"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 one like these. In essence, she describes the experiences of a 23-year-old girl S.H. moving to New York from the Midwest (Minnesota) to write a novel. The autobiographical slant is immediately clear, although Hustvedt in interviews has clarified that not everything is based on her own experiences, but 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. Sounds familiar, and indeed, Hustvedt is far from 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 this neighbor is a part, and a terrifyingly described 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 at the time, 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 (1979) 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 her best book, but the thorough, thoughtful way in which Hustvedt writes continues to charm me. ( )

Weird and sort of a slow burn at first, but by the end, it was really gripping. Probably not for everybody -- perspective/voice changes, postmoderny stuff. Learned some neat (angrifying) stuff about Duchamp's appropriation of the work of others. ( )

** : Compliqué & ennuyeux

Al final dels anys setanta una jove aspirant a escriptora arriba a NY sense diners. A través de la paret del seu apartament sent les converses misterioses de la seva veïna i ho escriu.
40 anys desprès quan ja es una escriptora reconeguda troba aquelles notes i estableix un diàleg entre la noia que era i la dona gran que es ara ( )

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

My Litsy post 5-days ago:

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.

2020
https://www.librarything.com/topic/318836#7207494 ( )