What doyouthink?
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318 pages, Hardcover
First published March 19, 2019
This book is a portrait of the artist as young woman, the artist who came to New York to live and to suffer and to write her mystery, Like the great detective who shares her initials S.H., the writer, sees, hears and smells the clues. The signs are everywhere, in a face, in the sky, in a book. A letter is slipped under the door. A knife arrives in the mail. Footsteps sound in the street and in the hallway. She turns her key in the lock. The woman are chanting in the next room. Unlike Holmes, however Minnesota cannot depend on Conan Doyle to arrange a perfect world for her..
Temporal coexistence is true of every single book. You can hop to page 137 and then back to 7 twenty times over, but the story or the argument is fixed, determined from the first word to the last. And in this particular book, the book you are reading now, the young person and the old person live side by side in the precarious truths of memory. Here I am free to dance over decades in the small white space between paragraphs or longer over one bright minute of my life for page after page or toy with tenses that point backwards of forwards. I am free to follow the earlier self with interruptions from the later self because the old lady has perspective the young person cannot have.
We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backwards too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the capricious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable.
We keep company with an inner voice, one that began long ago in early childhood and falls silent in unconsciousness, in dreamless sleep, and in death. When we are alive and awake it is the mouthpiece of the self, and he or she is the chattering person we know best, often deluded it is true, but endlessly explicating events as they happen.
Can the past serve as a hiding place from the present? Is this book you are reading now my search for a destination called Then? Tell me where memory ends and invention begins. Tell me why I need you with me as my fellow traveller, my variously dear and crotchety other, my spouse before the book’s duration……… Every book is a withdrawal from immediacy into reflection. Every book includes a perverse wish to foul up time, to cheat its inevitable pull…… Am I vainly searching for the moment when the future that is now the past beckoned me with its vast, empty face
I read for hours and felt as if I have become a being of pure potential, a body transformed into an enchanted space of infinite expansion.. I found refuge in the cadances of whichever mind I was borrowing for the duration, immersed in sentences I couldn’t have written or imagined
Wish I could capture this. Playful and clever like Ali Smith, but more philosophy, Hustvedt is just really enjoyable to spend time with. Here she talks to her 23 yr old self alone in New York City in 1978, beautiful, intelligent, awash in poetry and philosophy, disregarded for her gender, writing a failed novel, flashing a switchblade. Somewhere I saw this described as a rage against the patriarchy. It‘s also fun. Really happy I finally read her.
No olvidemos que un recuerdo está siempre en el presente, no olvidemos que cada vez que evocamos un recuerdo este está sujeto a cambios, pero tampoco olvidemos que esos cambios pueden traer consigo verdades.
El pasado es cambiante cada vez que se recuerda.