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The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt
Siri PREMIO PRINCESA DE ASTURIAS DE LAS LETRAS. Una inquietante y perturbadora novela sobre los misterios de la identidad. Iris Vegan es una joven estudiante de Literatura de la Universidad de Columbia que se busca a sí misma en una ciudad, Nueva York, donde los encuentros fortuitos pueden alterar el curso de una vida para siempre. Así, en ese intento por definirse, Iris es cruelmente recompensada por el destino al cruzarse con cinco desconocidos que amenazan con romper su frágil identidad. Esta brillante, hipnótica y turbadora novela es una compleja exploración de un desasosiego vital. Con un estilo original y una voz lúcida, esta obra es un desafío a nuestro concepto de la relación entre realidad y ficción, y la penetrante presentación de una mente afligida. Siri Hustvedt, cuya dilatada carrera literaria le ha valido una merecida reputación como escritora y múltiples premios y reconocimientos, irrumpió en el panorama literario con esta «novela impactante» ( Library Journal ), «conmovedora y deslumbrante» (Don DeLillo) que descubrió «la llegada de un gran talento» (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times ).
Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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About the author
Siri Hustvedt
93 books2,517 followersHustvedt was born in Northfield, Minnesota. Her father Lloyd Hustvedt was a professor of Scandinavian literature, and her mother Ester Vegan emigrated from Norway at the age of thirty. She holds a B.A. in history from St. Olaf College and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University; her thesis on Charles Dickens was entitled Figures of Dust: A Reading of Our Mutual Friend.
Hustvedt has mainly made her name as a novelist, but she has also produced a book of poetry, and has had short stories and essays on various subjects published in (among others) The Art of the Essay, 1999, The Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991, The Paris Review, Yale Review, and Modern Painters.
Like her husband Paul Auster, Hustvedt employs a use of repetitive themes or symbols throughout her work. Most notably the use of certain types of voyeurism, often linking objects of the dead to characters who are relative strangers to the deceased characters (most notable in various facits in her novels The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl) and the exploration of identity. She has also written essays on art history and theory (see "Essay collections") and painting and painters often appear in her fiction, most notably, perhaps, in her novel, What I Loved.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, writer Paul Auster, and their daughter, singer and actress Sophie Auster.
Hustvedt has mainly made her name as a novelist, but she has also produced a book of poetry, and has had short stories and essays on various subjects published in (among others) The Art of the Essay, 1999, The Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991, The Paris Review, Yale Review, and Modern Painters.
Like her husband Paul Auster, Hustvedt employs a use of repetitive themes or symbols throughout her work. Most notably the use of certain types of voyeurism, often linking objects of the dead to characters who are relative strangers to the deceased characters (most notable in various facits in her novels The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl) and the exploration of identity. She has also written essays on art history and theory (see "Essay collections") and painting and painters often appear in her fiction, most notably, perhaps, in her novel, What I Loved.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, writer Paul Auster, and their daughter, singer and actress Sophie Auster.
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April 29, 2013
I recorded this review, previously for Bird Brian's Big Audio Project. You can listen at the following link: https://soundcloud.com/kris-rabberman...
In a Guardian interview from 2010, Siri Hustvedt describes herself as wanting "to write something with an uncanny feeling" a few years after her marriage to Paul Auster. At the time of her marriage, she had been writing poetry, but she shifted her focus and crafted this unsettling, haunting novel.
On the surface, The Blindfold is about three years in the life of Iris Vegan, a graduate student at Columbia University with very few personal or financial resources, who struggles to navigate an ominous New York City. Beneath that surface, the novel explores the fragmentation of identity, the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of Iris’s emerging with an integrated sense of self in a world where people put on and take off masks seemingly at will, where gender, age, and influence make it difficult for a young female student to find her identity without being coerced by others' desires. I found Iris's efforts in the face of medical traumas, poverty, and troubled personal relationships and encounters to be moving. I also believe that this novel’s power stems not only from Hustvedt’s unblinking examination of Iris’s struggles, but also from her presentation of some cracks in the armor of the powerful men whom Iris faces. This is a novel that does not provide a sense of closure. All the characters are missing pieces of themselves. All resort to silences, misdirections, projections, and disguises when interacting with others. In spite of this darkness, and of her apparent fragility, Iris keeps trying to connect meaningfully with others, and with herself. Her efforts are admirable, and provided me with a sense of hope for her, even as she runs away from another dangerous encounter in the novel’s climax.
The novel's central concerns are reflected in its structure. The Blindfold is comprised of four sections, with the first three focusing on specific episodes in Iris's life, taken out of chronological order, and the fourth section referring back to the previous sections as Iris narrates a linked series of new events. As Iris narrates this section, she attempts to put events back into an integrated whole. In the end, however, Hustvedt leaves the reader with a host of questions. In this final section, in spite of Iris’s efforts to relate an integrated story, in her narration events do not lead to a clear chronology. Motives remain obscure. The novel is shattered, mirroring Iris’s fragmented identity.
Soundtrack for The Blindfold
Nico & The Velvet Underground- I’ll Be Your Mirror (Andy Warhol Video, 1966)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sKzME...
John Parish and Polly Jean Harvey - That Was My Veil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJH7W3...
Throwing Muses - Ellen West
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTMgQ...
Kristin Hersh - Close Your Eyes (Demo)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlKxcX...
Kristin Hersh - Trouble
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fqIsf...
Ani DiFranco - Present/Infant (Live at Babeville)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU17oI...
In a Guardian interview from 2010, Siri Hustvedt describes herself as wanting "to write something with an uncanny feeling" a few years after her marriage to Paul Auster. At the time of her marriage, she had been writing poetry, but she shifted her focus and crafted this unsettling, haunting novel.
On the surface, The Blindfold is about three years in the life of Iris Vegan, a graduate student at Columbia University with very few personal or financial resources, who struggles to navigate an ominous New York City. Beneath that surface, the novel explores the fragmentation of identity, the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of Iris’s emerging with an integrated sense of self in a world where people put on and take off masks seemingly at will, where gender, age, and influence make it difficult for a young female student to find her identity without being coerced by others' desires. I found Iris's efforts in the face of medical traumas, poverty, and troubled personal relationships and encounters to be moving. I also believe that this novel’s power stems not only from Hustvedt’s unblinking examination of Iris’s struggles, but also from her presentation of some cracks in the armor of the powerful men whom Iris faces. This is a novel that does not provide a sense of closure. All the characters are missing pieces of themselves. All resort to silences, misdirections, projections, and disguises when interacting with others. In spite of this darkness, and of her apparent fragility, Iris keeps trying to connect meaningfully with others, and with herself. Her efforts are admirable, and provided me with a sense of hope for her, even as she runs away from another dangerous encounter in the novel’s climax.
The novel's central concerns are reflected in its structure. The Blindfold is comprised of four sections, with the first three focusing on specific episodes in Iris's life, taken out of chronological order, and the fourth section referring back to the previous sections as Iris narrates a linked series of new events. As Iris narrates this section, she attempts to put events back into an integrated whole. In the end, however, Hustvedt leaves the reader with a host of questions. In this final section, in spite of Iris’s efforts to relate an integrated story, in her narration events do not lead to a clear chronology. Motives remain obscure. The novel is shattered, mirroring Iris’s fragmented identity.
Soundtrack for The Blindfold
Nico & The Velvet Underground- I’ll Be Your Mirror (Andy Warhol Video, 1966)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sKzME...
John Parish and Polly Jean Harvey - That Was My Veil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJH7W3...
Throwing Muses - Ellen West
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTMgQ...
Kristin Hersh - Close Your Eyes (Demo)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlKxcX...
Kristin Hersh - Trouble
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fqIsf...
Ani DiFranco - Present/Infant (Live at Babeville)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU17oI...
August 17, 2012
In Her Own Write
To paraphrase a less hyperbolic comment by David Foster Wallace, the point of this review is that “The Blindfold” is an extraordinary novel.
DFW described it as a “really good book” that is “clearly a feminist reworking of some of the central themes of [Don] DeLillo and his literary compadre, Paul Auster.”
I don’t think this does justice to what Siri Hustvedt achieved in her own right. Nor does the following question from a “reader” on amazon.com:
"Would this book have been published at all, had Siri Hustvedt not been married to Paul Auster, another completely overrated author?"
As Iris Vegan (Hustvedt’s protagonist) might have said, "Stuff it up your ass."
Unrequited Dedication?
While Hustvedt was writing “The Blindfold” in 1992, Auster was writing “Leviathan”.
She dedicated her work to her husband, while he dedicated his to DeLillo (who later reciprocated by dedicating “Cosmopolis” to Auster in an apparent act of bro-love).
However, Auster included the character Iris Vegan in “Leviathan”. How meta-dedicated is that!
First Things First (But Not Necessarily In That Order)
“The Blindfold” is divided into four untitled sections of quite different lengths. By the time I’d got to the beginning of the third section, I was starting to wonder whether there was any relationship between them and whether the book would have been better called a collection of short stories.
Was the fact that Iris Vegan was in each section enough to constitute a novel?
However, I soon realised that this was indeed a tightly plotted novel where every intricate detail was very precisely described and located, like objects in a museum or art gallery.
To paraphrase Iris, Hustvedt is a one-woman performance team, a juggler who works with objects.
She moves the objects around, on the shelf or in the air or on the canvas.
It doesn’t matter when or where we start looking. The point is to observe them all.
Only once we have followed one entire sequence do we start to get an idea of the whole.
Once you’ve detected the trend, you discover that you are contained or enclosed in a drama that intensifies with every word and that ultimately you don’t want to stop.
Student Affairs
The novel maps the course of a number of relationships that Iris forms over the course of three years, while she is a postgraduate English student at Columbia University.
During the course of her studies, she develops headaches and suffers migraine auras.
We never find out whether her affliction is the result of a physiological condition or the emotional stress that she undergoes.
However, migraine auras can result in a disturbance of the patient’s sense of time. In the words of an actual patient, “The feelings of a pre-migraine aura are definitely one of 'otherness', with...temporal, aural and visual disturbances.”
While the events are recounted by Iris in the first person eight years after they occurred, her condition allows Hustvedt to mess with time and the sequence in which events occur.
It also raises the question of whether Iris is an unreliable narrator.
For the first half of the novel, I was quite prepared for some tragic turn of events from a medical point of view.
However, after a while I felt that Iris was quite normal, if a little intense, in the manner of a highly intelligent student preoccupied with her self and her role in the world (although the same could be said of a male).
Before I move on, I want to dispense with one issue that threatens the appreciation of the novel as a whole.
One of the relationships is with a college professor who is in his early 50’s. While Iris is 22 at the time and not a child, I assume that this relationship would offend the university’s sexual misconduct policies.
The relationship is consensual and one which Iris consciously or unconsciously seeks almost from their first handshake.
The professor displays reluctance in initiating the relationship and ultimately cannot handle the personal and professional guilt that threatens the future of the relationship. He commits an act that in most cases would warrant someone terminating the relationship, even though Iris understands the psychological cause of the act and is prepared to forgive him for it.
Because Iris herself does not make any adverse comment on the propriety of the relationship, I don’t propose to comment on it adversely, especially because it seems to me (as a male of a similar age) to contribute to her growth as a person in the novel.
Chronology
Once you’ve finished the novel, it really is quite time-consuming to try and work out the linear chronology.
If you can be bothered, it serves mainly to enhance your appreciation of Hustvedt’s skills as a story-teller.
The timeline as presented is actually one that makes sense organically in the development of the themes of the novel.
We witness the growth of Iris’ self in a logical, analytical manner, even if the timing is manipulated.
Equally importantly, it builds to a climax which happens to coincide with the most recent and most important of the events in the narrative.
Because the story concerns Iris’ psyche, it makes sense that the events are presented in this sequence, as if they are part of a professional character assessment or diagnosis.
The Development of Female Identity
In a way, the novel can be seen as a casebook on the development of female identity as illustrated by the example of one woman.
As a male surrounded by one wife and two daughters, I’ve lost the ability to judge whether the casebook is representative of women at large.
However, if either of our daughters experienced relationship problems in maturity, I would point them in the direction of the novel if advice by first their mother, then me or a professional proved inadequate.
It really is that insightful, at least in my male eyes.
An Eye on Your Own Identity
What appealed most to me about the novel was the way in which it explored the role of looking and seeing in the relationship, not just between the sexes, but between any two people, or one person or subject (on the one hand) and an object (on the other hand).
The very process of perception is described as if it were a more dynamic verb or action. How someone looks (actively) or how someone looks (passively) is just as important as what they ‘do” in some other sense.
The eyes are indeed the window to the soul, and this is very much a novel about the soul, the essence of Iris Vegan.
It’s no coincidence that Iris is a word that describes part of the structure of the eye, nor that it is the reverse of the first name of the book’s author.
While there is a normal amount of dialogue, so much of the novel’s message is revealed by the way people look and see.
However, equally importantly, Hustvedt is concerned with the psychoanalytical nature of “the gaze”, not just how a male gazes at a female, but how a female gazes at a male.
Without reading like a textbook, the novel explores the type of gaze described by Lacan.
The gaze is not just the process of looking, seeing and perceiving.
It describes the relationship between subject and object.
The subject can desire the object, he can aspire to possess and control the object, to make her or it a possession or a chattel.
Conversely, the object can possess a power over the subject, especially when the object is aware that she is being gazed at.
The object can capture or enchant the subject.
Either way, there can be a power relationship between subject and object, particularly in the sexual context.
It’s interesting that Hustvedt uses the concept relatively even-handedly, even though her principal interest is Iris.
On the novel’s third page, Iris remarks, “Without any apparent reserve, he looked at me, taking in my whole body with his gaze.”
Note that the act of looking involves a taking of something, the body, in fact.
Yet, only a few sentences before, Iris “looked at the skin of his neck”.
Midway through the novel, when she first meets Professor Rose, “I stared at him and he continued to gaze at me. This went on for maybe half a minute.”
The relationship at the heart of the novel starts with a stare and a gaze.
Within a few pages, the sexuality at the root of the gaze is made even more explicit:
"He gazed at me and pressed his index finger into the hollow beneath his cheekbone. Then he nodded. It was the nod that unraveled me, with its suggestion of penetration, almost telepathy. I looked back at him and felt my jaw relax, my lips part. Who are you? I thought. He took in my whole face with a leisure that astounded me. We looked at each other for too long, and the impropriety made me tremble."
The sentence is rattled off, almost innocuously, as if the word “penetration” relates to Iris’ mind, yet the reader can’t help but infer physical sexual penetration as well.
As with the first example, the subject “takes” something (or some thing), this time the object’s face.
The object is not just the thing looked at, but the thing possessed, as if it is a material object.
The gaze can possess both the body and the psyche of the object.
I’m Touched by Your Presence, Dear
Hustvedt uses the gaze as a foundation for a more palpable or tangible relationship.
Just as characters gaze at each other, they touch one another.
Valuable items remain boxed up, “to keep them untouched by the here and now.”
While sitting at a bar, Iris’ knee “grazes” a gun in a policeman’s holster. (Note the rhyme.)
Iris "felt Tim beside me, the sleeve of his coat touching mine," the inanimate object almost an extension or projection of the animate self.
At one point, the art critic (known only as) Paris promises he’ll "be in touch"; at another, the photographer George acknowledges a comment by Iris with the rejoinder, "Touche."
More importantly, sexual encounters are described in terms of their sensual appeal:
"Their intense wishes made me claustrophobic. They were always breathing on me, pulling, tugging, even begging for some mysterious gift they thought I could give them. But I didn’t really have it – the thing they wanted. I know they dreamed of sexual triumph, of some erotic cataclysm that would erase their need, and I know that by eluding them I became more and more a creature of their hopes, a vaporous being with blond hair and blue eyes. They weren’t to blame. Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want."
Note how desire sometimes involves distortion, elusion feeds illusion.
Tell Me, Tell Me, Tell Me, Do
Within relationships, Hustvedt also explores the significance of silence and telling and revelation.
Her longest relationship is with Stephen, who is carrying a copy of "The Portable Nietzsche", when she first sees him.
Stephen maintained a reserve in their relationship. Secrecy undermines their intimacy:
"Stephen was secretive. He enjoyed withholding information…I should have known that he was lost to me from the very beginning, but his body was magic then, and it drove me on. One look at his neck, his hands, his mouth, brought on a shudder of sexual memory, a pleasure that became a torment, because Stephen rationed his body..."
His explanation of himself is quite Nietzchean:
"I’m telling you what I can’t bear is the ordinary. I don’t want to bore myself, to sink into the pedestrian ways of other people – heart to heart talks, petty confessions, relationships of habit, not passion. I see those people all around me, and I detest them, so I have to be divorced from myself in order to keep from sliding into a life I find nauseating. It’s a matter of appearances, but surfaces are underestimated. The veneer becomes the thing. I rarely distinguish the man in the movie from the spectator anymore."
Stephen’s attempts to elude intimacy end up ludicrous. They are not just self-delusion, they delude others such as Iris as well.
In contrast, the ability to confide in George creates a confidence in their relationship, at least in the short-term:
"George inspired telling. He was so easy in his manner, so kind and understanding, it was hard not to confide in him. But there was something else, too, something more important. George had a way of talking to me as if he knew me better than I knew myself, and in George this presumption was a kind of wizardry that turned loose thoughts and memories I had never spoken of to anyone before."
This is a relationship that is not consummated physically, although George “takes” a photo of Iris that is regarded as a study in eroticism, as if he had captured her naked.
George regards the photo as “extraordinary”, while Iris regards it as “an object of regret”.
Having taken it, the photo satiates George. In his eyes, “It’s all there…everything I want.” He rebuffs Iris’ one advance:
"I looked at George. He grinned. He was sitting on the floor with his camera in his lap. I knelt down and crawled toward him, looking at his lean arms and beautiful mouth. I lifted my right arm and extended my hand toward his face, but something in his expression stopped me. I have what I want, it seemed to say. Don’t come any closer. I dropped my arm and sat back, still breathing hard."
Iris imagines George "stealing photographs in the darkness, his flash igniting the startled faces of those caught in an act they wanted to keep secret – a kiss or a fight or an illicit transaction – and then I saw George run from the spot like a burglar."
Not just does George take photos, he steals them from the psyche of the object.
Notes from Underground
While George seems to thrive in the darkness, Iris has already had an experience of life in the demimonde or netherworld.
After the rape of a resident of her apartment building, she starts dressing as a man in a suit in order to go to and from her night jobs.
"It wasn’t so much that I looked like a man but that the clothes created an image of sexual doubt. With no makeup and my hair hidden beneath a fedora, I seemed to be either a masculine woman or an effeminate man..."
At a crucial moment in the development of her sexual identity, she is able to experiment with a male persona.
People cease to look or gaze at her as a sexual object. She evades men, by impersonating a man. She removes men from the picture, by removing herself as woman from the picture.
Iris neuters herself, firstly as an act of self-defence, secondly as a stepping stone to personal and sexual confidence.
While inhabiting this world, a world that reminded me of Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground” or Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” (including the Magic Theatre), Iris is poverty-stricken, starving, hallucinating, bordering on the hysterical (in Freudian terms).
Fortunately, her experience starts with a transgression of sorts and ends up as a transition,a journey, an Odyssey that prepares her for her next relationship with Michael (Professor Rose).
Giorgione’s “The Tempest”
Loving You the Way You Want
Hustvedt is also fascinated by the nature of desire.
In some people, as we have already seen, it represents the lack of something, a want, a need, an absence, an emptiness, a [black] hole that the subject attempts to fill with the object.
Ironically, when Iris doesn’t share the desire, she finds that the subject’s desire is even greater:
"Men I cared nothing about called me…on them my indifference worked like an aphrodisiac. Because I didn’t want anything..."
On the other hand, when she suggests that Stephen has never loved her, he responds:
"I’ve always loved you…I just don’t love you the way you want."
Yet again, Hustvedt has a poet’s eye for both the multiple meanings of words and their resemblance to other words.
You have to want, to love and be loved; you have to want to be loved; and you have to be loved the way you want!
When Iris experiences love with Michael, there is a different want, a new emptiness, a fear that they will lose each other, a desire that things stay the same, even though the truth is that they can’t.
The risk is that this emptiness will become an evil, a source of cruelty and destructiveness, something that will bring about the end of their relationship.
Walking the Last Stretch Blindfolded
Just as the novel explores looking and seeing, it addresses blindness.
With Iris’ migraine auras, she experiences black spots, blindness that starts with a hole and ultimately blacks out the whole, not just of the object, but the subject.
"Only later was I able to tell myself that I had suffered a migraine aura. The following months were a time when the everyday became precarious. At any moment an ordinary thing, a table or chair, a face or hand, might disappear, and with the blindness came a feeling of that I was no longer whole. I had put myself back together and now my body was failing me."
The negative connotation of blindness is the inability to look or see, or even to gaze.
Paradoxically, the blindfold incident in the novel offers a positive connotation to blindness.
Michael gives Iris a scarf. As they walk along the familiar streetscape back to her apartment, her confidence in her route leads her to tie the scarf around her eyes. In a scene that reminded me of the film “Trust”, she voluntarily embraces blindness. She must trust herself and/or Michael in order to get home safely.
This key metaphor is pregnant with connotations:
"He kissed me, and it was good not to see him. He could have been any man. The anonymity was his and mine. Like a child, I felt that blindness made me disappear, or at least made the boundaries of my body unstable. One of us gasped. I didn’t know who it was, and this confusion made my heart pound."
Despite the danger of her predicament, she did not want anything. She did not want a particular person, a particular man, for what they could give her. She could not look, she could not desire, she could not gaze, she could not judge beauty, she could not detect an object, but equally she could not be a subject.
She had lost her sense of self, at least her extreme self-consciousness. Her self had disappeared. It had become one with her surroundings, including Michael. That one, the “one of us”, gasped. She had everything, because she saw and needed nothing. Because she could not see, the two of them had become invisible and anonymous in her own mind (even if Michael could still see and gaze at her).
I wonder whether there is a hint of Zen “non-attachment” in this scene.
Like a Bat Out of Hell
The novel does not end with the blindfold scene, which would have been a convenient romantic denouement.
Instead, it sees Iris running away from the touch of the tiny, almost effeminate art critic Paris, to the IRT.
He sees Iris as some kind of Odysseus to his Penelope, whether or not he knows that she was treated for her migraines at Mount Olympus Hospital.
What should we infer from the ending?
Did Iris simply elude the Judgment of Paris?
A pessimist might conclude that Iris has returned to the darkness of the Underground.
An optimist might hope that she has finally put the past behind her and is ready for the next stage of her journey as a woman who has constructed a female identity she can be proud of, and who has something to offer other women.
To paraphrase a less hyperbolic comment by David Foster Wallace, the point of this review is that “The Blindfold” is an extraordinary novel.
DFW described it as a “really good book” that is “clearly a feminist reworking of some of the central themes of [Don] DeLillo and his literary compadre, Paul Auster.”
I don’t think this does justice to what Siri Hustvedt achieved in her own right. Nor does the following question from a “reader” on amazon.com:
"Would this book have been published at all, had Siri Hustvedt not been married to Paul Auster, another completely overrated author?"
As Iris Vegan (Hustvedt’s protagonist) might have said, "Stuff it up your ass."
Unrequited Dedication?
While Hustvedt was writing “The Blindfold” in 1992, Auster was writing “Leviathan”.
She dedicated her work to her husband, while he dedicated his to DeLillo (who later reciprocated by dedicating “Cosmopolis” to Auster in an apparent act of bro-love).
However, Auster included the character Iris Vegan in “Leviathan”. How meta-dedicated is that!
First Things First (But Not Necessarily In That Order)
“The Blindfold” is divided into four untitled sections of quite different lengths. By the time I’d got to the beginning of the third section, I was starting to wonder whether there was any relationship between them and whether the book would have been better called a collection of short stories.
Was the fact that Iris Vegan was in each section enough to constitute a novel?
However, I soon realised that this was indeed a tightly plotted novel where every intricate detail was very precisely described and located, like objects in a museum or art gallery.
To paraphrase Iris, Hustvedt is a one-woman performance team, a juggler who works with objects.
She moves the objects around, on the shelf or in the air or on the canvas.
It doesn’t matter when or where we start looking. The point is to observe them all.
Only once we have followed one entire sequence do we start to get an idea of the whole.
Once you’ve detected the trend, you discover that you are contained or enclosed in a drama that intensifies with every word and that ultimately you don’t want to stop.
Student Affairs
The novel maps the course of a number of relationships that Iris forms over the course of three years, while she is a postgraduate English student at Columbia University.
During the course of her studies, she develops headaches and suffers migraine auras.
We never find out whether her affliction is the result of a physiological condition or the emotional stress that she undergoes.
However, migraine auras can result in a disturbance of the patient’s sense of time. In the words of an actual patient, “The feelings of a pre-migraine aura are definitely one of 'otherness', with...temporal, aural and visual disturbances.”
While the events are recounted by Iris in the first person eight years after they occurred, her condition allows Hustvedt to mess with time and the sequence in which events occur.
It also raises the question of whether Iris is an unreliable narrator.
For the first half of the novel, I was quite prepared for some tragic turn of events from a medical point of view.
However, after a while I felt that Iris was quite normal, if a little intense, in the manner of a highly intelligent student preoccupied with her self and her role in the world (although the same could be said of a male).
Before I move on, I want to dispense with one issue that threatens the appreciation of the novel as a whole.
One of the relationships is with a college professor who is in his early 50’s. While Iris is 22 at the time and not a child, I assume that this relationship would offend the university’s sexual misconduct policies.
The relationship is consensual and one which Iris consciously or unconsciously seeks almost from their first handshake.
The professor displays reluctance in initiating the relationship and ultimately cannot handle the personal and professional guilt that threatens the future of the relationship. He commits an act that in most cases would warrant someone terminating the relationship, even though Iris understands the psychological cause of the act and is prepared to forgive him for it.
Because Iris herself does not make any adverse comment on the propriety of the relationship, I don’t propose to comment on it adversely, especially because it seems to me (as a male of a similar age) to contribute to her growth as a person in the novel.
Chronology
Once you’ve finished the novel, it really is quite time-consuming to try and work out the linear chronology.
If you can be bothered, it serves mainly to enhance your appreciation of Hustvedt’s skills as a story-teller.
The timeline as presented is actually one that makes sense organically in the development of the themes of the novel.
We witness the growth of Iris’ self in a logical, analytical manner, even if the timing is manipulated.
Equally importantly, it builds to a climax which happens to coincide with the most recent and most important of the events in the narrative.
Because the story concerns Iris’ psyche, it makes sense that the events are presented in this sequence, as if they are part of a professional character assessment or diagnosis.
The Development of Female Identity
In a way, the novel can be seen as a casebook on the development of female identity as illustrated by the example of one woman.
As a male surrounded by one wife and two daughters, I’ve lost the ability to judge whether the casebook is representative of women at large.
However, if either of our daughters experienced relationship problems in maturity, I would point them in the direction of the novel if advice by first their mother, then me or a professional proved inadequate.
It really is that insightful, at least in my male eyes.
An Eye on Your Own Identity
What appealed most to me about the novel was the way in which it explored the role of looking and seeing in the relationship, not just between the sexes, but between any two people, or one person or subject (on the one hand) and an object (on the other hand).
The very process of perception is described as if it were a more dynamic verb or action. How someone looks (actively) or how someone looks (passively) is just as important as what they ‘do” in some other sense.
The eyes are indeed the window to the soul, and this is very much a novel about the soul, the essence of Iris Vegan.
It’s no coincidence that Iris is a word that describes part of the structure of the eye, nor that it is the reverse of the first name of the book’s author.
While there is a normal amount of dialogue, so much of the novel’s message is revealed by the way people look and see.
However, equally importantly, Hustvedt is concerned with the psychoanalytical nature of “the gaze”, not just how a male gazes at a female, but how a female gazes at a male.
Without reading like a textbook, the novel explores the type of gaze described by Lacan.
The gaze is not just the process of looking, seeing and perceiving.
It describes the relationship between subject and object.
The subject can desire the object, he can aspire to possess and control the object, to make her or it a possession or a chattel.
Conversely, the object can possess a power over the subject, especially when the object is aware that she is being gazed at.
The object can capture or enchant the subject.
Either way, there can be a power relationship between subject and object, particularly in the sexual context.
It’s interesting that Hustvedt uses the concept relatively even-handedly, even though her principal interest is Iris.
On the novel’s third page, Iris remarks, “Without any apparent reserve, he looked at me, taking in my whole body with his gaze.”
Note that the act of looking involves a taking of something, the body, in fact.
Yet, only a few sentences before, Iris “looked at the skin of his neck”.
Midway through the novel, when she first meets Professor Rose, “I stared at him and he continued to gaze at me. This went on for maybe half a minute.”
The relationship at the heart of the novel starts with a stare and a gaze.
Within a few pages, the sexuality at the root of the gaze is made even more explicit:
"He gazed at me and pressed his index finger into the hollow beneath his cheekbone. Then he nodded. It was the nod that unraveled me, with its suggestion of penetration, almost telepathy. I looked back at him and felt my jaw relax, my lips part. Who are you? I thought. He took in my whole face with a leisure that astounded me. We looked at each other for too long, and the impropriety made me tremble."
The sentence is rattled off, almost innocuously, as if the word “penetration” relates to Iris’ mind, yet the reader can’t help but infer physical sexual penetration as well.
As with the first example, the subject “takes” something (or some thing), this time the object’s face.
The object is not just the thing looked at, but the thing possessed, as if it is a material object.
The gaze can possess both the body and the psyche of the object.
I’m Touched by Your Presence, Dear
Hustvedt uses the gaze as a foundation for a more palpable or tangible relationship.
Just as characters gaze at each other, they touch one another.
Valuable items remain boxed up, “to keep them untouched by the here and now.”
While sitting at a bar, Iris’ knee “grazes” a gun in a policeman’s holster. (Note the rhyme.)
Iris "felt Tim beside me, the sleeve of his coat touching mine," the inanimate object almost an extension or projection of the animate self.
At one point, the art critic (known only as) Paris promises he’ll "be in touch"; at another, the photographer George acknowledges a comment by Iris with the rejoinder, "Touche."
More importantly, sexual encounters are described in terms of their sensual appeal:
"Their intense wishes made me claustrophobic. They were always breathing on me, pulling, tugging, even begging for some mysterious gift they thought I could give them. But I didn’t really have it – the thing they wanted. I know they dreamed of sexual triumph, of some erotic cataclysm that would erase their need, and I know that by eluding them I became more and more a creature of their hopes, a vaporous being with blond hair and blue eyes. They weren’t to blame. Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want."
Note how desire sometimes involves distortion, elusion feeds illusion.
Tell Me, Tell Me, Tell Me, Do
Within relationships, Hustvedt also explores the significance of silence and telling and revelation.
Her longest relationship is with Stephen, who is carrying a copy of "The Portable Nietzsche", when she first sees him.
Stephen maintained a reserve in their relationship. Secrecy undermines their intimacy:
"Stephen was secretive. He enjoyed withholding information…I should have known that he was lost to me from the very beginning, but his body was magic then, and it drove me on. One look at his neck, his hands, his mouth, brought on a shudder of sexual memory, a pleasure that became a torment, because Stephen rationed his body..."
His explanation of himself is quite Nietzchean:
"I’m telling you what I can’t bear is the ordinary. I don’t want to bore myself, to sink into the pedestrian ways of other people – heart to heart talks, petty confessions, relationships of habit, not passion. I see those people all around me, and I detest them, so I have to be divorced from myself in order to keep from sliding into a life I find nauseating. It’s a matter of appearances, but surfaces are underestimated. The veneer becomes the thing. I rarely distinguish the man in the movie from the spectator anymore."
Stephen’s attempts to elude intimacy end up ludicrous. They are not just self-delusion, they delude others such as Iris as well.
In contrast, the ability to confide in George creates a confidence in their relationship, at least in the short-term:
"George inspired telling. He was so easy in his manner, so kind and understanding, it was hard not to confide in him. But there was something else, too, something more important. George had a way of talking to me as if he knew me better than I knew myself, and in George this presumption was a kind of wizardry that turned loose thoughts and memories I had never spoken of to anyone before."
This is a relationship that is not consummated physically, although George “takes” a photo of Iris that is regarded as a study in eroticism, as if he had captured her naked.
George regards the photo as “extraordinary”, while Iris regards it as “an object of regret”.
Having taken it, the photo satiates George. In his eyes, “It’s all there…everything I want.” He rebuffs Iris’ one advance:
"I looked at George. He grinned. He was sitting on the floor with his camera in his lap. I knelt down and crawled toward him, looking at his lean arms and beautiful mouth. I lifted my right arm and extended my hand toward his face, but something in his expression stopped me. I have what I want, it seemed to say. Don’t come any closer. I dropped my arm and sat back, still breathing hard."
Iris imagines George "stealing photographs in the darkness, his flash igniting the startled faces of those caught in an act they wanted to keep secret – a kiss or a fight or an illicit transaction – and then I saw George run from the spot like a burglar."
Not just does George take photos, he steals them from the psyche of the object.
Notes from Underground
While George seems to thrive in the darkness, Iris has already had an experience of life in the demimonde or netherworld.
After the rape of a resident of her apartment building, she starts dressing as a man in a suit in order to go to and from her night jobs.
"It wasn’t so much that I looked like a man but that the clothes created an image of sexual doubt. With no makeup and my hair hidden beneath a fedora, I seemed to be either a masculine woman or an effeminate man..."
At a crucial moment in the development of her sexual identity, she is able to experiment with a male persona.
People cease to look or gaze at her as a sexual object. She evades men, by impersonating a man. She removes men from the picture, by removing herself as woman from the picture.
Iris neuters herself, firstly as an act of self-defence, secondly as a stepping stone to personal and sexual confidence.
While inhabiting this world, a world that reminded me of Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground” or Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” (including the Magic Theatre), Iris is poverty-stricken, starving, hallucinating, bordering on the hysterical (in Freudian terms).
Fortunately, her experience starts with a transgression of sorts and ends up as a transition,a journey, an Odyssey that prepares her for her next relationship with Michael (Professor Rose).
Giorgione’s “The Tempest”
Loving You the Way You Want
Hustvedt is also fascinated by the nature of desire.
In some people, as we have already seen, it represents the lack of something, a want, a need, an absence, an emptiness, a [black] hole that the subject attempts to fill with the object.
Ironically, when Iris doesn’t share the desire, she finds that the subject’s desire is even greater:
"Men I cared nothing about called me…on them my indifference worked like an aphrodisiac. Because I didn’t want anything..."
On the other hand, when she suggests that Stephen has never loved her, he responds:
"I’ve always loved you…I just don’t love you the way you want."
Yet again, Hustvedt has a poet’s eye for both the multiple meanings of words and their resemblance to other words.
You have to want, to love and be loved; you have to want to be loved; and you have to be loved the way you want!
When Iris experiences love with Michael, there is a different want, a new emptiness, a fear that they will lose each other, a desire that things stay the same, even though the truth is that they can’t.
The risk is that this emptiness will become an evil, a source of cruelty and destructiveness, something that will bring about the end of their relationship.
Walking the Last Stretch Blindfolded
Just as the novel explores looking and seeing, it addresses blindness.
With Iris’ migraine auras, she experiences black spots, blindness that starts with a hole and ultimately blacks out the whole, not just of the object, but the subject.
"Only later was I able to tell myself that I had suffered a migraine aura. The following months were a time when the everyday became precarious. At any moment an ordinary thing, a table or chair, a face or hand, might disappear, and with the blindness came a feeling of that I was no longer whole. I had put myself back together and now my body was failing me."
The negative connotation of blindness is the inability to look or see, or even to gaze.
Paradoxically, the blindfold incident in the novel offers a positive connotation to blindness.
Michael gives Iris a scarf. As they walk along the familiar streetscape back to her apartment, her confidence in her route leads her to tie the scarf around her eyes. In a scene that reminded me of the film “Trust”, she voluntarily embraces blindness. She must trust herself and/or Michael in order to get home safely.
This key metaphor is pregnant with connotations:
"He kissed me, and it was good not to see him. He could have been any man. The anonymity was his and mine. Like a child, I felt that blindness made me disappear, or at least made the boundaries of my body unstable. One of us gasped. I didn’t know who it was, and this confusion made my heart pound."
Despite the danger of her predicament, she did not want anything. She did not want a particular person, a particular man, for what they could give her. She could not look, she could not desire, she could not gaze, she could not judge beauty, she could not detect an object, but equally she could not be a subject.
She had lost her sense of self, at least her extreme self-consciousness. Her self had disappeared. It had become one with her surroundings, including Michael. That one, the “one of us”, gasped. She had everything, because she saw and needed nothing. Because she could not see, the two of them had become invisible and anonymous in her own mind (even if Michael could still see and gaze at her).
I wonder whether there is a hint of Zen “non-attachment” in this scene.
Like a Bat Out of Hell
The novel does not end with the blindfold scene, which would have been a convenient romantic denouement.
Instead, it sees Iris running away from the touch of the tiny, almost effeminate art critic Paris, to the IRT.
He sees Iris as some kind of Odysseus to his Penelope, whether or not he knows that she was treated for her migraines at Mount Olympus Hospital.
What should we infer from the ending?
Did Iris simply elude the Judgment of Paris?
A pessimist might conclude that Iris has returned to the darkness of the Underground.
An optimist might hope that she has finally put the past behind her and is ready for the next stage of her journey as a woman who has constructed a female identity she can be proud of, and who has something to offer other women.
August 30, 2021
That was totally unexpected, I ripped through the pages of this intense and unusual novel. Iris Vegan is a literature student and she tells her story of her University years. The initial chapters seemed like almost unconnected vignettes of her life. Then the long final chapter brings it all together. Iris has a variety of jobs but still lives close to poverty in her tiny flat. Much of the novel is about perception, her self perception and how other people see her. She also gets migraines where she has bouts of partial blindness, like a black hole in her vision. (Obviously her name Iris is significant). It’s also about her female identity, for a time she wears a mans suit at night and calls herself Klaus and notes how it changes her behaviour and perspective. There’s much more, photography and art, literature, translation, age, relationships, hunger, sex, trust, friendship, beauty…
January 30, 2024
If you want to know what fiction is for, read The Blindfold. It is Iris Vegan's narrative of her early 20s in New York. Stephen and Iris are in a relationship. A third person enters, George, a recent friend of Stephen and a photographer, the three hang out. George takes photos of Iris by agreement one day and the relationship changes, art transforms her briefly as his model in one afternoon in a frenzy of photography. When George invites Stephen and Iris over to see the one photo worthy to be seen as art, Stephen has other plans, he is meeting someone. Here is what Iris thinks about that:
I imagine Stephen’s companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and colouring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn’t stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them, but hadn’t written a single word about Dorothea [her thesis subject on George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch she’d been working on]
We invent all the time, consumed by fictions, they trap us into seemingly ridiculous yet plausible narratives. We are our own invention. Thankfully we have writers to spin more interesting stories about those fantastical worlds that interrupt and damage our lives and selves all day long.
The self is an incomplete idea at any point. Iris is a young graduate student at university in New York. At that point, incompleteness seems more obvious, the self is emerging out of experiences and encounters. The novel comprises four sections, four periods of time or four episodes of interactions. Iris in various relationships. One with Stephen, one with George, one with doctors, one with Michael. Interwoven between these is the experience of a character in a novel named Klaus who Iris translates with her professor. Klaus’ experiences in the novel interact with her world. Another is with Paris, who is fascinated by her from the beginning and pops up regularly. And yet another is Mr Morning, who employs her to animate the objects that belong to a dead woman so he can write about them. She has to study the objects and read unemotionally into a tape recorder what she sees.
From the beginning Iris comes across as a tough talker, she appears centred, argumentative, engaging with ideas, no push over. She questions and asserts. But that is insufficient when emotions overwhelm, when the reality of surviving financially force decisions, or a migraine disables her and lands her in hospital. How does a girl pay the rent in a tough world? How smart does she have to be? Is giving emotionally just an opportunity for exploitation? What happens to that core self along the way when it is dispersed by interactions and experience?
The self constantly alters forms, appearance, adjusts and gives itself over to anything from love to friendship, to ideas. How does it emerge from it? For a young smart woman in a tough town, run mostly by men for their own needs, known for its violence, exploitation, its ability to devour and consume everything and transform it, perhaps the only recourse is a clever fictional narrative that imposes if not order on its universe but a way of interrogating it to understanding it.
I imagine Stephen’s companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and colouring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn’t stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them, but hadn’t written a single word about Dorothea [her thesis subject on George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch she’d been working on]
We invent all the time, consumed by fictions, they trap us into seemingly ridiculous yet plausible narratives. We are our own invention. Thankfully we have writers to spin more interesting stories about those fantastical worlds that interrupt and damage our lives and selves all day long.
The self is an incomplete idea at any point. Iris is a young graduate student at university in New York. At that point, incompleteness seems more obvious, the self is emerging out of experiences and encounters. The novel comprises four sections, four periods of time or four episodes of interactions. Iris in various relationships. One with Stephen, one with George, one with doctors, one with Michael. Interwoven between these is the experience of a character in a novel named Klaus who Iris translates with her professor. Klaus’ experiences in the novel interact with her world. Another is with Paris, who is fascinated by her from the beginning and pops up regularly. And yet another is Mr Morning, who employs her to animate the objects that belong to a dead woman so he can write about them. She has to study the objects and read unemotionally into a tape recorder what she sees.
From the beginning Iris comes across as a tough talker, she appears centred, argumentative, engaging with ideas, no push over. She questions and asserts. But that is insufficient when emotions overwhelm, when the reality of surviving financially force decisions, or a migraine disables her and lands her in hospital. How does a girl pay the rent in a tough world? How smart does she have to be? Is giving emotionally just an opportunity for exploitation? What happens to that core self along the way when it is dispersed by interactions and experience?
The self constantly alters forms, appearance, adjusts and gives itself over to anything from love to friendship, to ideas. How does it emerge from it? For a young smart woman in a tough town, run mostly by men for their own needs, known for its violence, exploitation, its ability to devour and consume everything and transform it, perhaps the only recourse is a clever fictional narrative that imposes if not order on its universe but a way of interrogating it to understanding it.
August 30, 2021
Am impressive debut by Siri (married to Paul Auster) sees her weave a dark, intense wonderful written novel describing a few years in the college life of of Iris Vegan, including working as an assistant for a professor translating a dark novella, that impacts on both their lives. With compelling well thought out and realised characters a good read indeed. 7 out of 12.
June 24, 2015
The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt tells the story of a young graduate student, Iris, and her relationships with four very different (but all very odd) men. The book was especially meaningful to me since I went to Columbia in the neighborhood where the story takes place.
Iris is changed by each relationship she participates in. She wears the suit of a friend's brother and travels the street in disguise as a man called Klaus, the name of a character in a book she translates for one of her partners, a disturbing, brutal story. She is extremely poor and apparently between lack of food and the relationship she is in, she has something of a nervous breakdown. She enters a neuropsycho ward because of her migraines and is in a room with an elderly woman who frequently hallucinates and involves Iris in her visions.
I found the book impossible to put down but extremely disturbing at the same time. Iris is opaque, troubled and troubling. She walks the streets exploring both the city and her own identity. She enters these dado-masochistic relationships and either finds or creates new identities within them.
Hustvedt is, as always, a terrific and thought-provoking writer.
Iris is changed by each relationship she participates in. She wears the suit of a friend's brother and travels the street in disguise as a man called Klaus, the name of a character in a book she translates for one of her partners, a disturbing, brutal story. She is extremely poor and apparently between lack of food and the relationship she is in, she has something of a nervous breakdown. She enters a neuropsycho ward because of her migraines and is in a room with an elderly woman who frequently hallucinates and involves Iris in her visions.
I found the book impossible to put down but extremely disturbing at the same time. Iris is opaque, troubled and troubling. She walks the streets exploring both the city and her own identity. She enters these dado-masochistic relationships and either finds or creates new identities within them.
Hustvedt is, as always, a terrific and thought-provoking writer.
April 25, 2014
It's just on 2am and I tore through the second half tonight; finishing it in just over 24 hours.
WOW!
I can't believe this was her debut, there's something in this that was missing from her later work, although seems to have returned in a The Blazing World.
WOW!
WOW!
I can't believe this was her debut, there's something in this that was missing from her later work, although seems to have returned in a The Blazing World.
WOW!
February 3, 2011
I've been obsessively cataloguing my books for awhile now, and last year I decided to reacquire titles that I have lost to a previous relationship. It was quite a task, since A. and I were both voracious readers. The more I delve into my bookshelf the more I discover books gone missing. I can't remember now if I gave them away because I loved him, or because I loved the books so much that I have made them a constant presence in his life: I wanted him to read them and see pieces of my self tucked in between the pages, written on the margins. We went through so many books while we were in love. Not only mine, but his, too, and sometimes, books that we discovered together.
When the relationship ended, a lot of these books went with him (along with a lot of my film and music collection, unfortunately). He broke my heart, I left, and I couldn't bring myself to take any souvenirs. It's one of my few regrets: those books were a huge part of who I am, and to have someone who used to know me well, who I let under my skin, keep them was unsettling.
Siri Hustvedt was one of the many that we read. I loved Auster's The New York Trilogy, and he loved Hustvedt's What I Loved, and before we were friends, at a party, he told me that the two are married and that I should read her. I didn't, at least, not until we were together. And he made me read The Blindfold first. He told me he never believed that a real Iris existed until he met me, with all my migraines and perversions. I told him I suppose I should take that as a compliment.
The Blindfold is special to me, but I can't seem to find the right words now explaining why and how. I reread it last night, in the dark, beside a tiny lamp. I couldn't sleep, and I pulled this out by chance, and reading the first few pages felt like I have gotten a piece of myself back somehow. I can't spare you my subjectivity; Hustvedt's tone is a bit overindulgent (this is her first work) but I didn't mind, and the different parts, even disjointed at times, is something I appreciate. A. said I was Iris walking with a blindfold, I was Iris hanging around a professor's desk, saying everything and nothing. I told him I was the one whispering words to a machine, I was a green eraser left in someone's hand, I was a diptych made out of stolen moments.
I'm glad I have this book again. I'm happy to have seen it randomly in a bookstore last year, and on sale, too, like a consolation. There would be more ruminations like these in the coming days, I suspect, as I make my way through my recently acquired 'old' books. It feels good to reread them after a few years have passed.
/ First read October 2004.
When the relationship ended, a lot of these books went with him (along with a lot of my film and music collection, unfortunately). He broke my heart, I left, and I couldn't bring myself to take any souvenirs. It's one of my few regrets: those books were a huge part of who I am, and to have someone who used to know me well, who I let under my skin, keep them was unsettling.
Siri Hustvedt was one of the many that we read. I loved Auster's The New York Trilogy, and he loved Hustvedt's What I Loved, and before we were friends, at a party, he told me that the two are married and that I should read her. I didn't, at least, not until we were together. And he made me read The Blindfold first. He told me he never believed that a real Iris existed until he met me, with all my migraines and perversions. I told him I suppose I should take that as a compliment.
The Blindfold is special to me, but I can't seem to find the right words now explaining why and how. I reread it last night, in the dark, beside a tiny lamp. I couldn't sleep, and I pulled this out by chance, and reading the first few pages felt like I have gotten a piece of myself back somehow. I can't spare you my subjectivity; Hustvedt's tone is a bit overindulgent (this is her first work) but I didn't mind, and the different parts, even disjointed at times, is something I appreciate. A. said I was Iris walking with a blindfold, I was Iris hanging around a professor's desk, saying everything and nothing. I told him I was the one whispering words to a machine, I was a green eraser left in someone's hand, I was a diptych made out of stolen moments.
I'm glad I have this book again. I'm happy to have seen it randomly in a bookstore last year, and on sale, too, like a consolation. There would be more ruminations like these in the coming days, I suspect, as I make my way through my recently acquired 'old' books. It feels good to reread them after a few years have passed.
/ First read October 2004.
June 7, 2018
Con Los ojos vendados nos encontramos ante la primera novela, su debut, de Siri Hustvedt, que Seix Barral se ha animado a editar para que podamos apreciar la evolución de la literatura de esta prolífica escritora y ensayista.
La protagonista de esta historia, Iris Vegan, es una mujer cuyo interior descubriremos de manera intensa y nada idílica, pues aquí Hustvedt no nos muestra a un personaje amable, sino lleno de sombras y sensaciones únicas. Iris Vegan empieza mintiendo en el arranque de la historia al decir su nombre; lo que declarará al lector un vestigio de desequilibrio, de inestabilidad. Una señal de que en esta novela nada será como queremos que sea. Aquí todo se volverá del revés mientras acompañamos a Iris por sus aventuras filológicas y filosóficas, por todas sus aventuras amorosas y psicológicas. Iris será contratada para escribir una historia sobre unos objetos particulares que el señor Morning le ofrece. A través de esos objetos, y a través de los libros que la protagonista irá encontrándose, reconoceremos y hallaremos advertencias de lo que ocurre en Iris. Todo lo que sucederá a su alrededor será un reflejo de lo que ella misma es.
En cada historia de esta novela prima el misterio, la sombra, lo que hace que nos mantengamos alerta frente a lo desconocido. Se torna principal el desplazamiento del yo que Iris tiene, el cual dará paso a otras experiencias, nada agradables y de una tensión que no lograremos especificar. Pareciera que la psicología de Iris se torna psicosomática, quizá y seguramente de ahí vengan sus migrañas, sus dolores de cabeza que la llevarán a internarse en el hospital y del que saldrá contando a modo de carta a su madre todo lo extraño y curioso que vivirá en él.
En esta novela, las cosas no son como creemos. Siempre hay algo nuevo, algo que no habíamos pensado antes, algo que nos saca de nuestras casillas. Quizá sea eso lo más importante en este libro: lo que no pensamos y viene por sorpresa. Eso es exactamente lo que le ocurre a Iris a lo largo del libro, incluso para ella misma.
«A veces las palabras tienen que calar un poco. Ya sabes, reposar en el fondo por un tiempo», le dirán a Iris. Y eso es lo que he necesitado hacer con este libro. He tenido que dejarlo reposar en mi interior para poder escribir sobre él. Por que no es un libro fácil. Es un libro que nos vuelve un poco locos porque no sabemos cómo decirle a la protagonista que logre calmarse, que logre descansar de sí misma, que logre conectar con su interior para que esas fuerzas que no conoce la destruyan por completo. Esta novela es capaz de hacerlo con nosotros. Aunque al principio parezca y se torne algo superficial, termina por calar en nuestros huesos y nuestra alma. Termina por hacernos pensar que necesitamos de un equilibrio físico y mental para que podamos seguir hacia adelante, que es para lo que Iris no está destinada aquí.
Los ojos vendados es la ceguera ante nosotros mismos, ante la vida, ante lo que nuestro yo quiere y no puede ser. Los ojos vendados es una advertencia de nuestros miedos, de nuestras inseguridades y defectos. Quizá eso es lo que hace bello a los libros, que son capaces de ponernos con hechos y situaciones reflejos del mundo interior que somos incapaces de mirar a la cara.
La protagonista de esta historia, Iris Vegan, es una mujer cuyo interior descubriremos de manera intensa y nada idílica, pues aquí Hustvedt no nos muestra a un personaje amable, sino lleno de sombras y sensaciones únicas. Iris Vegan empieza mintiendo en el arranque de la historia al decir su nombre; lo que declarará al lector un vestigio de desequilibrio, de inestabilidad. Una señal de que en esta novela nada será como queremos que sea. Aquí todo se volverá del revés mientras acompañamos a Iris por sus aventuras filológicas y filosóficas, por todas sus aventuras amorosas y psicológicas. Iris será contratada para escribir una historia sobre unos objetos particulares que el señor Morning le ofrece. A través de esos objetos, y a través de los libros que la protagonista irá encontrándose, reconoceremos y hallaremos advertencias de lo que ocurre en Iris. Todo lo que sucederá a su alrededor será un reflejo de lo que ella misma es.
En cada historia de esta novela prima el misterio, la sombra, lo que hace que nos mantengamos alerta frente a lo desconocido. Se torna principal el desplazamiento del yo que Iris tiene, el cual dará paso a otras experiencias, nada agradables y de una tensión que no lograremos especificar. Pareciera que la psicología de Iris se torna psicosomática, quizá y seguramente de ahí vengan sus migrañas, sus dolores de cabeza que la llevarán a internarse en el hospital y del que saldrá contando a modo de carta a su madre todo lo extraño y curioso que vivirá en él.
En esta novela, las cosas no son como creemos. Siempre hay algo nuevo, algo que no habíamos pensado antes, algo que nos saca de nuestras casillas. Quizá sea eso lo más importante en este libro: lo que no pensamos y viene por sorpresa. Eso es exactamente lo que le ocurre a Iris a lo largo del libro, incluso para ella misma.
«A veces las palabras tienen que calar un poco. Ya sabes, reposar en el fondo por un tiempo», le dirán a Iris. Y eso es lo que he necesitado hacer con este libro. He tenido que dejarlo reposar en mi interior para poder escribir sobre él. Por que no es un libro fácil. Es un libro que nos vuelve un poco locos porque no sabemos cómo decirle a la protagonista que logre calmarse, que logre descansar de sí misma, que logre conectar con su interior para que esas fuerzas que no conoce la destruyan por completo. Esta novela es capaz de hacerlo con nosotros. Aunque al principio parezca y se torne algo superficial, termina por calar en nuestros huesos y nuestra alma. Termina por hacernos pensar que necesitamos de un equilibrio físico y mental para que podamos seguir hacia adelante, que es para lo que Iris no está destinada aquí.
Los ojos vendados es la ceguera ante nosotros mismos, ante la vida, ante lo que nuestro yo quiere y no puede ser. Los ojos vendados es una advertencia de nuestros miedos, de nuestras inseguridades y defectos. Quizá eso es lo que hace bello a los libros, que son capaces de ponernos con hechos y situaciones reflejos del mundo interior que somos incapaces de mirar a la cara.
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August 25, 2022The Lingering Effects of a Poor Beginning
In the decade roughly between 2005 and 2015 Hustvedt became a well-known writer, not least for her autobiographic account of her illness, "The Shaking Woman Or A History of My Nerves" (2010), a book which was endorsed by neurobiologically-minded people, including Antonio Damasio and Mark Solms. "The Blindfold" (1992) is a very poor novel. It's barely altered from her experiences as a grad student: the episodes are hardly knitted together into a novel at all. The opening episode reads as if it's going to structure the novel, but she seems to forget it later on. The same happens throughout; the episodes, usually about fifteen pages long, read like sketches done for a weekly MFA writing seminar: they appear to be transcribed experiences with the first frail senses of how they might be fictionalized, how she might create distance and a sense of writerly purpose.
The prose is utilitarian rather than descriptive, the dialogue just serviceable, and there infelicities in description, temporality, and continuity, of the sort that beginning writers make. She relies too much, for example, on the device of anticipation: "I didn't realize until later that..." and so on. I see the same writer's problems mentioned in reviews of her more recent work, for example "Memories of the Future" (2019), which toys inconsistently with autofiction and uses a gimmick (Minkowski space-time) to resolve questions of memory.
In 2012, when I first drafted this note, I concluded that "The Blindfold" was poor enough so I wouldn't be reading any of her other work. I still haven't, athough I might be talked into one if someone could make the case that one of her more recent books has some measure of consistency, coherence, and narrative control.
In the decade roughly between 2005 and 2015 Hustvedt became a well-known writer, not least for her autobiographic account of her illness, "The Shaking Woman Or A History of My Nerves" (2010), a book which was endorsed by neurobiologically-minded people, including Antonio Damasio and Mark Solms. "The Blindfold" (1992) is a very poor novel. It's barely altered from her experiences as a grad student: the episodes are hardly knitted together into a novel at all. The opening episode reads as if it's going to structure the novel, but she seems to forget it later on. The same happens throughout; the episodes, usually about fifteen pages long, read like sketches done for a weekly MFA writing seminar: they appear to be transcribed experiences with the first frail senses of how they might be fictionalized, how she might create distance and a sense of writerly purpose.
The prose is utilitarian rather than descriptive, the dialogue just serviceable, and there infelicities in description, temporality, and continuity, of the sort that beginning writers make. She relies too much, for example, on the device of anticipation: "I didn't realize until later that..." and so on. I see the same writer's problems mentioned in reviews of her more recent work, for example "Memories of the Future" (2019), which toys inconsistently with autofiction and uses a gimmick (Minkowski space-time) to resolve questions of memory.
In 2012, when I first drafted this note, I concluded that "The Blindfold" was poor enough so I wouldn't be reading any of her other work. I still haven't, athough I might be talked into one if someone could make the case that one of her more recent books has some measure of consistency, coherence, and narrative control.
February 3, 2025
Iris Vegan (Hustvedt’s mother’s surname), like many a Paul Auster character, is bewildered by what happens to her. An impoverished graduate student in literature, she takes on peculiar jobs. First Mr. Morning hires her to make audio recordings meticulously describing artefacts of a woman he’s obsessed with. Iris comes to believe this woman was murdered and rejects the work as invasive. Next she’s a photographer’s model but hates the resulting portrait and tries to take it off display. Then she’s hospitalized for terrible migraines and has upsetting encounters with a fellow patient, old Mrs. O. Finally, she translates a bizarre German novella and impersonates its protagonist, walking the streets in a shabby suit and even telling people her name is Klaus.
I worked out that the chronological order of the parts is 2 – 4 – 3 – 1, with 1 including a recap of the others. The sections feel like separate vignettes, perhaps reflecting Hustvedt’s previous experience with the short story form, and make a less than satisfying whole. I was most engaged with the segment on working for Mr. Morning and thought that might recur, but it doesn’t. Many of the secondary characters are grotesque, whereas Iris is the intellectual waif trying to make her way in the cruel city, almost like a Dickens or Gissing (anti)hero.
It’s refreshing to get a female take on the Bildungsroman and a little bit of gender-bending with the cross-dressing. (Iris reminds me of Lauren Elkin’s Flaneuse.) The title felt like an enigma to me until close to the end, when it’s revealed to be a tool of sexual sadism. Indeed, each of the sections, in its own way, addresses male exploitation of and violence against women. Disappointingly, Iris remains defined by her relationships with men. She deserves better. Heck, she deserves a sequel! It’s interesting to see where Hustvedt got her start, but I didn’t warm to this as I did to later novels including What I Loved.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
I worked out that the chronological order of the parts is 2 – 4 – 3 – 1, with 1 including a recap of the others. The sections feel like separate vignettes, perhaps reflecting Hustvedt’s previous experience with the short story form, and make a less than satisfying whole. I was most engaged with the segment on working for Mr. Morning and thought that might recur, but it doesn’t. Many of the secondary characters are grotesque, whereas Iris is the intellectual waif trying to make her way in the cruel city, almost like a Dickens or Gissing (anti)hero.
It’s refreshing to get a female take on the Bildungsroman and a little bit of gender-bending with the cross-dressing. (Iris reminds me of Lauren Elkin’s Flaneuse.) The title felt like an enigma to me until close to the end, when it’s revealed to be a tool of sexual sadism. Indeed, each of the sections, in its own way, addresses male exploitation of and violence against women. Disappointingly, Iris remains defined by her relationships with men. She deserves better. Heck, she deserves a sequel! It’s interesting to see where Hustvedt got her start, but I didn’t warm to this as I did to later novels including What I Loved.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
December 31, 2022
I was thinking about which author would be honoured by being my next “publication order (re-)read” of all their works. Then I suddenly remembered that I had bought a copy of The Blindfold quite some time ago with exactly that idea in mind. So here it is: the beginning of my publication order (re-)read (POR) of all Siri Hustvedt’s fiction and non-fiction. Things that attract me to to Hustvedt’s work include her love of art (my first experience of her writing was The Blazing World and I loved the art in that) and her clarity of writing. It will be interesting to see how these, and other things, shape up as I work my way through her books.
Our protagonist is Iris Vegan (note that Iris is, of course, Siri backwards and Vegan is Hustvedt’s mother’s maiden name). What we read are four episodes from Iris’s life. These are not presented to us chronologically. And, in fact, the first three all present what could be considered complete short stories tied together by a common narrator and some recurring characters. These three episodes fill half the book. The fourth episode is much longer and covers the whole of the time period of the first three. Indeed, it’s an exercise (not a tricky one) for the reader to fit the first three in at the appropriate places in the fourth. The lack of chronological order is a very deliberate and carefully worked choice by Hustvedt. At amerker.de she explains:
The eighteenth-century novel, for example, unfolds before us the whole life of the hero, from birth to death. No questions remain unanswered. The reality, on the other hand, looks different. We often don't know why this or that happened, and perhaps the crucial background is always hidden from us. Before we even know the outcome of a story, we already find ourselves entangled in a new one. That's what I wanted to draw attention to in my book.
And to this she adds:
Usually, the author takes the reader by the hand and guides them through the story from beginning to end. If I break this continuity and stagger the individual episodes, the reader's attention is automatically drawn more to what is being told. As I said before, I wasn't so much interested in telling a chronological story as in confronting my main character with different - if you will put it very strange - situations, in which her person becomes tangible for the reader bit by bit.
(I should add that these quotes are cut and paste from a Google translation of an interview in German - they might not be exactly what Hustvedt said).
And we start to see that whilst the stories told here are fascinating and dark and compelling to read, they are perhaps not the thing that was most in focus for Hustvedt as she wrote.
All the stories are extremely well written and have interesting, disturbing plots. Iris often finds herself in emotionally dangerous situations. The men in her life often want to control her, perhaps by withholding information from her, perhaps by photographing her and taking control of the images, for example. One or two men seem to be the good guys, but even then there are dark twists. The sections in which Iris works with Professor Rose to translate a novella called Der Brutale Junge, and in which Iris adopts a different personality as she is drawn into the text, are especially fascinating to read. Chronologically, these are early in the story, but we as readers don’t get to read them until we are well into the novel and already forming opinions about Iris and other characters.
All in all, I found this a really interesting book to read. It is a book that leaves the reader with a myriad of unanswered questions. It would be perfect for a discussion over a couple of bottles of wine trying to decide what the individual characters did when they left the story, whether they did the things we think they might have done before they entered the story, what their motives were etc.. Which isn’t to say the book feels incomplete. It’s more to say that it feels larger on the inside than it is on the outside, which, for me at least, is almost always a good thing.
I am really looking forward to reading the rest of Hustvedt’s oeuvre. Several of her fictional works will be re-reads for me, but they all figure on my list of books I want to go through again so that doesn’t matter in the slightest. Next up: The Enchantment of Lily Dahl.
Our protagonist is Iris Vegan (note that Iris is, of course, Siri backwards and Vegan is Hustvedt’s mother’s maiden name). What we read are four episodes from Iris’s life. These are not presented to us chronologically. And, in fact, the first three all present what could be considered complete short stories tied together by a common narrator and some recurring characters. These three episodes fill half the book. The fourth episode is much longer and covers the whole of the time period of the first three. Indeed, it’s an exercise (not a tricky one) for the reader to fit the first three in at the appropriate places in the fourth. The lack of chronological order is a very deliberate and carefully worked choice by Hustvedt. At amerker.de she explains:
The eighteenth-century novel, for example, unfolds before us the whole life of the hero, from birth to death. No questions remain unanswered. The reality, on the other hand, looks different. We often don't know why this or that happened, and perhaps the crucial background is always hidden from us. Before we even know the outcome of a story, we already find ourselves entangled in a new one. That's what I wanted to draw attention to in my book.
And to this she adds:
Usually, the author takes the reader by the hand and guides them through the story from beginning to end. If I break this continuity and stagger the individual episodes, the reader's attention is automatically drawn more to what is being told. As I said before, I wasn't so much interested in telling a chronological story as in confronting my main character with different - if you will put it very strange - situations, in which her person becomes tangible for the reader bit by bit.
(I should add that these quotes are cut and paste from a Google translation of an interview in German - they might not be exactly what Hustvedt said).
And we start to see that whilst the stories told here are fascinating and dark and compelling to read, they are perhaps not the thing that was most in focus for Hustvedt as she wrote.
All the stories are extremely well written and have interesting, disturbing plots. Iris often finds herself in emotionally dangerous situations. The men in her life often want to control her, perhaps by withholding information from her, perhaps by photographing her and taking control of the images, for example. One or two men seem to be the good guys, but even then there are dark twists. The sections in which Iris works with Professor Rose to translate a novella called Der Brutale Junge, and in which Iris adopts a different personality as she is drawn into the text, are especially fascinating to read. Chronologically, these are early in the story, but we as readers don’t get to read them until we are well into the novel and already forming opinions about Iris and other characters.
All in all, I found this a really interesting book to read. It is a book that leaves the reader with a myriad of unanswered questions. It would be perfect for a discussion over a couple of bottles of wine trying to decide what the individual characters did when they left the story, whether they did the things we think they might have done before they entered the story, what their motives were etc.. Which isn’t to say the book feels incomplete. It’s more to say that it feels larger on the inside than it is on the outside, which, for me at least, is almost always a good thing.
I am really looking forward to reading the rest of Hustvedt’s oeuvre. Several of her fictional works will be re-reads for me, but they all figure on my list of books I want to go through again so that doesn’t matter in the slightest. Next up: The Enchantment of Lily Dahl.
January 12, 2023
Me siento un pésimo #aliado diciendo esto, pero hace tiempo que un libro me “no gustaba” tanto. Hace tiempo que no escribía notas tipo “uf” “puaj” y “detente”.
O sea sí, Siri Hustvedt me parece una autora genial, inteligente y todo, pero cada libro presenta un universo de verosimilitud y este no fue el mío. No hicimos el contrato no más. Me costó tragarlo y creerlo todo. Me costaba lidiar con esos diálogos tan forzosamente profundos, con esta gente que todo el tiempo se cree interesante, y sobre todo (perdón Siri, perdón mundo), me costó lidiar con la protagonista. Iris Vegan me cayó tremenda, inevitable e inequívocamente mal. Y ahí hay algo interesante: me cayó mal porque creo que esa no era la intención. Me parece que Iris no sabe que es una apestosa. Toma un poco de aire, Iris. Relájate. Anda a bailar. Por favor deja de llorar por todo, deja de dramatizar, deja de enfermarte, de hacerte la mártir. Y por favor deja de salir con hombres y comerte a todos los que te vas encontrando y después sentirte abandonada, porque los dos sabíamos en qué te estabas metiendo. Mejor sigue estudiando, porque las historias de la estudiante de doctorado que pasa hambre y se gasta la plata que no tiene en cigarros me pareció la mejor parte.
O sea sí, Siri Hustvedt me parece una autora genial, inteligente y todo, pero cada libro presenta un universo de verosimilitud y este no fue el mío. No hicimos el contrato no más. Me costó tragarlo y creerlo todo. Me costaba lidiar con esos diálogos tan forzosamente profundos, con esta gente que todo el tiempo se cree interesante, y sobre todo (perdón Siri, perdón mundo), me costó lidiar con la protagonista. Iris Vegan me cayó tremenda, inevitable e inequívocamente mal. Y ahí hay algo interesante: me cayó mal porque creo que esa no era la intención. Me parece que Iris no sabe que es una apestosa. Toma un poco de aire, Iris. Relájate. Anda a bailar. Por favor deja de llorar por todo, deja de dramatizar, deja de enfermarte, de hacerte la mártir. Y por favor deja de salir con hombres y comerte a todos los que te vas encontrando y después sentirte abandonada, porque los dos sabíamos en qué te estabas metiendo. Mejor sigue estudiando, porque las historias de la estudiante de doctorado que pasa hambre y se gasta la plata que no tiene en cigarros me pareció la mejor parte.
August 1, 2020
Vier verhalen over de belevenissen van een studente literatuur in New York. Ik dacht, ik lees er vlug één en begin dan aan mijn werk. Maar ik bleef maar lezen, tot het boek uit was. Mooie meeslepende verhalen met een vleugje mysterie. Je wil gewoon weten wat er gebeurt en je blijft geïnteresseerd lezen. Prachtige stijl en puike karakteriseringen. Alleen met de laatste dertig pagina’s heb ik het lastig. Geloofwaardigheid is alles in een boek. Tot dertig pagina’s voor het einde ga ik méé, maar dan lees ik iets waarvan ik denk: “Dit is totale onzin”. Een koppel gaat uit elkaar, na een halve verkrachting, met een enorm zware filosofische conversatie. Ik dacht: “Neen, dit is er zo over”. En dat is jammer, want het zijn zulke mooie verhalen. Daarom drie sterren. Met een ander slot waren dat er gemakkelijk vier geweest. Want Siri kan schrijven!
April 26, 2017
An intense, visceral debut novel telling a story of a literature student in New York in search of her identity. The book takes the form of a confessional monologue. The first three chapters are episodic, self contained and only tenuously linked by the narrative voice. The long fourth and final chapter puts them in context and introduces a darker psychological element. The tone throughout is cool, and the characters she meets are enigmatic and often slightly menacing. A gripping book, but a difficult one to sum up.
February 20, 2018
El ritmo ha sido trepidante y, en muchos aspectos, podía sentir un vínculo psicológico con la protagonista. Además, ese ápice de ambigüedad y oscuridad en la narración, ha llenado de misterio unos retazos de vida cotidianos. En general, he estado muy cómoda en esta lectura, he tenido esa sensación de reencontrarme con una persona conocida. Esto, porque Hustvedt me devuelve de nuevo a un estado de lectura que me envuelve y transmite cercanía.
January 30, 2021
¿Es este el mejor self-insert de la historia? Sí. ¿Es Siri Hustvedt una persona tan brillante que duele? Sí también. Socorro. El final ha sido un poco agridulce, pero creo que encaja muy bien con toda la historia. El ritmo narrativo, los saltos, el cuadro final... Siri, te quiero.
July 9, 2015
Perfect.
September 21, 2015
Certain books have to be read in a certain state of mind. I completely missed the point of this one. The only reason why I think this is, it's because currently I am really satisfied with my life. If we are talking about issues that are followed in this novella, then I can say that I am not over thinking and I am not analysing myself. When you read books like The blindfold, you have to go deep because it writes about search for identity. On the other hand, maybe this is my current lack of understanding, but I’m not in the mood for some woman's confusions. Especially, if that woman is writing about artistic destructions, philosophy and darkness.
Maybe I just have to quit doing this: finding myself in every book that I read. Is this the right approach to any reading? Or is it inevitable to do so with this theme?
I know one thing, if I were in my early 20s, I would worship it and even if I didn’t get it, I would pretend that I did, because it's easier in two. But I don’t have identity crisis anymore and I particularly don’t enjoy anymore reading something where main protagonists are so hard on themselves. I mean, it’s not that I have a ladybug on a poppy personality, but at the moment, I like to spare myself a little bit.
Maybe I just have to quit doing this: finding myself in every book that I read. Is this the right approach to any reading? Or is it inevitable to do so with this theme?
I know one thing, if I were in my early 20s, I would worship it and even if I didn’t get it, I would pretend that I did, because it's easier in two. But I don’t have identity crisis anymore and I particularly don’t enjoy anymore reading something where main protagonists are so hard on themselves. I mean, it’s not that I have a ladybug on a poppy personality, but at the moment, I like to spare myself a little bit.
June 23, 2017
La historia está formada por cuatro partes protagonizadas por Iris Vegan, una joven estudiante de literatura de la Universidad de Columbia. Aunque parezcan relatos independientes, en realidad comparten un nexo en común. En la primera parte, Iris es contratada por un excéntrico personaje para que describa ciertos objetos, y grabe dichas descripciones. En la segunda parte, se narra la relación de Iris con su novio Stephen, y George, amigo de ambos y fotógrafo. En la tercera parte, la protagonista, tras sufrir fuertes dolores de cabeza, es ingresada en el hospital, donde se nos cuenta la relación con sus compañeras de habitación. Y en la cuarta parte, la mejor del libro, sabremos de la relación de Iris con su profesor, además de conocer a un extraño crítico de arte.
‘Los ojos vendados’ (The Blindfold, 1992), fue la primera novela publicada por la escritora Siri Hustvedt. Se trata de un libro caracterizado por las emociones y sentimientos de su protagonista, por su fragilidad y el pequeño universo que nos presenta, con personajes un tanto extraños y aislados, rozando la locura. La prosa de Hustvedt es clara y evocadora, aunque se nota que es una primera novela.
‘Los ojos vendados’ (The Blindfold, 1992), fue la primera novela publicada por la escritora Siri Hustvedt. Se trata de un libro caracterizado por las emociones y sentimientos de su protagonista, por su fragilidad y el pequeño universo que nos presenta, con personajes un tanto extraños y aislados, rozando la locura. La prosa de Hustvedt es clara y evocadora, aunque se nota que es una primera novela.
July 15, 2008
Hustvedt, who is also a poet, presents us with four beautiful snapshots of a young woman in graduate school at Columbia, trying to pay her bills, understand her peers, and understand herself. Each section is so different, it's surprising they concern the same young woman, but the way the story lines end up fitting together is incredibly skillful and makes you rethink past sections and the characters involved. In one section, she takes a job describing in detail a collection of objects for a mysterious old man. In another, she is obsessed with reclaiming a photo that was taken of her by a photographer due to the unexpected gossip about the nature of the image. In a third, she finds herself wandering Manhattan in the guise of a German boy named Klaus. It's all so magical. It does her a great disservice to say she's been influenced by her husband, Paul Auster: she far surpasses him in her form, language, and the humanity of her characters.
February 10, 2017
I like it better each time
September 24, 2020
Cuando alguien me habló por primera vez de Siri Hustvedt me la presentó desde su relación con Paul Auster y dijo, “ Y escribe tal vez mejor que el, lo que ya es mucho decir”. Desde ese momento la tuve en mi lista de pendientes.
Este es uno de esos libros que dejan en el lector una sensación de que algo se le pudo haber pasado, de que algún detalle importante no fue tenido en cuenta. Es una historia para procesar con tiempo después de leída. No es trivial, es corta, no fácil.
A Iris, la protagonista nos la presentan a partir de varias historias aparentemente inconexas, con algo de sinsentido. Solo al final, cada una de esas historias toma parte en el todo, en el dibujo completo de una Iris en construcción, en descubrimiento de su identidad. Una mente compleja atravesando una transformación que ni ella misma entiende bien. La escena de los ojos vendados resulta un contrasentido. Iris, tras andar a ciegas apenas comienza a quitarse la venda. Yo como lector, depronto no he terminado de quitármela.
Una novela que entiende la infinita red de la mente humana, los comportamientos indescifrables como su manifestación y a nuestras vidas como sus víctimas.
Léanla también. Algo habrá para cada uno en sus páginas.
Este es uno de esos libros que dejan en el lector una sensación de que algo se le pudo haber pasado, de que algún detalle importante no fue tenido en cuenta. Es una historia para procesar con tiempo después de leída. No es trivial, es corta, no fácil.
A Iris, la protagonista nos la presentan a partir de varias historias aparentemente inconexas, con algo de sinsentido. Solo al final, cada una de esas historias toma parte en el todo, en el dibujo completo de una Iris en construcción, en descubrimiento de su identidad. Una mente compleja atravesando una transformación que ni ella misma entiende bien. La escena de los ojos vendados resulta un contrasentido. Iris, tras andar a ciegas apenas comienza a quitarse la venda. Yo como lector, depronto no he terminado de quitármela.
Una novela que entiende la infinita red de la mente humana, los comportamientos indescifrables como su manifestación y a nuestras vidas como sus víctimas.
Léanla también. Algo habrá para cada uno en sus páginas.
Want to read
September 17, 2009I discovered this by going through the amazing archives of the fantastic website that's been devoted to all things David Foster Wallace for over a decade now:
http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw
For any serious fans of Wallace this site is a must-see, especially this section:
http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/...
This section compiles every single essay, book review, and contribution of any kind he ever published and even gives a complete look at where excerpts from subsequent novels and short stories first were published and the same goes for non-fiction essays which would later be collected and published as compilations. But the most interesting stuff is the stuff almost no one's ever read before which was published years before he became hugely famous or was published in more obscure literary or otherwise academic journals. And there are a number of book reviews including the one I just read for The Blindfold which resulted in me placing it on my to-read shelf:
http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs...
http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw
For any serious fans of Wallace this site is a must-see, especially this section:
http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/...
This section compiles every single essay, book review, and contribution of any kind he ever published and even gives a complete look at where excerpts from subsequent novels and short stories first were published and the same goes for non-fiction essays which would later be collected and published as compilations. But the most interesting stuff is the stuff almost no one's ever read before which was published years before he became hugely famous or was published in more obscure literary or otherwise academic journals. And there are a number of book reviews including the one I just read for The Blindfold which resulted in me placing it on my to-read shelf:
http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs...
March 20, 2022
Ύστερα από το πολύ ωραίο και απολαυστικό "Mr. Vertigo" του αγαπητού Πολ Όστερ, αποφάσισα να διαβάσω ένα από τα βιβλία της συζύγου του, της Σίρι Χούστβεντ, για να δω τι λέει και αυτή. Και έπιασα το "Η τυφλόμυγα", που είναι και το πρώτο της βιβλίο. Λοιπόν, αν μη τι άλλο ήταν μια ενδιαφέρουσα και ιδιαίτερη αναγνωστική εμπειρία, χαίρομαι που το διάβασα, μου δημιούργησε ποικίλα συναισθήματα και η αλήθεια είναι ότι χάρη στην περίεργη ατμόσφαιρα αλλά και την πολύ καλή γραφή κατάφερε να με κρατήσει σε εγρήγορση μέχρι το τέλος, όμως δεν είναι ένα βιβλίο για όλα τα γούστα, ενώ επίσης δεν μπορώ να πω ότι το απόλαυσα κιόλας, σίγουρα όχι όσο απόλαυσα το βιβλίο του Όστερ που διάβασα πριν από αυτό. Εδώ που τα λέμε, η όλη ιστορία είναι αρκετά μαύρη και καταθλιπτική, οπότε έτσι κι αλλιώς δύσκολα μπορείς να πεις ότι θα την απολαύσεις, ότι θα περάσεις ωραία διαβάζοντάς την, αλλά κουβέντα να γίνεται. Πάντως, ναι, παρά τα κάποια βαρετά ή και κουραστικά σημεία εδώ κι εκεί, παρά την όχι και τόσο συμπαθητική πρωταγωνίστρια, είναι ένα ενδιαφέρον και καλογραμμένο βιβλίο, οπότε πρόσημο θετικό. (7.5/10)
November 19, 2019
divno iznenađenje.
neočekivano duboka, vješto pletena knjiga. sastoji se od četiri priče kroz koje autorica u prvom licu priča o svom životu u određenoj fazi. makar su priče međusobno nepovezane (npr. o 3. priči je claude miller snimio film), sve se vrte oko turbulentnog života njujorške studentice i njenih peripetija - kompleksni odnosi s muškarcima, financijski problemi, boravak u sanatoriju...). događaji koje opisuje taman su toliko bizarni i čudnovati da bi mogli biti istiniti. piše jakim ženskim rukopisom, ali bez ikakve mlakosti, lažne sentimentalnosti i bez moraliziranja.
za siri hustved svakako ću opet posegnuti, ovo mi je bilo otkriće.
neočekivano duboka, vješto pletena knjiga. sastoji se od četiri priče kroz koje autorica u prvom licu priča o svom životu u određenoj fazi. makar su priče međusobno nepovezane (npr. o 3. priči je claude miller snimio film), sve se vrte oko turbulentnog života njujorške studentice i njenih peripetija - kompleksni odnosi s muškarcima, financijski problemi, boravak u sanatoriju...). događaji koje opisuje taman su toliko bizarni i čudnovati da bi mogli biti istiniti. piše jakim ženskim rukopisom, ali bez ikakve mlakosti, lažne sentimentalnosti i bez moraliziranja.
za siri hustved svakako ću opet posegnuti, ovo mi je bilo otkriće.
August 7, 2018
Über dieses Buch zu schreiben, fällt mir nicht leicht. Da es so vielschichtig ist, bin ich konstant verwirrt , wenn ich versuche, herauszufinden, worum es geht. Kunst, Psychologie, Wissenschaft, Studium, Männer Beziehungen werden unter anderem thematisiert.
Das Buch erzählt aus dem Leben der Studentin Iris und ihren Beziehungen zu vier verschiedenen (seltsamen) Männern. Es gibt vier Episoden, die nicht chronologisch angeordnet sind, erst in der letzten Episode erfährt man, wie alles zusammenhängt. Iris ist eine sehr attraktive junge Frau, studiert Literaturwissenschaften und versucht, sich in New York über Wasser zu halten, was ohne Unterstützung gar nicht so einfach ist. Immer wieder nimmt sie Nebenjobs an, die sie teilweise zu den seltsamen Männern führen, mir denen sie sich in erotische Abenteuer stürzt. Jedenfalls ist das Leben nicht immer einfach fur Iris und manchmal rutscht sie in labile Zustände ab, wodurch sie sogar in der Psychiatrie landet. Eine Zeit lang verkleidet sie sich als Mann und treibt sich in zwielichtigen Spelunken herum, dann wieder übersetzt sie für einen alten Professor eine deutsche Novelle auf Englisch, in der es um einen brutalen Jungen geht, was sie wiederum fast zu einem Zusammenbruch führt . Es gibt wunderschöne philosophische Dialoge, spannende Stellen wie in einem Horrorfilm, dann wieder geht es um Kunst, und ein Teil spielt in der Psychiatrie. Ich fühle mich, als hätte ich nicht ein Buch, sondern viele verschiedene gelesen.
Immer wieder erinnert mich das Buch sehr stark an "Die Glasglocke" von Sylvia Plath, wo es ebenfalls um eine junge Studentin in New York, die in eine Krise gerät und dabei verrückt wird.
Beim Lesen ist mir außerdem aufgefallen, dass der Name der Hauptperson Iris ein Anagramm des Names der Schriftstellerin SIRI Hustvedt ist. Es gibt auch noch einige weitere Ähnlichkeiten zwischen der Schriftstellerin und der Hauptperson, was sehr interessant ist hinsichtlich der Frage, wie autobiografisch ein (Debüt) Roman sein sollte.
Siri Hustvedt hat mit "Die unsichtbare Frau" ein ganz besonderes Werk geschaffen, etwas merkwürdig, aber sehr facettenreich und das alles in einer klaren aber fesselnden Sprache verfasst. Verwirrend und großartig.
Das Buch erzählt aus dem Leben der Studentin Iris und ihren Beziehungen zu vier verschiedenen (seltsamen) Männern. Es gibt vier Episoden, die nicht chronologisch angeordnet sind, erst in der letzten Episode erfährt man, wie alles zusammenhängt. Iris ist eine sehr attraktive junge Frau, studiert Literaturwissenschaften und versucht, sich in New York über Wasser zu halten, was ohne Unterstützung gar nicht so einfach ist. Immer wieder nimmt sie Nebenjobs an, die sie teilweise zu den seltsamen Männern führen, mir denen sie sich in erotische Abenteuer stürzt. Jedenfalls ist das Leben nicht immer einfach fur Iris und manchmal rutscht sie in labile Zustände ab, wodurch sie sogar in der Psychiatrie landet. Eine Zeit lang verkleidet sie sich als Mann und treibt sich in zwielichtigen Spelunken herum, dann wieder übersetzt sie für einen alten Professor eine deutsche Novelle auf Englisch, in der es um einen brutalen Jungen geht, was sie wiederum fast zu einem Zusammenbruch führt . Es gibt wunderschöne philosophische Dialoge, spannende Stellen wie in einem Horrorfilm, dann wieder geht es um Kunst, und ein Teil spielt in der Psychiatrie. Ich fühle mich, als hätte ich nicht ein Buch, sondern viele verschiedene gelesen.
Immer wieder erinnert mich das Buch sehr stark an "Die Glasglocke" von Sylvia Plath, wo es ebenfalls um eine junge Studentin in New York, die in eine Krise gerät und dabei verrückt wird.
Beim Lesen ist mir außerdem aufgefallen, dass der Name der Hauptperson Iris ein Anagramm des Names der Schriftstellerin SIRI Hustvedt ist. Es gibt auch noch einige weitere Ähnlichkeiten zwischen der Schriftstellerin und der Hauptperson, was sehr interessant ist hinsichtlich der Frage, wie autobiografisch ein (Debüt) Roman sein sollte.
Siri Hustvedt hat mit "Die unsichtbare Frau" ein ganz besonderes Werk geschaffen, etwas merkwürdig, aber sehr facettenreich und das alles in einer klaren aber fesselnden Sprache verfasst. Verwirrend und großartig.
November 6, 2021
Cuántos saltos me ha hecho dar este libro hasta decidirme si me ha gustado o no. He pasado de creer que no entendía absolutamente nada a darme cuenta de por qué no lo hacía. No es un libro fácil. No en cuanto a la estructura del mismo, sino al mensaje oculto que guarda entre página y página.
Ha sido grotesco. He pasado de odiar a Iris a tenerle cariño, luego pena, más tarde desesperación, y, por último, rabia; una rabia agridulce que acompaña a la aceptación para con un personaje tan complejo como ella. No creo que, de haberla conocido, nos hubiésemos llevado muy bien. No creo (de hecho) que Iris consiga llevarse bien con nadie. Sus relaciones son una proyección de ella misma. Eso es lo que causa más frustración. Esta autora siempre da giros en el guión que me hacen pasar de enfadarme con ella a admirarla con profundidad. Por suerte, siempre me aferro a lo segundo.
Ha sido grotesco. He pasado de odiar a Iris a tenerle cariño, luego pena, más tarde desesperación, y, por último, rabia; una rabia agridulce que acompaña a la aceptación para con un personaje tan complejo como ella. No creo que, de haberla conocido, nos hubiésemos llevado muy bien. No creo (de hecho) que Iris consiga llevarse bien con nadie. Sus relaciones son una proyección de ella misma. Eso es lo que causa más frustración. Esta autora siempre da giros en el guión que me hacen pasar de enfadarme con ella a admirarla con profundidad. Por suerte, siempre me aferro a lo segundo.
Read
May 30, 2022I cannot fully understand why, but I have a weakness for authors who made their literary debut later in life, in their late 30s or 40s (prime example of a recently discovered favourite: Elizabeth Strout). "The Blindfold" is the debut novel of Siri Hustvedt, published when she was 37. Masterful use of language (simple, elegant). Made me order two more books by Hustvedt (essays collections) in an instant.
October 11, 2024
bir ilk roman için oldukça etkileyici,
aynı karakterin dört ayrı öyküsü gibi okunduğunda ilk öykü açık ara kendini belli ediyor, diğer kitaplarından sadece biri çevrilmiş, onu da okurum ama en çok "The Enchantment of Lily Dahl"u merak ettim...
aynı karakterin dört ayrı öyküsü gibi okunduğunda ilk öykü açık ara kendini belli ediyor, diğer kitaplarından sadece biri çevrilmiş, onu da okurum ama en çok "The Enchantment of Lily Dahl"u merak ettim...
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