Reading made me feel as if I were the center of the universe

I had always liked reading, but lately I had started reading in a different kind of way. When I opened a book now, I was seized with desperation. I felt as if I was madly in love. It was as if I were in a confession booth and the characters in the book were on the other side telling me their most intimate secrets. When I read, I was a philosopher and it was up to me figure out the meaning of things. Reading made me feel as if I were the center of the universe.

— from Lullabies for Little Criminals, by Heather O'Neill.

It is impossible to divine a story while you are living it

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read, and at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

The Summer without Men, by Siri Hustvedt, was not at all what I expected it to be; it pales against my memory of her What I Loved (which I consider to be one of the best books I've ever read), as well as against my personal expectation of the liberation that an actual summer without men might entail.

It definitely leans toward angry feminist rather than ditzy chick lit. The narrator seems to hold that you have to act like a man — in work, love, whatever — to make it in a man's world. But perhaps by the end of the summer she learns that women can assert themselves in much more effective, subversive ways.

This is the summer of Mia, whose husband of 30 years is taking a Pause from their marriage, in the form of a bright young French thing.

At this news, Mia suffered a breakdown:

Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption. An extreme effort is required just to keep track of one's self, and the turn toward wellness happens the moment a bit of the world is allowed back in, when a person or thing passes through the gate.

She spends time with her mother and her cohort at the seniors' residence.

The Five lived in a ferocious present because unlike the young, who entertain their finality in a remote, philosophical way, these women knew that death was not abstract.

She teaches a summer poetry workshop to a gang of 13-year-olds. It doesn't go easily.

Perception is laden with visible differences, with light and shadow and object masses and moving bodies, but also always there are invisible differences and similarities, ideas that draw the lines, separate, isolate, identify. I was, am kinda different. Not one of the gang. Outside, always outside.

Mia has plenty of time to reflect on her marriage.

This is not the voluntary blindness of new attraction; it is the blindness of an intimacy wrought from years of parallel living, both from its bruises and its balms.

There's a shoutout to Hustvedt's real-life husband:

Correlation is not cause. It is just "the music of chance," as one prominent American novelist has phrased it.

It's a very thoughtful and thought-provoking novel.

What do we know about people really? What the hell do we know about anyone?

There are several philosophical asides, with reference to Kant and Hegel, Socrates and Kierkegaard, and Meister Eckhart.

We are not only receivers of the world; we also actively produce it.

The poetry classes are pretty terrific, rich with how the young experience their worlds, how their worlds are transformed into poetry.

It is impossible to divine a story while you are living it; it is shapeless; an inchoate procession of words and things, and let us be frank: We never recover what was. Most of it vanishes.

It's a well-crafted novel, but for all its interesting bits, as a whole it's a little clinical. Told by Mia, the academic poet, it's fairly emotionless; the tone could be read as being consistent with Mia's character. Mia's poetry, scattered throughout, is pretty awful.

I read on, but more to see what else there might be on Rilke, what more of one old lady's secret embroideries, or what else the adolescent poets might devise, rather than out of any feeling for Mia and how her marriage might turn out.

I didn't move for a few minutes. I stood there with my bare feet in the warm grass and felt immeasurably sad. All at once, I felt sad for the whole lot of us human beings, as if I had suddenly been transported skyward and, like some omniscient narrator in a nineteenth-century novel, were looking down on the spectacle of flawed humanity and wishing things could be different, not wholly different, but different enough to spare some of us a little pain here and there. This was a modest wish, surely, not some utopian fantasy, but the wish of a same narrator who shakes her red head with its slices of gray and mourns deeply, mourns because it is right to mourn the endless repetitions of meanness and violence and pettiness and hurt. And so I mourned until the door opened, and my three neighbors emerged from the house and came across the lawn, and I took them in.

Read an excerpt.

Death will not correct a single line of verse

Proofs

Death will not correct
a single line of verse
she is no proof-reader
she is no sympathetic
lady editor

a bad metaphor is immortal

a shoddy poet who has died
is a shoddy dead poet

a bore bores after death
a fool keeps up his foolish chatter
from beyond the grave

— Tadeusz Różewicz
(translated by Adam Czerniawski)

Tadeusz Różewicz, Polish poet and playwright, died April 24, 2014.

Lullabies for white trash

I'm reading Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals, in anticipation of seeing the author next week. I'm only halfway, but I highly recommend it. It is absolutely heartbreaking.

The worst is, she names streets that I know, and I picture myself walking along them with my daughter, who's just about the age of the novel's narrator, and, well, I well up, and I think how lucky I am.

A selection of Heather O'Neill's writing is available online:

Fiction
The End of Pinky

Johnny really was a gorgeous thief. Tonight he was wearing a black fedora over his dirty blond hair, and his blue eyes peeked out from underneath. He had a tattoo of a swan on his fist. He had survived his father trying to kill him three times. Once he had held him under the water in his bubble bath for a whole minute. Another time he had thrown Johnny off the balcony, and he landed in a pile of snow in just his underwear. Once his father sent him to talk to a stranger wearing a trench coat with nothing on underneath. As a result, Johnny didn’t fear death at all and he had no morals, which gave him the wickedest smile on the strip. It was as though each homicide attempt had only made him more beautiful.

And They Danced by the Light of the Moon (a prequel to the events of Lullabies)

Manon liked how the word "fuck" sounded when it came out of Jules’s mouth. It was like something shiny and wondrous that lit up her whole being. It was like a little piece of dirt in the oyster’s mouth that would turn into a pearl.

Riff-raff

Because I was from Canada, they seemed to think that I had never been exposed to riff-raff. I was like the dodo birds that lacked natural predators and so stood meekly as Europeans clubbed them to death. Listening to too much Anne Murray had made me soft.

Nonfiction
On Deadbeat Dads

Deadbeat Dad typically wears sunglasses and leather jackets. He has long hair, even though he’s balding on top. He rides a skateboard at age thirty-five. He’s fit, and is often spotted in the playground doing chin-ups on the monkey bars. When children are with Deadbeat Dad, they always feel in the flush of a new relationship. Everything Deadbeat Dad says is a riot. He does the most exciting things. He wrestles snakes! He eats shark! He runs into Ozzy Osbourne in bars!

On Growing Up White Trash

I wrote about how the basement walls of my building were covered in licence plates and hubcaps. I thought it was beautiful, like Aladdin's cave. I wrote about eating pork chops while sitting on the sidewalk and watching a television plugged into an extension cord that ran through a window.

Poetic License: A letter from Heather O'Neill, on liberating the sixth grade.

One had compared feeling good to disco balls, one had written about a raving stepbrother who drank all the orange juice in the house, one had written about his dad letting him sleep out on the balcony in the summer.

Radio
Various stories on This American Life.

"The Little Wolfboy of Northern Quebec" on Wiretap. (There are several other stories on Wiretap, but they are not easily searchable, or findable; this one's a favourite of mine.)

Blue Met
Heather O'Neill is at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, interviewed by Shelagh Rogers, on May 2. Heather O'Neill's new book is The Girl Who Was Saturday Night.

If we were his sentences

If any of us were as well taken care of as the sentences of Henry James, we'd never long for another, never wander away: where else would we receive such constant attention, our thoughts anticipated, our feelings understood? Who else would robe us so richly, take us to the best places, or guard our virtue as his own and defend our character in every situation? If we were his sentences, we'd sing ourselves though we were dying and about to be extinguished, since the silence which would follow our passing would not be like the pause left behind by a noisy train. It would be a memorial, well-remarked, grave, just as the Master has assured us death itself is: the distinguished thing.

— from On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, William H. Gass.

Gass writes a mean sentence himself.

[On Being Blue is the Argo Bookshop bookclub selection to be discussed at the end of May.]

Mind modelling

As you may have noticed, in general members of book clubs regard the characters inside books exactly the way they regard the characters outside books. The facts that the former are made of the alphabet and the latter of muscle, tissue, and bone are of little relevance.

— from The Summer without Men, by Siri Hustvedt.

Science backs this up. It's the same brain centres lighting up in response to a stimulus, whether in the world or in our minds.

This is the essence of a short online course I recently completed, and it's a curious serendipity that I was concurrently reading a novel that addressed the same concept within it.

By the age of 3 or 4, we develop a theory of mind, applying the sense of our own personness, to others, real or fictional, in order to understand them, to fill in the gaps.

Real life is good experience for understanding and appreciating literature; and fiction can be good practice for real life.

Certainly the girls attending the narrator's summer poetry workshop learn this lesson.

The Summer without Men was not the book I expected it to be. Having read Hustvedt before, I knew it wouldn't be chick lit. There's some angry feminism about it, not all of which I agree with.

The narrator's a poet, an academic. As much as she references Kierkegaard, I never fully warmed to her.

Reading Gabo online

The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World
"even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination"

Light Is Like Water
"Household objects, in the fullness of their poetry, were flying through the kitchen sky on their own wings."

Tuesday Siesta
"She bore the conscientious serenity of someone accustomed to poverty."

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
"a Portuguese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him"

Transcendence of form

Beethoven's music is Hegelian philosophy: it is at the same time truer than this; i.e., it contains the conviction that the self replication of society as something identical is not enough, indeed, that it is false. Logical identity as the esthetic and produced domination of forms is at once practiced and criticized by Beethoven. The seal of its truth in Beethoven's music is its suspension: the transcendence of form, through with form for the first time achieves its inner meaning. The transcendence of form is for Beethoven the portrayal — not the expression — of hope.

— T.W. Adorno, as quoted in Hegel — Purpose, Results and the Philosophical Essence, by Scott Hornton, in Harper's Magazine.

I've just finished another online course, this one exploring Beethoven's piano sonatas. I've learned quite a bit about the structure of Beethoven's music, and about the historical context for all the rules he was stretching to breaking point. And I've come to some understanding about some of the elements that attract me, about why I love Beethoven so much (even though I wasn't especially familiar with his sonatas before taking up this course).

I got to realizing just how modern Beethoven is, and it got me thinking about Kierkegaard and the crisis of modernity, and I started drawing connections, and recognized an ironic stance in Beethoven's work, how self-reference can only come from self-awareness, how he could be said to be composing metamusic. Beethoven of course precedes Kierkegaard, but Hegel would've been all the rage, and Kant: "The moral law within us and the starry heaven above us!" — which Beethoven had scrawled in a notebook. The music is becoming. And Beethoven is infinite.

And in writing my final assignment, I found scattered across the internet evidence that others have thought as I have. A reassuring thing.

And I am reminded to pick up Thomas Mann again. I must read Doctor Faustus.

Life has taught me to understand books

Learning to Read

If I had to look up every fifth or sixth word
so what. I looked them up.
I had nowhere important to be.

My father was unavailable, and my mother
looked like she was about to break,
and not into blossom, each time I spoke.

My favorite was The Iliad. True,
I had trouble pronouncing the names;
but when was I going to pronounce them, and

to whom?
My stepfather maybe?
Number one, he could barely speak English –

two, he had sufficient cause
to smirk or attack
without prompting from me.

Loneliness boredom and fear
my motivation
fiercely fueled.

I get down on my knees and thank God for them.

Du Fu, the Psalms, Whitman, Rilke.
Life has taught me
to understand books.

— Franz Wright

I am resplendent in divergence

The end is the best part. After the stop. I love the end. Sometimes I start chanting that bit spontaneously. "I am resplendent in divergence." It's a holy thing.

I've been looking for this song forever, because upon a time I owned it, on vinyl, and I think of it often, every time I encounter a new ism. Surely my vast knowledge of isms can be traced back to this song. I learned more isms than any 12-year-old ought to know. I developed a weird interest in the Great Schism, and also the teachings of Nestorius. I think solipsism may still be my favourite, though, because it was my first.

Sometimes when I hear bells, I say, out loud, "Bells! I can hear bells!"

Nobody ever gets the reference, though, with my chanting, or the bells, or the diction of various isms.

Having seen Divergent this weekend with my daughter, I am now, of course, resplendent in it.

Thank you, Internet, for restoring this divergence to me.

We are all comic characters

Lola's eyes gleamed with pleasure and interest as she listened to my tales of the cosmopolitans, all of them true but all fictions nevertheless. Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic of the merely sad. It doesn't matter whether you are stuck in the provincial backwater of Bonden or wandering down the Champs-Élysées. The merely sad business about me was that I wanted to be admired, wanted to see myself as a shining reflection in Lola's eyes.

— from The Summer without Men, by Siri Hustvedt.

Closing the circle

The Circle, by Dave Eggers.

I mean, all this stuff you're involved in, it's all gossip. It's people talking about each other behind their backs. That's the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, it's fucking dorky.

Like, smile, favorite, zing, tweet, thumbs up, vote up, recommend, pin, forward, plus, doubleplusgood.

Recommended for anyone who has ever tweeted, messaged, sent an email, answered a customer survey, reviewed, commented, posted a status update, joined a community.

Reviews

Bookpuddle:

Society buys into the idea that ever increasing levels of "transparency" are of ultimate benefit to all. The Circle implements what sounds like great ideas at first — politicians that wear cameras on them at all times, criminals that are easily identifiable in a crowd, children that can never be abducted because they are instantly trackable via GPS, etc., — but along the way, all personal freedoms are one by one jettisoned, and the reader is faced with seeing (literally) what it would really be like to be at all times monitored, and "known" by anyone else who wanted to observe what you were up to.

So Many Books:

The Circle was a page-turner, the horror of watching Mae get sucked into the hivemind is delicious.

Betsy Morais: Sharing Is Caring Is Sharing, The New Yorker

But even without the searing wit of "1984," the book is capable of landing on point—when it's at its most irksome. Where "1984" has the vigilant Police Patrol and Thought Police, "The Circle" has SeeChange and Clarification. Surveillance isn't a bad word; it's a gift, even a human right.

Margaret Atwood: When Privacy Is Theft, The New York Review of Books

The nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin—who famously said, "Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you who you are"—viewed bad taste as a moral offense, and the young Circlers subscribe to this dogma: nothing gets you the brushoff more quickly than a pair of uncool jeans. Utopia, it seems, is an awful lot like high school, but with even more homework.

Ellen Ullman: Ring of Power, The New York Times

She is more a high school mean girl than an evil opponent. Perhaps this is what Eggers wants to say: that evil in the future will look more like the trivial Mae than it will the hovering dark eye of Big Brother.

Looking forward to Blue Met

The launch of the festival program is like Christmas for me. I look forward to it every year. Then I sit with my various coloured pens, marking the must-sees and the maybe-interestings, mapping and scheduling.

The 16th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, themed "The Power of Words," runs April 28 to May 4, with some pre- and post-festival events.

This year's recipient of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix is Richard Ford. (But I'm not yet convinced I need to read him.)

At my first go over the program, I've identified two standout events:

• Thursday, May 1, an interview with Austrian crime writer Wolf Haas, author of the darkly humorous Simon Brenner books and for whom I've developed a fondness. I'm giddy with anticipation.
• Friday, May 2, Shelagh Rogers interviews Heather O'Neill, author of the amazing Lullabies for Little Criminals. No, I haven't actually read it, but I own a copy and I know all sorts of things about it and I expect it to be thoroughly amazing. She has a new book out.

I'll be poring over the event listings in more detail in the coming days — I'll let you know what else I find. The full program is available on the Blue Metropolis website.

Before the law

Orson Welles reads Kafka.



"Every man strives to attain the law."

Unnaturally extreme social needs

"It's not that I'm not social. I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you're purveying. It improves nothing. It's not nourishing. It's like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You're not hungry, you don't need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these emptying calories. This is what you're pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it's equally addictive."

— from The Circle, by Dave Eggers.

Yes! That's the world exactly.

(As the novel progresses, there's a creeping sense of unease. Clearly something bad is going to happen to sweet Mae, new employee of the Circle, modelled after real-life Google.)

My reading is enhanced this week by watching Google and the World Brain, in which Kevin Kelly relates how Larry Page said, "It's not to make a search engine, it's to make an AI."

Also, "Google's Earth" by William Gibson: "We are its unpaid content-providers [...]. Google is made of us."

Everyone always mistakes everyone for someone else

The Letter Killers Club, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, is a strange little excuse for a novel.

I want to love it, but I don't quite. For such a short novel, it took an amazingly long time to read. It's full of interesting ideas that aren't completely developed, aren't resolved, don't completely gel. The novel is a fantastic cerebral exercise, but it leaves me cold.

A conception without a line of text, I argued, is like a needle without thread: it pricks, but does not sew.

That's how I feel about this book.

The club is a secret society of men known only by nonsense syllables. They are "conceivers" — in the interest of purity, nothing is committed to paper. They meet weekly and tell stories that span genres, subjects, and formats.

But it's the framing story that captivates me — who are these men, why do they meet, what is so subversive in it, why must it be so secret? where is the political element? for it feels like there must be one.

Here are some of the themes strewn across these pages.

I walked quickly — from crossroad to crossroad — trying to untangle my feelings. The evening seemed like a black wedge driven into my life. I had to unwedge it. But how?

**********

I think this is all fairly simple: every three-dimensional being doubles himself twice — reflecting himself outwardly and inwardly. Both reflections are untrue: the cold, flat likeness returned by the looking glass is untrue because it is less than three-dimensional; the face's other reflection, cast inward, flowing along nerves to the brain and composed of a complex set of sensations, is also untrue because it is more than three-dimensional.

**********

And if the hectic youth who mistook our passer for someone else — racing up, then away — had been able to see through eyes to what is behind them, he would have understood once and for all: everyone always mistakes everyone for someone else.

**********

The fewer the managers, the greater the manageability.

**********

[...] you enter facts from the outside, not the inside, you're worse than your bacteria: they eat the facts, you eat the facts' meanings.

**********

Plotlines throw out disputes the way a plant throws out spores: into space, where they germinate.

See also
The Millions: Storytelling is a Deadly Business: Krzhizhanovsky's The Letter Killers Club
The Rumpus: Against an Ethical Machine

Inspiration is for amateurs

Last week I went to see Man Booker International Prize-nominated author and creative writing professor Josip Novakovich and two-time Booker Prize-winning author Peter Carey in conversation on stage.

I like Peter Carey, and I'm so relieved that the real-life Peter Carey does not taint my impression of his books, but confirms and enhances my suspicion of the sort of person he is. Wry and unassuming. Observant, clever. Genuine.

On the other hand, I've never read Josip Novakovich. Being a "local" boy (he's called Montreal home for some time), he has flirted with one of my friends. He completely won me over; a little obsessed with death, but in a good way, smart and funny.

The audio file linked to here is a little over an hour, but well worth it. The conversation is moderated; they cover topics including the writing process, inspiration, motivation, editors, how you view "home" when you no longer live there, outsiderness.

Highlights
Josip described in great detail a story he's working on, about a dying man who plans in great detail his own death, funeral, etc. but he — Josip — played it down as something he hasn't fully worked out yet. And Peter cried out, why bother? he's already plotted it out to the point that he — Peter — would lose interest with the project. (Peter himself may plot the skeleton of a journey, but the writing remains a journey of discovery.) And all of this has seeped heavily into my current reading (Krzhizhanovsky's Letter Killers Club) and studying (a MOOC on cognitive poetics) and stained it beyond repair.

Novakovich also said the best advice he ever received from an editor was to cut the first nine pages (and bear in mind that he writes short stories). As an editor, I love hearing anecdotes like this, about finding the real story in a glut of words, finding where the story really starts.

The big takeaway for me was in the discussion of "inspiration is for amateurs," driving home the point that writing is not a romantic notion; it's something they work hard at.


Learn more about the Thinking Out Loud conversation series on the creative process, sponsored by Concordia University and The Globe and Mail.

Peter Carey's latest novel, Amnesia, about a hacker, is due out in November. Why, yes, I do have a birthday around then.

No one should end his learning while he lives

We are living in 1937 and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organisation, education, graduation, for a century — for several centuries. The three- or four-years' course of lectures, the bachelor who knows some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern. A new battleship, a new aeroplane, a new radio receiver is always an improvement upon its predecessor. But a new university is just another imitation of all the old universities that have ever been. Educationally we are still for all practical purposes in the coach and horse and galley stage.

— from World Brain, by H.G. Wells.

In this collection of essays, Wells envisions a massive, digitized, permanent World Encyclopedia, accessible to everyone. In 2004, Google announced that it had the same idea. Sort of.



Google and the World Brain is being screened tonight in Montreal.

I'm not able to attend, so I poked around a little and it turns out the film is readily available for viewing online. (But don't tell anyone. Pretty sure it's an infringement of copyright.)

Lettered excesses must be destroyed

"You know, Goethe once described Shakespeare (to Eckermann) as a wildly overgrown tree that — for two hundred years straight — had stifled the growth of all English literature; thirty years later, Börne called Goethe: 'A monstrous cancer spreading through the body of German literature.' Both men were right: if our letterizations stifle one another, if writers prevent each other from writing, they don't allow readers even to form an idea. The reader hasn't the chance to have ideas, the right to them has been usurped by word professionals who are stronger and more experienced in this matter: libraries have crushed the reader's imagination, the professional writings of a small coterie of scribblers have crammed shelves and heads to bursting. Lettered excesses must be destroyed: on shelves and in heads. One must clear at least a little space of other people's conceptions to make room for one's own: everyone has the right to conception — both the professional and the dilettante."

— from The Letter Killers Club, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.

The Argo Bookshop book club meets March 27 to discuss this book over drinks.

Three novels about art, plus

I love art. As the saying goes, I don't know much about art, but I know what I like. Often I feel that I don't have the vocabulary to talk about art. But some writers do.

While nonfiction texts about art might teach me something about technique, form, history, context, I think fiction excels at teaching me to respond to and feel something about art.

Here are three novels that have dealt with art, artists, the art world superbly. (And it's telling that I was unable have yet to get around to review a couple of them.)

Art as business

An Object of Beauty, by Steve Martin.

The story follows young and ambitious Lacey Yeager as she climbs through the New York art world, starting in the bins at Sotheby's and finally owning her own gallery. This world is full of art history majors, and generally not people who actually make art.

It doesn't entirely succeed as a novel — I never cared what happened to Lacey. But it's a fascinating glimpse of a world few are wealthy, privileged, or determined enough to see. Steve Martin is a collector of fine art, and this novel is not about art so much as its value, whether to an individual or according to the market.

Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air.

Read an excerpt.

Note, also, that gorgeous artwork is reproduced within.

Art as an intensely personal expression

The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud.
There's a lot of hate in this novel's narrator. Nora, gradeschool art teacher, rediscovers her artistic drive when she befriends the immigrant family of a new student, in particular his mother, an artist looking to share a studio.

Messud explores Nora's art-making and its concept, which in turn relies on Nora's interpretation of the art and biographies of Emily Dickinson, Alice Neel, and Edie Sedgwick.

It's said of Edie Sedgwick, but it may as well be about Nora, perhaps Messud herself:

When, as a woman, you make yourself the work of art, and when you are then what everyone looks at, then whatever else, you aren't alone.

I can't think of another recent novel that's been so divisive in its reception, so many voices whom I respect decrying that this novel is not worth the hype or critical praise, and it seems to me the lines are clearly drawn along gender and age. For me, that reinforces the point, that art, the creative process, is deeply individual.

Hate it for yourself.

Art for art's sake

What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt.

I loved this novel. It brought me to tears, wonder, astonishment, despair. It's one of the finest novels I've read, ever.

Written from the point of view of an art historian with some artists as characters, it describes the (near?) contemporary art scene and facets like installation art such that I almost think I understand them.

In equal parts family saga, thriller, meditation, I'd say its primarily about love and loss. But its imbued with art, peopled with artists, who do art, who live and breathe art. It makes not just the characters' artistic visions come alive, but the very idea that there exists such a thing as artistic vision becomes crystal clear, and it makes me wonder how anyone could live without art.

"That's the problem with seeing things. Nothing is clear. Feelings, ideas shape what's in front of you. Cezanne wanted the naked world, but the world is never naked. In my work, I want to create doubt." He stopped and smiled at me. "Because that's what we're sure of."

Sample it here.

Coincidentally, I finally downloaded some of Hustvedt's back catalogue last week. And I was thrilled to discover that she has another novel freshly released, The Blazing World, about a woman painter negotiating New York's art establishment.

Plus
Mark Rothko on the Transcendent Power of Art and How (Not) To Experience His Paintings