Siri Hustvedt  

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Siri Hustvedt (born February 19, 1955) is an American novelist and essayist. Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, five novels, two books of essays, and several works of non-fiction. Her books include: The Blindfold (1992), The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), What I Loved (2003), for which she is best known, A Plea for Eros (2006), The Sorrows of an American (2008), The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2010), The Summer Without Men (2011), Living, Thinking, Looking (2012), and The Blazing World (2014). What I Loved and The Summer Without Men were international bestsellers. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.

Biography and writing life

Siri Hustvedt attended public school in her hometown Northfield, Minnesota and received a degree from the Cathedral School in Bergen, Norway, in 1973. Hustvedt graduated from St. Olaf College with a B.A. in History in 1977. She moved to New York City to attend Columbia University as a graduate student in 1978. Her first published work was a poem in The Paris Review. A small collection of poems, Reading to You, appeared in 1982 with Station Hill Press.

She met her husband, the writer Paul Auster in 1981, and they were married the following year.

She completed her PhD in English at Columbia in 1986. Her dissertation on Charles Dickens, Figures of Dust: A Reading of Our Mutual Friend, is an exploration of language and identity in the novel, with particular emphasis on Dickens’ metaphors of fragmentation, his use of pronouns, and their relation to a narrative, dialogical conception of self. She refers in the dissertation to sources that would influence and reappear in her later writing, including the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Mary Douglas, Paul Ricoeur, and Julia Kristeva.

Hustvedt and Auster’s daughter, Sophie Hustvedt Auster, the singer and actress, was born in 1987.

After finishing her dissertation, Hustvedt began writing prose. Two stories of the four that would become her first novel, The Blindfold, were published in literary magazines and later included in Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991. Since then she has continued to write fiction and publish essays on visual art but also on diverse interdisciplinary subjects that investigate the intersections among philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience.

Writing style and themes

Siri Hustvedt’s works repeatedly pose questions about the nature of identity, selfhood and perception. In The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, an interdisciplinary account of her own seizure disorder, Hustvedt states her need to view her symptom not “through a single window” but “from all angles.” These multiple perspectives do not resolve themselves into a single view but rather create an atmosphere of ambiguity and flux. Hustvedt presents the reader with characters whose minds are inseparable from their bodies and their environments and whose sense of self is situated on the threshold between the conscious and unconscious. Her characters often suffer traumatic events that disrupt the rhythms of their lives and lead to disorientation and a discontinuity of their identities. Hustvedt’s concern with embodied identity manifests itself in her investigation of gender roles and interpersonal relations. Both her fiction and nonfiction highlight dynamics of the gaze and questions of ethical representation in the visual arts.

An example of crossover to her husband's work, Auster used Iris, the narrator of Hustvedt's first novel, The Blindfold, in his novel Leviathan.

Books

Poetry

• Reading to You (1982)

Fiction

• The Blindfold (1992)
• The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996)
• What I Loved (2003)
• The Sorrows of an American (2008)
• The Summer Without Men (2011)
• The Blazing World (2014)

Nonfiction

• Yonder (1998)
• Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (2005)
• A Plea for Eros (2005)
• The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2009)
• Living, Thinking, Looking (2012)

Translation

• Kjetsaa, Geir. Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer's Life, translated by Siri Hustvedt and David McDuff (1998)
• Six poems by Tor Ulven from Vanishing Point. Writ, no. 18, 1986.

Translation editor

• Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Ferber, Nadof, Tazi (1998)

Original foreign book publications

• Embodied Visions: What Does it Mean to Look at a Work of Art?, bilingual edition English-German, published as part of a series of the annual Schelling Lectures delivered at the Academie der Bildenen Künste in Munich; Deutscher Kunst Verlag, 2010
• The Eight Voyages of Sinbad, published in Spanish Ocho Viajes Con Simbad with photographs by Reza. Madrid: La Fabrica, 2011. French edition by Actes Sud, 2011

Publications in journals and anthologies

Poems

• “Weather Markings.” The Paris Review 81(1981): 136-137 Reprinted. The Paris Review Anthology. Ed. George Plimpton. New York: Norton, 1990. 582-5833.
• “Broken Geometry.” Pequod 12 (1981): 69-73.
• “Eclipse,” “Hermaphroditic Parallels.” The Paris Review 87 (1983): 129-130.
• “Haiku” (on Chardin). Art Issues, Summer (2000).
• “Nine Boxes.” A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell. Ed., Jonathan Safran Foer. New York: D.A.P., 2001. 93-98.

Stories

• “Mr. Morning.” Ontario Review 30 (1989): 80-98.

Reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1990. Ed. Richard Ford. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 1990. 105-126. Also reprinted in The Literary Insomniac: Stories and Essays for Sleepless Nighta. Eds. Elyse Cheney and Wendy Hubbert. New York: Doubleday, 1996. 20-48.

• “Houdini.” Fiction 9 (1990): 144-162. Reprinted in Best American Short Stories 1991. Ed. Alice Adams. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. 209-227.

Essays on visual art

• “Vermeer’s Annunciation.” Modern Painters, Spring, 1996.
• “Ghosts at the Table.” Modern Painters, Summer, 1997.
• “Not Just Bottles” (on Giorgio Morandi). Modern Painters, Winter, 1998.

Reprinted: The Penguin Book of Art Writing. Eds. Karen Wright and Martin Gayford, 1999. Reprinted in Writers on Artists, London: DK, 2001.

• “The Man with the Red Crayon” (on Chardin). Modern Painters, Spring, 2000.
• “Double Exposure” (on Gerhard Richter). Modern Painters, Summer, 2002.
• “Heaven’s Alphabet” (on Russian avant-garde book exhibition at MoMA) Art on Paper, July, August, 2002.
• “Remembering in Color” (on Joan Mitchell). Modern Painters, Autumn, 2002.
• “The Pleasures of Bewilderment”(on Giorgione). The Yale Review 91 (2003): 85-93.
• “Finding Goya’s Head.” Modern Painters. Winter, 2003.
• “Necessary Leaps” (catalogue essay). Richard Allen Morris: Retrospective 1958-2004. Museum Haus Lange. Krefeld, Germany: 2004. Reprinted in Modern Painters. Winter, 2004.
• "Duccio di Buoninsegna at the Met.” “La Vierge et l’Enfant.” Nouvelle Observateur. August 18, 2005.
• “Goya’s Bodies: The Living, the Dead, and the Ghostly.” The Yale Review 93 (2005): 34-59.
• “Old Pictures” (on photography) Modern Painters, Fall, 2005.
• “Insides Out” (on Kiki Smith). Modern Painters, 2006. Revised version for catalogue essay, “Kiki Smith: Bound and Unbound,”Kiki Smith: Wellspring, Repères, Cahiers d’art contemporain, no. 139, Galerie Lelong, Paris, 2007.
• “The Places that Scare You” (on Louise Bourgeois) The Guardian, October 6, 2007.
• “Why Goya” published in Spanish as “Francisco de Goya o los equivos.” Fundacion Amigos Museo del Prado (2008)
• “The Enchanted and Demonic World of Annette Messager” The Guardian, February 21, 2009.
• “Truth and Rightness” (catalogue essay for Gerhard Richter). Gerhard Richter: Overpainted Photographs, ed. Markus Heinselmann, Hatje Cantz, 2009.
• “The Drama of Perception: Looking at Morandi.” The Yale Review 97 (2009).
• “Embodied Visions: What Does it Mean to Look at a Work of Art,” The Yale Review 98 (2010).
• “Margaret Bowland’s Theatrum Mundi,” catalogue essay for Excerpts from the Great American Songbook, Babcock Galleries, New York, and the Greenville County Museum of Art (2011).
• “A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women.” Catalogue essay for Frauen: Picasso, Beckmann, de Kooning at Pinakothek der Moderne. Munich (2012)
• “Anselm Kiefer: The Truth is Always Gray.” Essay for catalogue of the Eli Broad Collection of Art in Los Angeles (2013).

Essays on various subjects

• “Gatsby’s Glasses.” Conjunctions: 29. Tributes: American Writers on American Writers, (1997): 265-275.
• “A Plea for Eros.”Brick, 1997. Reprinted in The Art of the Essay: The Best of 1999. Ed. Philip Lopate. New York: Random House, 1999.
• “Franklin Pangborn: An Apologia.” O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors. Eds. Luc Sante and Melissa Pierson. New York: Granta Books, 1999. Reprinted as essay for The Criterion Collection (film).
• Essay on Bohumil Hrabel’s I Served the King of England. Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost. Eds. Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Linda and Esta Spalding. London: Bloomsbury, 2001.
• “The World Trade Center.” 110 Stories: New York Writers After September 11. Ed. Ulrich Baer. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
• “Being a Man.” Conjunctions 41, Two Kingdoms: The Dualism Issue (2003) 71-76.
• “Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self.” Samtiden (Norway), November, 2004.
• “Some Musings on the Word Scandinavia,” Lettre Internationale, Denmark: 08, 2005.
• Introduction. “Personal and Impersonal Words.” Henry James, The Bostonians. New York: Barnes and Nobles Classics, 2005.
• “Look Away.” New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 135-138.
• “Variations on Desire: A Mouse, A Dog, Buber, and Bovary.” Conjunctions 41 (2007) 213-221.
• “My Father Myself.” Granta 104 (2008): 56-75.
• “My Inger Christensen,” Jyllands Posten (Denmark) Jan. 8, 2009. Reprinted in Poetry, May, 2009.
• “Excursions to the Islands of the Happy Few” (on expert culture). Philoctetes: The Journal of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination, vol.1 2007. Reprinted in Salmagundi, no. 166-167; Spring Summer 2010.
• “Reflections on a More or Less Hidden Being.” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 46: Special Issue on Psychoanalysis and the Media (2010): 224-234.
• “Stig Dagerman.” Foreword to The Snake, Ormen, Norstedts Forlag, Sweden, 2010.
• “The Real Story.” Salmagundi, nos. 170-171, Spring Summer (2012): 35-53.
• “Three Emotional Stories: Reflections on Memory, the Imagination, Narrative and the Self. Neuropsychoanalysis 13 (2), 2011 (with peer review: Vittorio Gallese, dept. of neuroscience, University of Parma and Richard Kessler, Adults and Children with Learning Disabilities, Inc. New York)
• “Flashbacks” New York Times, Sunday Review, Feb. 18, 2012
• “Freud’s Playground” Salmagundi, nos. 174-175, Spring Summer (2012): 59-78.
• “On Reading.” Columbia: 49, (2011).
• “Philosophy Matters in Brain Matters” Seizure: European Journal of Epilepsy 22 (2013) 169-173.
• “Underground Sexism: What was that you just said?” In Fifty Shades of Feminism. Eds. Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes, and Susie Orbach. London: Virago, 2013.