UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION · BIOGRAPHY
Siri Hustvedt
American novelist, essayist, and poet.
My story with Giorgione's painting The Tempest is now twenty-six years old.
— from Mysteries of the Rectangle, 2005
Most acclaimed
Memories of the future
Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling "everything you need for suicide"; an absentminded passenger boards the wrong train, winding up in a place where night is day, nightmares are the reality, and the backs of all facts have been broken; a man out looking for work comes across a line for logic but doesn't join it as there's no guarantee the logic will last; a sociable corpse misses his own funeral; an inventor gets a glimpse of the far-from-radiant communist future. (Source
Yonder
1998
This is a look at men, women, and the life of the world we share. A large part of the motivation from this piece stems from a paradox, or at least an oddity. When a feminist takes a position, she is quite often articulate, and can give clear and cogent arguments why feminism or something close to it is needed for the well-being of women (and perhaps men). By contrast, people who disagree with feminism on principle are rarely so articulate: while they may quote the Bible, they so rarely articulate their "why?" that often it is not only feminists who may have never heard why a traditional position has an inner logic and a beating heart that is not only coherent, but is meant for the benefit of women as well as men. (Few feminists, egalitarians, or complementarians have seen this position clearly explained.) In fact, those who disagree with feminism may not have heard any more articulate of an explanation than many feminists! This isn't just unfortunate for complementarians; egalitarians and feminists may not really benefit from such an arrangement either. The pieces in this volume are connected, each in its own way, to an effort to articulate precisely what is almost never explained even by people who hold it on a deep level. A quote: Interlocutor What would you say to, "A woman's place is in the House--and in the Senate!"? Articulate Qualitarian Well, if we're talking about disrespectful, misogysnistic... Wait a minute... Let me respond to the intention behind your question. Do you know the Bible story about the Woman at the Well? Interlocutor Yes! It's one of my favorite stories. Articulate Qualitarian Do you know its cultural context?
Mysteries of the Rectangle
2005
In Mysteries of the Rectangle, Hustvedt concentrates her narrative gifts on the works of such masters as Francisco Goya, Jan Vermeer, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Gerhard Richter, and Joan Mitchell. Through her own personal experiences, Hustvedt is able to reveal things until now hidden in plain sight: an egglike detail in Vermeer's Woman with a Pearl Necklace and the many hidden self-portraits in Goya's series of drawings, Los Caprichos, as well as in his infamous painting The Third of May. Most importantly, these essays exhibit the passion, thrill, and sheer pleasure of bewilderment a work of art can produce—if you simply take the time to look.