Siri Hustvedt (United States, 1955)
Siri Hustvedt is an American novelist and essayist, born in Minnesota in 1955 to a Norwegian mother and an American father. As a child, Hustvedt spent some time living in Bergen (Norway) and Reykjavik (Iceland): it was then when she decided she wanted to become a writer.
Hustvedt graduated with a History BA from St. Olaf College and she moved to New York in 1978 to complete her PhD. There she met the novelist Paul Auster, to whom she married years later. Hustvedt's works repeatedly pose questions about the nature of identity, selfhood and perception, and in many of her books she presents the readers with traces of her own biography. Besides her fiction books, Hustvedt has published several essays on visual art, and she also writes on diverse interdisciplinary subjects that investigate the intersections among philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience.
“Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.”
The Summer Without Men
The Blazing World
After years of being ignored by the art world, the artist Harriet Burden conducts an experiment: she conceals her female identity behind three male fronts. Presented as a collection of texts, edited and introduced by a scholar, years after the artist's death, the book unfolds through extracts from Burden's notebooks and conflicting accounts from others about her life and work...
The Summer Without Men
The poet Mia Fredrickson has been forced to re-examine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia’s husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a “pause.” This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia’s release from the hospital...
The Sorrows of an American
When Erik Davidsen and his sister, Inga, find a disturbing note from an unknown woman among their dead father’s papers, they believe he may be implicated in a mysterious death. Returning to New York from Minnesota, the grieving siblings continue to pursue the mystery behind the note. While Erik’s fascination with his new tenants and emotional vulnerability...
What I loved
Leo is a middle-aged art critic who buys a painting that intrigues and disturbs him, and he soon becomes close to the experimental artist, Bill Wechsler. Bill is married to a poet, the emotionally fragile Lucille; Leo to an academic, the rather more down-to-earth Erica. Soon the four are great friends, living above each other in the same apartment block, talking about art and ideas, even...