Novela difícil de catalogar está de Siri Hustvedt. Partiendo de la crisis nerviosa de Mia, una mujer madura, poeta y profesora de literatura tras ser abandonada por su esposo, la autora nos brinda una excelente metáfora sobre el paso del tempo desde el punto de vista de las mujeres. Lejos de ser ...
This novel started out very strong, rambled a bit in the middle (albeit intelligently), and ultimately ended up a satisfying read.On the plus side:* the plot* the characters, women of all ages and stages of life* the writing, so smart and engagingA couple of minuses:*rambling philosophical aside...
When Mia's husband of 30 years demands a pause in their relationship – the Pause in question being clever, French, and younger than her by twenty years. It propels her into a brief but spectacular breakdown in a psychiatric unit, and thence to the Minnesota town of her childhood for a summer of ...
A chipper novel about a transition period after the poet-narrator’s husband leaves her for a younger woman. The frame of a summer visiting her elderly mother and her pals works well, providing Hustvedt with the freedom to allow her narrator to converse, connect, philosophize, and try to come to t...
SEXY and EERIE.For a grown up man like me, what a way to celebrate Halloween. This book has that eerie feeling that one gets by reading Emilie Bronte's Wuthering Heights and at the same time watching an R-18 movie with frontal nudity. Lily Dahl, this novel's main protagonist, is a 19-y/o county g...
First things first, Siri Hustvedt writes beautifully (the German translation reads already very smoothly and I'm sure reading it in English would only improve my impression) and her intelligence is apparent on almost every page. In short the book is amazing.Nonetheless, the fact that she is obvi...
The title reads like a question. It dissolves in a way that suggests the intangibility of experience. Among the recurring iterations of that theme is the halting observation of Leo's son Matt: “'...all those different people see what they see just a little different from everybody else....[B...
as one of the elements of fiction. It went along with “theme” and “character.” I can’t remember how Paul and I started our discussion of place in fiction or how we arrived at his startling comment about Pride and Prejudice. But I clearly remember him saying that Austen’s novel had taken place in ...
But that was a cosmetic problem, really. I am the proud owner of any number of tattered and beaten biographies that are still decipherable. Time creeps. Time alters. Gravity insists. As my mother used to say to me, “After fifty, Bruno, it’s just patch, patch, patch.” No, it wasn’t my going-on-six...
You’re Insane, Crazy, Bonkers. Mr. Nobody. I felt slapped. I remembered the sign from NAMI on the wall of the hospital unit’s small library: FIGHTING THE STIGMA OF MENTAL ILLNESS. Stigmatos, marked by a sharp instrument, the sign of a wound. Sometime much later, the fifteenth century, maybe, it ...