Leben denken schauen siri hustvedt biography
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Leben, Denken, Schauen
I remember the first time I heard of Siri Hustvedt—it was via Larry Ypil, poet extraordinaire, who’d drawn me aside one night of literature and revelry to say, “If you want to read about Eros, you have to read Siri Hustvedt.”
Nearly her entire published oeuvre later, I came to her latest collection of essays, Living, Thinking, Looking—picked up from a bookstore one distraught night; it felt like the Universe had consoled me—and I have emerged affirmed of my devotion to Hustvedt. The collection felt too much—bewilderingly so—like coming home. Or, perhaps more accurately, being reminded of what that familiarity felt like. The first essay, its very first line: “Desire appears as a feeling, a flicker or a bomb in the body, but it’s always a hunger for something, and it always propels us somewhere else, toward the thing that is missing.” From this nugget of rhetoric, the essay “Variations of Desire: A Mouse, a Dog, Buber, and Bovary” veers into touchstones seemingly so disparate: Siri’s sister Asti pins her childhood longings on a Mickey Mouse telephone; I am introduced to Martin Buber stroking a horse—the “immense vitality” beneath his skin as he did so; and I cross paths once more with Madame Bovary. And yet, Hustvedt makes it
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Living, Thinking, Looking
The internationally acclaimed novelist Siri Hustvedt has also produced a growing body of nonfiction. She has published a book of essays on painting (Mysteries of the Rectangle) as well as an interdisciplinary investigation of a neurological disorder (The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves). She has given lectures on artists and theories of art at the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In , she delivered the thirty-ninth annual Freud Lecture in Vienna. Living, Thinking, Looking brings together thirty-two essays written between and , in which the author culls insights from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis, and literature. The book is divided into three sections: the essays in Living draw directly from Hustvedt's life; those in Thinking explore memory, emotion, and the imagination; and the pieces in Looking are about visual art. And yet, the same questions recur throughout the collection. How do we see, remember, and feel? How do we interact with other people? What does it mean to sleep, dream, and speak? What is "the self"? Hustvedt's unique synthesis of knowledge from many fields reinvigorates the much-needed dialogue between the humanities and the sciences as it deepe
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