Names can be misleading, especially if - like me - your grasp of their provenance is, ahem, on the loose side. Still, having just finished reading this collection of essays written by her, I think that Siri Hustvedt would likely be amused and interested by my misapprehension, based on her name, that she was of Indian background (a belief which obviously owed rather more to the 'Siri' than the 'Hustvedt')...
One could probably get some way towards understanding why I enjoyed these essays by considering a list of Hustvedt's preoccupations, which include but are not limited to:
- liminality and interstitiality (forgive the jargon - sometimes it really is the best way to express something);
- imagination and reality (and the relationship between them, natch);
- memory and the present moment (ie, and/in);
- language and Everything (see immediately above);
- images and the self (and psychoanalytic such-and-suchness);
- people and the spaces between them (see all of the above);
- et cetera (not to mention her ability to write about The Great Gatsby with genuine insight and feeling).
I sometimes felt as if I was reading a less precious ("less precious" = better, in this context) Jeanette Winterson, which made me feel a bit ambivalent in light of my current perspective on, and past infatuations, with (the writing of) said JW, but I suppose it comes with the terrain of writing in this kind of abstract, philosophical, 'postmodern', overtly personally-informed vein.
Skipped the ones on The Bostonians and Our Mutual Friend, not having read either (even though I knew that Hustvedt would cover much more than merely the texts of those novels in her excursions around them), but very much enjoyed the piece on Gatsby (not least for the light it sheds on the curious way in which the novel is framed by its opening - the narrator's memory of his father's words, "Whenever you feel like criticising anyone, remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had"); those are the only explicitly literature-focused ones, and elsewhere Hustvedt, amongst other things: provides a potted family and personal history (in "Yonder" which, like the word which gives the essays its the title, enacts a continual slippage from one point - or scene - to another, over and over); uses her experiences wearing a corset as a film extra as a jumping-off point for a meditation on clothing, identity and imagination; and makes the case for what she calls 'eros', the mystery and uncertainty which always abides at the heart of love and sexual attraction.
So I didn't find these essays particular remarkable or wonderful or amazing, but they're good and I feel a better person (again with the self-improvement!) for having read them. Next up (so far as Hustvedt goes): What I Loved.
