The Enchantment of Lily Dahl [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Siri Hustvedt, whose debut novel The Blindfold was showered with critical acclaim, returns with The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, the coming of age story of a voluptuous and vacuous aspiring actress who lives in a small town in Minnesota. In addition to the Marilyn Monroe-esque title character, Hustvedt provides a bevy of quirky characters including Lily's former high school pal Martin Petersen, who is assembling a collection of corpse photographs, and Edward Shapiro, the college professor and painter whom Lily quickly beds. On top of that, Hustvedt layers on a nice little murder mystery, which Lily investigates and solves. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Hustvedt's second outing abandons the cerebral regions of postmodernism (The Blindfold, 1992) and turns to the familiar melodramas of small-town gothic. Nineteen-year-old Lilly Dahl lives in Webster, Minnesota, rooms over the main-street cafe where she works as waitress, and has ambitions of becoming an actress--she's learning, in fact, the role of Hermia for a local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The dream-world of Shakespeare's play and the events here befalling the hapless Lilly are often dovetailed neatly enough by Hustvedt, but at the same time her heroine's credibility-stretching tale of perversion, mystery, and obsession groans with the familiar. The seeming start of things was the long-ago killing of a woman named Helen Bodler, whose farmer husband is said by some to have buried her alive. Waitress Lilly serves breakfast daily to Helen's now-grown sons, the demented and unwashed bachelor farmers Frank and Dick, and to another distant relative of the dead Helen's, the eccentric loner Martin Petersen, ex-childhood playmate of Lilly herself. When eerie things start happening, then, there is no dearth of suspects--excluding neither Mabel Wasley, Lilly's 78- year-old neighbor who types all night and has secrets aplenty up her sleeve, nor Ed Shapiro, the handsome artist and out-of-towner who knows all about opera, works on his mysterious canvases all night--and steals Lilly's susceptible heart. When new murders and spectral sightings (of Lilly herself, no less) are reported, our feisty heroine turns fearless gumshoe (``She froze and held her breath. . . . But Lily knew that she was going to lurch headlong into whatever was waiting for her''), managing finally not only to expose all but to play a cool hand when Ed Shapiro at last offers to waft her away to New York City. Mystery, murder, and provincial caricatures, all in a readable but curiously dusty mix from a writer whose aims seemed higher the first time around. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Hustvedt follows up the success of The Blindfold (LJ 3/15/92), portions of which appeared in The Best Short Stories of 1991 (LJ 10/1/91), with a riveting portrayal of a young woman in a small Midwestern town, cafe waitress Lily Dahl, who resembles a dark Marilyn Monroe. From her window, Lily watches Ed, a New York Jewish artist, as much seduced by her own eroticism as his. Ed paints private pictures of "people who looked straight out at you, but who were alone at the same time." Hustvedt's poignant depiction of the friendships and loneliness of small town life is reminiscent of Carson McCullers. Lily evolves from an unformed girl to a compelling woman who knows that her hope is her toughness. Rich characterization makes up for an initially slow-moving narrative, which gathers momentum and culminates in the spectacular demise of Lily's eccentric childhood friend. Recommended for all literary collections.?Molly Gorman, San Marino, Cal.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

'Compelling...Webster's hot-house atmosphere and collection of oddballs and freaks are brilliantly evoked...She orchestrates suspense masterfully and her writing has a quality of stillness, of effortless deliberation, which is peculiarly suited to the sense of foreboding.' -- Literary Review 'Full of humour, surprise and powerful images...Hustvedt's real triumph, though, is to take the ordinary and make it strange while showing how all strangeness is rooted in the ordinary.' -- Observer 'Told with the gripping pace of a straightforward mystery tale...A natural born storyteller' -- Independent 'A taut and convincing drama, as well as an intriguing metaphysical thriller' -- Sunday Times 'Subtle, complex and engaging' -- Financial Times 'Hustvedt's powerful theme of small-town mentality shows how intimacy and claustrophobia, secrets and skeletons, come out of the same closet...[an] exploration of the narrow line between imagination and reality while still managing to be a rip-roaring adventure story...beautifully written' -- Scotsman 'A startlingly good novel, tautly written and very sexy.' -- Marie Claire

Sie beobachten sich gegenseitig, sind magisch voneinander angezogen, und schließlich beginnen die junge Lily und der attraktive Edward Shapiro eine heftige Affäre. Auf einmal gibt es zwei Tote, mit denen Lily in Verbindung gebracht wird - ein erotischer Psychothriller. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Lily Dahl is a heroine of the old school: tough, beautiful and brave. A nineteen-year-old waitress and aspiring actress living in Webster, Minnesota, she becomes enchanted by an exotic outsider - an artist from New York. Drawn into a world of erotic adventure, she finds herself the target of mysterious acts of madness as she strains against the confines of small town life.

Siri Hustvedt geb. am 19.02.1955 in Northfield, Minnesota, als älteste von vier Töchtern eines norwegisch-amerikanischen Professors für Skandinavistik und einer norwegischen Einwanderin. Nach dem Besuch des St. Olaf College in Northfield, das sie 1977 mit B.A. in Geschichte abschloss, arbeitete sie zunächst als Kellnerin. 1978 ging sie zum Studium nach New York. 1979 erwarb sie an der Columbia University den M.A. in Anglistik. 1986 wurde sie mit einer Arbeit über Charles Dickens ('Figures of Dust. A Reading of 'Our mutual friend'") zum PhD promoviert. Im Februar 1981 lernte sie den Schriftsteller Paul Auster kennen, den sie 1983 heiratete und mit dem sie einen Stiefsohn und eine Tochter hat. Heute arbeitet Siri Hustvedt als Schriftstellerin, Essayistin und Übersetzerin aus dem Norwegischen.