader to characters whose minds are inextricably linked to their bodies and environments, and whose sense of self exists somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. Her characters are frequently subjected to traumatic events that disrupt their daily routines, causing disorientation and a loss of identity. Hustvedt’s investigation of gender roles and interpersonal relationships reflects her interest in embodied identity. Her fiction and nonfiction both focus on the dynamics of the gaze and ethical issues in art.
3) A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women:
The novelist’s insightful essays on science and the arts bridge the gap between disciplines, inviting us to reconsider our perspectives. Hustvedt divides the book into three parts, drawing on insights from the humanities and sciences. The first section covers a wide range of male artists, from Pablo Picasso to Robert Mapplethorpe and Pedro Almodóvar. She examines Pina by Wim Wenders, which is essentially a “artist’s gift to another artist,” an homage by Wenders to the fabulous Pina Bausch, in one of the essays.
Hustvedt delves into an examination of art and perception, posing the question of how we evaluate works of art and creativity. Our criteria shift as we move from one culture to the next or from one historical period to the next, but we still believe that “good art” is not only universal, but also timeless and unchanging. Hustvedt’s voice has an emotional, almost lambasting tone to it at times, but it’s clear that she prefers questions to answers, eager to open up new spaces of free discussion, inviting readers to consider things from different perspectives but ultimately leaving the answers to them.
The essays in which Hustvedt deftly weaves her personal stories with the state of the world, academia, and technology are among the best. Hustvedt delves into the mother-daughter relationship, the journey from girlhood to womanhood, the construction of gender patterns, and sexuality experiments using her psychoanalysis knowledge and fascination with the “writing self.” “Girls have more freedom to experiment with masculine forms than boys do with feminine forms.” Hustvedt effortlessly moves between the spheres of culture, society, and self, combining familiar observations (e.g., braiding her daughter’s hair before bed) with Freud’s interpretation of Medusa and her snaky mane or rereading of the folk tale Rapunzel.
It is in the third and final section of the book, which is partly made up of lectures Hustvedt has given in various countries, that her voice reaches a wonderful intensity once more. Here’s a writer who has a lot to say to the rest of the world about the world. Even though the book’s scope is commendably broad, certain thinkers and writers appear repeatedly, including Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, and Margaret Cavendish, an English poet and philosopher who has yet to achieve the fame she so richly deserves, at least in the non-English speaking world.
4) Importance of her works in our times.
A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women – Essays (2016), Hustvedt’s latest book, is an impressive collection of essays by a novelist who clearly enjoys the humanities, sciences, and the ancient art of storytelling. Hustvedt, however, is more than a writer. She is also an avid reader, which is where the book’s secret lies: in the fundamental and never-ending act of reading, rethinking, and reconnecting.
Hustvedt’s voice changes as she shifts between topics of interest, and you may disagree with some of her conclusions, but it is clear that she has a brilliant mind that is constantly exploring, searching, and “becoming.” She describes herself as a “constant outsider who observes multiple disciplines.” Being a perpetual outsider, settling down on a threshold of existing in between, can be a lonely feeling, but it is the best position for inventiveness, perceptiveness, and wisdom – all three of which are abundant in this volume.
It is past time for fiction writers to emerge from their imaginative cocoons and speak out about politics, nationalism, religion, tribalism, and a variety of other topics that are influencing current debates. It’s not an easy task, given that novelists are typically introverted individuals. I believe that, as time goes on, European/western authors will increasingly feel compelled to speak out about current events. Hustvedt has created an impressive collection that celebrates critical thinking against this backdrop especially in recent times of political and moral chaos.
