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What I Loved
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What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
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I really wanted to like this one and then just...didn't. It wasn't egregiously bad in any way, the writing quality was fine, I just found it really boring (which is sad considering one of the plots is about a shock artist) and didn't connect with what was supposed to be an emotionally impactful storyline.I think it was just too similar to many of the more modern books on the list: a family tragedy, upper-class ennui in New York, infidelity, an element that is supposed to be provocative but isn't if you've read a huge swath of books just like this one... and missing something unique about it to tread water above the other ones.
I gave it 2 stars, and feel a bit bad about that considering I didn't find it offensive or worth ranting about...but I just didn't enjoy it enough to give it 3.
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I liked this book a lot, and be warned, this review probably will contain spoilers because it would be difficult to write about this book without giving stuff away. This is the story of "what I love". Leo is our protagonist. He is a Jewish, New York Man who is a teacher, writer of art and he falls in love with the portrait titled 'Self Portrait' which is be Bill and the person in the painting is Violet. Leo was born in the thirties and his family came from Europe to escape what was happening in Germany. The author is Siri Hustvedt, from Minnesota, married to Paul Auster. Violet was from Minnesota and returned to visit family occasionally. She brought her step son to Minnesota to go through treatment at Hazelden.
Some say this is about love. I say it is about the past tense of love. Love lost. Leo loses his family of origin, he then loses his child and his wife. Next he loses his best friend Bill and in his loss he tries to replace love with Mark and Violet. And in the end, he loses his eye sight, so it can also be said that this book is about aging and in aging we lose those things we love as we move along. It is also about grief.
The story is also an interesting look at art and mental illness. I would say the author does an excellent job with mental illness both in the history research that Violet does on hysteria as well as Bill's brother Dan and antisocial personality disorders of Mark.
Rating: 4.25
Orange Prize Longlist (2003)
Prix des libraires du Québec (Roman hors Québéc, 2004)
Orange Prize for Fiction's "50 Essential Reads by Contemporary Authors"
The edition I picked up of this book didn't even have a summary of the plot on the cover or inside page. I hate this and would normally not give the book the time of day - why do publishers do this? The more blurb you get from magazines/authors/people I should probably have heard of, the less I want to read it. I picked it up because I knew it was on the 1001 list. That is the only reason.And it would have been a shame to miss it. This is the most intense book I have read in a while. So many different plots, so much loss, we effectively have as a narrator a person who loses everyone important to him, in one way or another, whose story lives on in the book we hold in our hand.
5 stars. An unexpected delight from an author I have never read before and had heard almost nothing about.
4/5 stars
This was a gut wrenching, emotional novel about love, loss, family and relationships. I have not read such an emotional roller coaster in quite some time. The story is told in three sections, no chapters, with each part taking the reader on a different journey. Leo is the voice of the novel and my favorite character. Many of the characters are artistic and the art scene of New York is featured prominently.
“...I continually found myself at a loss – either I didn't know what I was seeing or I didn't know how to read what I saw. Those experiences have left their traces in me as nearly perpetual disquiet. Although there are times when it vanishes altogether, usually I can feel it, lurking beneath the ordinary activities of my day- an inner shadow cast by the memory of having been completely lost.”
“It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another.”
“Every true story has several possible endings.”