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Loading... The Blazing World (2014)by Siri Hustvedt
  
Booker Prize (117) » 12 more Complex and subtle, dark and funny, cold and poignant all at once. When I finished I almost wanted to just turn back to the front and start over again, since I'm sure I missed lots of interesting bits. (  ) JBD1 | Dec 30, 2016 |  (36) This was pretty good, but pretty dense as well. An aging female artist decides her work will be more widely lauded if she uses a male artist as a front man. She claims it is all about perception, and that not only will people perceive the art differently if they think a man made it, but indeed, she will create it differently as a a male personnna. Her pseudonym art experiences are narrated as a collection of writings put together posthumously by an editor who admired Harriet Burden's work - some narratives from her children, art critics, friends of hers, her significant other, and her own journals. All these writings are introduced by an editor who begins the story and it is at first unclear what you are reading. The novel was compared to Nabokov by one reviewer and I think it is this 'Pale Fire; type-vibe - trying to figure out which voice is authentic. As I am writing the review, it seems I am liking the book more than when I was actually reading it. The problem for me was that there was a lot, I mean, a lot, of tedious name-dropping re: artists and philosophers throughout the ages that meant nothing to me. I imagine the references were meant to be almost comically obscure and erudite - almost like A.S. Byatt's 'Possession,' - sort of a kindly parody of intellectuals. But it bordered on painful and Harriet's rantings were histrionic. Again, I know they were meant to be, but not easy or pleasing to read. Hustveldt is really masterful with character sketching and creating distinct personalities in the different narratives - Harriet, Bruno, Sweet Autumn. They were unique and true to the characters she created. Well-done and her talent is appreciated. For me, this novel was less accessible that "What I loved' and was just a more difficult reading experience. So a conflicted review and rating; I think it will stick with me for awhile. (  ) jhowell | Sep 4, 2016 | �ÃÃNo one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal. Women do most delight in revenge, wrote Sir Thomas Browne. Sweet is revenge, especially to women, wrote Lord Byron. And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why.ÂàI read [b:What I Loved|125502|What I Loved|Siri Hustvedt|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347721158s/125502.jpg|1309881] last year and absolutely loved it. I thought I had found a new girl-crush in Siri Hustvedt, who is clearly a super-smart lady. But what should I read next? Well, The Blazing World was longlisted for the Booker Prize, was mentioned on numerous "Best of 2014" lists, and centers on that dreaded f-word: feminism. I was sold. Harriet Burden left the New York art scene years ago, partly because she was being ignored, and partly because she became a wife and mother. After her husband's death, she decides to come back, but with a twist. Convinced that critics would be less dismissive if she were a man, Harriet enlists three male artists willing to exhibit her work as their own. After the success of the three shows, she reveals herself as the creator only to be met with disbelief. Only one of the men confirms his role; the first has disappeared and the third denies her involvement. Harriet does gain a reputation, but unfortunately not for her work. Feminism has been getting so much flak lately, it was just nice to read a book that validated my experience as a woman. (In this case, it's a pretty privileged experience, but I can care about the underrepresentation of female artists and other women's issues. Screw y'all.) I found myself nodding my head at several points: A dinner guest disagrees with something Harriet says, but agrees with her husband when he says the same thing. A snippy critic mocks Harriet's appearance, like that has anything to do with her ability to create art. Rune, the artist who claims Harriet's work as his own, suggests she is mentally imbalanced. But The Blazing World reads like a slightly fleshed out thought experiment. I feel like plot and characters were passed over in favor of intellectual density. Right from the "Editor's Introduction," The Blazing World is presented as an academic study on the life and times of Harriet Burden. It collects Harriet's journal entries, articles from art mags, and interviews with family, friends, and acquaintances from the art world. Even if you aren't familiar with academic reviews, this shouldn't be a real deterrent. What got to me was the namedropping of writers, philosophers, and artists on pretty much every page. Around the fifth time SÃüren Kierkegaard was mentioned, I went, "Uh oh." I am not versed in philosophy at all, and the footnotes just seemed to demonstrate how encyclopedic Harriet's - and by extension Hustvedt's - knowledge is. Some references I knew, some I did not, and some were definitely made up. Yeah, I suppose I could have googled all those names, but ain't nobody got time for that! What I Loved was smart without being overly cerebral. Now I am going to stop writing this review and just start handing out copies of What I Loved. I can't say enough nice things about that book. Read that one instead. (  )1  doryfish | Aug 15, 2016 | My favorite piece of contemporary art is a graffiti conversation written on a stall in the girls' room of my high school: "I shit on guys for a living" "Keep up the good work!" Hustvedt examines the relationship between art, feminism, identity, authorship, perception, and interpretation through an assortment of documents (interviews, articles, reviews, and journal entries) about the life and works of Harriet Burden, ignored and underappreciated artist. I was excited about the premise, but the execution left me with mixed impressions. The voices that Hustvedt creates for each character are mostly successful, but a few are cliché and grating. The artworks themselves didn't strike me as innovative enough, either. ( ) xicohtli | Jul 20, 2016 | (if/when I get around to reading this, I will use Diane's review as a resource for appreciation)  Cheryl_in_CC_NV | Jun 5, 2016 |
 [This snippet is actually from the letter exchange, Terry Castle responds to a reader, condensing the viewpoint to a nutshell]: [. . .] I would not describe The Blazing World as a first-rate novel. But I have to say I concur with the rest of his opening salvo: I did find myself hankering for things the novel failed to provide. Among them: true wit and intellectual depth (as opposed to the author’s relentless grad school preening), a minimally plausible story line and believable characters, some appreciable emotional resonance, and—how exactly to put it?—whatever it is that makes a good novel all of a piece: delightful and risky and alive and worth caring about. It’s no defense of Hustvedt to say that the problems I mention arise because I’m too rigid to see that she is “ambivalent” about her tedious heroine and “knows better than to invest uncritically” in Harriet/Harry’s cartoonish anti-male views. Authorial ambivalence—about anything—has nothing to do with a book’s readability. And unlike Nabokov or Woolf, two of the great masters of literary multivocality, Hustvedt often just seems confused—unable (technically or emotionally) to manage all The Blazing World’s moving parts. By the end the whole lumbering, lurching juggernaut goes quite spectacularly off the rails. Faced with what I suspect is a basic weakness in the conception of the work, the novelist’s recourse is to confound matters further by heaping on gratuitous literary and philosophical references—the more recherché the better. Margaret Cavendish, Harriet’s revered “Blazing World Mother,” is one of a cast of thousands. Witness this passage in which Harriet’s daughter describes her peculiar parent: I don’t think anybody really knows when she first started thinking about pseudonyms. She published one dense art review under the name Roger Raison in a magazine in the eighties, dumping on the Baudrillard craze, demolishing his simulacra argument, but few people paid attention. I remember when I was fifteen, our family was in Lisbon, and she went over and kissed the statue of Pessoa. My mother told me to read him, and, of course, he was famous for his heteronyms. She was also deeply influenced by Kierkegaard. It’s not because I don’t “get” the references ostentatiously piling up here—Baudrillard on Disneyland, Kierkegaard’s aliases, Pessoa and his heteronyms, or, indeed, the whole Mommy’s-kissing-a-statue saudade of it all—that I find Hustvedt’s name-dropping way of characterizing her heroine coy and insufferable. A Little Wikipedia Is a Dangerous Thing. The fact is, the book is pretentious and contrived to the point of readerly burnout. It is also (dare one say) often dead-in-the-water boring.  Siri Hustvedt is far too subtle and multifaceted a raconteur to present us with a simple tale of institutional misogyny. “The path to the truth,” in her heroine’s words, “is doubled, masked, ironic.” Harry Burden, as revealed through both her own testimony and that of others, is a self-sabotaging bundle of confusion. “Loud, lecturing, unpleasant,” prone to haranguing or snapping at people who might be useful to her, alternating between gawky silence and explosive rage, the 6-foot-2-inch-tall Harry looks “like a cartoon character, big bust and hips, . . . a galumphing jump-shot-sized broad with long, muscular arms and giant hands, an unhappy combination of Mae West and Lennie in ‘Of Mice and Men.’ ” In one of the novel’s most heartbreaking passages, Burden’s childhood friend, now a psychoanalyst, tells us that the literary character with whom the teenage Harry most identified was Frankenstein’s monster. “The terrible being Frankenstein makes is so lonely and misunderstood that his very existence is cursed. . . . His awful isolation is transformed into vengeance.”  Hustvedt has constructed the novel as a kind of artefact, out of numerous kinds of testimony: it purports to be the work of an academic researching Harriet Burden's claims of authorship years after her death, and is a collection of interviews, essays, articles and letters demonstrating the spectrum of responses to the would-be scandal. . . . . . . Hustvedt has a lot of very entertaining satirical fun in The Blazing World, but that particular note of tragedy, though she tries to sound it, remains lost.
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