Mothers, Fathers, and Others
Essays
-
- 3,99 €
-
- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
'Dizzyingly flexible, deeply human, often funny, it blasts aside our preconceptions and urges us to see the world as it is' i
Feminist philosophy meets family memoir in Siri Hustvedt's most personal essay collection yet, a scintillating and profound exploration of motherhood, the maternal and misogyny.
Ranging across artistic mothers such as Jane Austen and Louise Bourgeois, psychoanalysis, science, literature and ethnography, this is a polymath's journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art. Fierce, moving and witty, it warns against drawing hard and fast borders where none exist.
'The voice is consistent, combining assured erudition with more playful questioning, always thoughtful and capable of surprising shifts of register and even genre' Lara Feigel, Guardian
PRAISE FOR SIRI HUSTVEDT:
'Hustvedt is that rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word I can find is wisdom' Salman Rushdie
'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear' Hilary Mantel
'Her novels have received a deserved acclaim. But to my mind, she is even more to be admired as an essayist . . . in this regard I feel that she resembles Virginia Woolf ' Observer
'Few contemporary writers are as satisfying and stimulating to read as Siri Hustvedt' Washington Post
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
“I could not write fiction during the lockdown,” Siri Hustvedt tells Apple Books. “Although I had had a novel simmering in me for two years, my alarm about the pandemic, coupled with dread about US politics, created an anxiety that could only be met by writing non-fiction. I found myself in the land of the essay.” Mothers, Fathers, and Others is the product of such feelings—a collection of essays written both during the events of 2020 as well as a handful from a few years before. In lockdown, Hustvedt’s thoughts—perhaps like many people’s—turned to grief, family, how we mark death as human beings, how her city had changed amid the pandemic, memories from childhood and her beloved, late mother. But this is one of America’s finest contemporary novelists and thinkers, so with all of that come sharp observations on everything from Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic, mentorship (a topic that should be quite rudimentary but which, in the hands of the author, is used to explore father figures and the patronising comments Hustvedt has endured as a female writer), the roles of mothers and her relationship with her own (the intimately written essay about her mother’s life, resilience and death is a stunning, cathartic exploration of grief and love). There is so much to enjoy here; in fact, you might often need to pause just to take it all in. But reading Mothers, Fathers, and Others is a powerful reminder that being in Siri Hustvedt’s mind is one of the best things you can do with your time.
