What I Loved. [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

What I Loved is a deeply touching elegiac novel that mourns for the New York artistic life, which was of a time but now has gone--by extension, it is about all losses swept away by mischance and time. Half-blind and alone, Leo tells us of marriage and friendship, and makes the sheer fragility of what seemed forever not only his subject, but perhaps the only subject worth considering. Scholars Leo and his wife Erica admire, and befriend, artist Bill and his first and second wives--their respective sons Matthew and Mark grow up together until the first of a series of tragedies strikes. And things get gradually worse from then on, both because terrible things happen and because people do not get over them.

Part of the strength of this impressive novel is its emotional intensity and part is the context in which those emotions exist; these are smart and talented people, even the children, and we luxuriate, even when things are at their worst, in the sheer intelligence they bring to bear on their situations. It is also impressive that, for Hustvedt, intelligence is an end in itself rather than something that prevents tragedy or makes it more bearable. This is a powerful book because everything Leo knows makes him ever more the victim of exquisite pain. --Roz Kaveney -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

*Starred Review* In her third novel, Hustvedt, a sophisticated and alluring writer drawn to the psyche's most convoluted passageways, co-opts New York's competitive and faddish art world for its symbol-laden milieu. Leo Hertzberg, a thoughtful art historian, narrates a measured and mesmerizing tale of passion and tragedy that spans 20 years and involves his wife, Erica, a literary scholar; his close friendship with highly provocative painter Bill Wechsler; and his hidden infatuation with Bill's sexy muse and second wife, Violet, an expert in psychotic disorders associated with women's body images, from nineteenth-century hysterics to contemporary anorexics. The two couples become thickly entwined, and their two sons, Leo and Erica's artistically inclined Matthew, and Mark, the strangely chimerical offspring of Bill and his morbid first wife, seem like brothers. Hustvedt has Leo dwell at length on the quartet's creative pursuits, which enables her to construct a disturbing lexicon of erotic obsessions and intimations of violence as her labyrinthine tale undulates its unnerving way toward abrupt deaths, prolonged grief, and teenage Mark's increasingly inexplicable behavior. By wedding the ordinary torments of family life with the heightened sensibilities of artists and a criminal grotesqueness, Hustvedt ponders the dark side of inheritance and creativity and the crushing burdens of love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

After buying an astonishing painting in a SoHo gallery, art historian Leo Hertzberg tracks down the artist, Bill Wechsler, and they launch a lifelong friendship with all the attendant joys and sorrows. There's great in-house enthusiasm for Hustvedt's third novel.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

This is the story of two men who first become friends in 1970s New York, of the women in their lives, and of their sons, born the same year. Spanning the hedonism of the eighties and the chill-out nineties, this multi-layered novel combines a plot of mounting menace with a superbly observed portrait of an artist, set against the backdrop of a society reaching new depths of depravity in its frenetic quest for the next fashion, drug and thrill. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

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.