Living, Thinking, Looking
'A 21st-century Virginia Woolf' - Literary Review
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF WHAT I LOVED AND A WOMAN LOOKING AT MEN LOOKING AT WOMEN
'Lucid, absorbing and vigorous'
Independent
'Richly intelligent'
Financial Times
In these fascinating essays, Siri Hustvedt shows what lies behind her fiction: an abiding curiosity about who we are and how we got that way. Covering a wide range of subjects, from the nature of desire to false memories and the paintings of Goya, she draws on the insights provided by both the arts and sciences to deepen our understanding of what it means to be human - to live, think and look.
'As an essayist, Hustvedt is the best kind: superbly clear, intellectually challenging but always human'
Independent on Sunday
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and essayist Hustvedt (Mysteries of the Rectangle) gathers 32 pieces (most previously published), written over the past six years, that she says are linked by an abiding curiosity about "what it means to be human." A lifelong migraine sufferer, Hustvedt recounts a rare premigraine hallucination in which she watched with fascination and an amiable tenderness a miniature, pink version of Paul Bunyan and his ox, Babe, two legendary, oversized characters from her Minnesota childhood. In another piece, Hustvedt describes how, to research her novel The Sorrows of an American, narrated by a New York City psychoanalyst, she interviewed analysts, read countless memoirs of mental illness, taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, and thought of her narrator as her imaginary brother who worked "at a job could imagine having had in another life." Fascinated by the emotional power of the work of painter and sculptor Louise Bourgeois, Hustvedt describes how that artist's gift is taking viewers to "strange and hidden places" in themselves, her oeuvre stirring up old pains and fears and echoing Hustvedt's own obsessions with rooms, dolls, missing limbs, mirrors, violence, order, and ambiguity. Hustvedt's essays are always perceptive, erudite, and also quite rarefied.
