This is the first book of Siri Hustvedt I have read, and it is powerful, worthwhile, deep & beautifully written. She is clearly a genius, and I look forward to reading another of her compilations of essays, as well as her novels & nonfiction. ( )

A collection of Hustvedt's shorter writings from the last five years or so, written against the background of Trump, Covid, and the deaths of her parents. There are several essays about her parents and grandparents that fill in some extra pieces around the people she wrote about in her novel The sorrows of an American; there are analytical pieces about Jane Austen, Emily Brontë and Louise Bourgeois; a playful reworking of Sinbad's voyages and a two-hour stare at a Bellini painting in the Frick Collection; and there are reflections on death-practices, on mentoring, on misogyny, and on the absence of representations of childbirth in Western art.

As you would expect, it's all calm, clear and devastatingly logical, with more than a hint of a twinkle in the author's eye as she points out the inanities of what earlier writers have said about a given subject. She especially castigates critics who apply the teachings of Freud uncritically in inappropriate places, notably in her essay on Louise Bourgeois, where she clearly feels that people have taken the artist's own statements far too literally, as though a woman artist wasn't capable of using irony or leading critics up the garden path. Calling Hustvedt "a twenty-first century Virginia Woolf", as one of the blurbers on the back cover does, is maybe a bit overblown, but that's certainly the kind of space she's operating in. ( )

La filosofía feminista y las memorias familiares van de la mano en esta nueva colección de ensayos de Siri Hustvedt, una magistral exploración sobre cómo muchas experiencias que damos por sentadas y que que nos definen como seres humanos no son tan inalterables como pensamos, especialmente las relaciones familiares o entre géneros, los abusos de poder o la influencia del entorno en quiénes somos, profundizando para ello en su propia memoria personal, en sus años de formación y en su experiencia como escritora.

Hustvedt vuelve a hacer gala de un extraordinario don para comunicar y de un conocimiento interdisciplinario en este volumen que se mueve sin esfuerzo entre las historias de su madre, su abuela y su hija pero también por las las de sus "madres artísticas", Jane Austen, Emily Brontë y Louise Bourgeois, y de ahí hasta conceptos más amplios, como la experiencia de la maternidad en una cultura moldeada por la misoginia y las fantasías de la autoridad paterna. Es, en defintiva, el viaje de una erudita hacia cuestiones urgentes sobre el amor y el odio familiares, el prejuicio y la crueldad humanos y el poder transformador del arte.