Elää, ajatella, katsoa

by Siri Hustvedt, Kaisa Sivenius (Translator)

Viisaissa ja tarkkanäköisissä kirjoituksissaan lukijoiden rakastama kirjailija pohtii, mitä on olla ihminen.

Siri Hustvedt ammentaa kiehtovissa esseissään sekä omista kokemuksistaan että eri tieteenalojen oivalluksista. Hän pohtii muistoihin, tunteisiin ja mielikuvitukseen liittyviä kysymyksiä, unien merkitystä sekä vuorovaikutusta ihmisten välillä. Aiheita lähestytään myös tunnettujen kuvataiteilijoiden teosten kautta. Eri tieteen- ja taiteenalojen välimaastossa liikkuessaan Hustvedt avaa yllättäviä ja valaisevia näkökulmia ihmisyyden peruskysymyksiin.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Art, Philosophy, Psychology, American, Cultural

462 pages, Hardcover

First published June 5, 2012

About the author

Hustvedt 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.

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part
that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of

-- from Where Your Eyes Don't Go by They Might Be Giants

Only because it was already unshelved did I play (and replay) the CD with the above song on it on Sunday while I was cleaning the house. As the line went through my head, I was struck by how it relates to this book of essays I was still reading at the time. (I am infamous in my family for my love of dark, serious books, but my taste in music is not the same: while on a road trip with my daughter a few months ago she live-tweeted my saying that I like upbeat music with goofy lyrics.)

Hustvedt writes of much of our living, thinking and looking as being on a subconscious or unconscious level, of our memories being remembered because of the emotion we've attached to them and of the space where play (transference, imagination, creativity) takes place between me and you, even if the "you" is an imagined one. I was particularly interested in the idea of memories needing to be rooted in a place, even if that place is later discovered not to be where the actual event happened, and of the memory we are currently remembering being the latest, inevitably revised, version of the so-called original memory.

In the "Looking" section, Hustvedt expounds on earlier (and amazing) essays on Goya from her Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting. She writes of art so clearly that I don't always feel the need to google the images she's referring to, though of course I do, especially that of lesser-known artists such as Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois, the latter a woman whose works and persona remind me of those of the fictional and not-as-successful protagonist of Hustvedt's latest novel, The Blazing World. These essays were published before that novel and the concepts Hustvedt explores here deeply inform the fictional work.

Some of the ideas and thoughts inherent in the essays become repetitive but that's because they were written over a span of six years, and for a wide range of publications and audiences. Any Hustvedt fan or anyone interested in memory, mind-brain issues and perception, including that of art and of culture, would be grateful for this collecting of articles, lectures and catalogue essays, all written in ordinary language, in one volume.

My own pondering on the space between me and you reminds me of a Harold Pinter poem I became obsessed with a few months ago. It may not seem like much to you, but my perception of it was most definitely colored by hearing Julian Sands speak it:

I know the place.
It is true.
Everything we do
Corrects the space
Between death and me
And you.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

Siri Hustvedt is one of the most interesting writers of the moment. I read almost all her novels, and was always pretty impressed. She is a very erudite, intellectualist writer, but not at all 'blasé', on the contrary, her message is usually how few certainties we have in life and how little we know about what really matters, even armed with the latest scientific insights. Her focus initially was on aesthetics and on the complex relationships between people, but over the years she has explicitly incorporated recent insights into neuropsychology and biology in her novels, always correcting the reductionist view on man. This is also reflected in this essay collection.

In general, Hustvedt manages to keep both academic and very personal aspects in balance and to deliver very readable pieces, constantly jumping back and forth between various disciplines. But I have to say that the fairly distant tone started to work a bit estranging in the long run. Many of her essays were already covered in her earlier prose work in one way or another, and there, in an ongoing story, they much more came to life. Conclusion: for those who did not yet know the work of Hustvedt, this might be a useful, albeit somewhat dry introduction, for the Hustvedt fans this work does not add much. (rating 2.5 stars)

[Sasha]

I remember the first time I heard of Siri Hustvedt—it was via Larry Ypil, poet extraordinaire, who’d drawn me aside one night of literature and revelry to say, “If you want to read about Eros, you have to read Siri Hustvedt.”

Nearly her entire published oeuvre later, I came to her latest collection of essays, Living, Thinking, Looking—picked up from a bookstore one distraught night; it felt like the Universe had consoled me—and I have emerged affirmed of my devotion to Hustvedt. The collection felt too much—bewilderingly so—like coming home. Or, perhaps more accurately, being reminded of what that familiarity felt like. The first essay, its very first line: “Desire appears as a feeling, a flicker or a bomb in the body, but it’s always a hunger for something, and it always propels us somewhere else, toward the thing that is missing.” From this nugget of rhetoric, the essay “Variations of Desire: A Mouse, a Dog, Buber, and Bovary” veers into touchstones seemingly so disparate: Siri’s sister Asti pins her childhood longings on a Mickey Mouse telephone; I am introduced to Martin Buber stroking a horse—the “immense vitality” beneath his skin as he did so; and I cross paths once more with Madame Bovary. And yet, Hustvedt makes it work.

Desire has long been Hustvedt’s forte, from her novels and threaded through her nonfiction. And the essays in this collection are so unmistakeably-to-me Hustvedtian: They’re essays in the blessedly conventional sense—the simplest route from writer to reader. Here are a host of subjects in a deeply personal voice, exceedingly intelligent, more than a little sensuous, and familiar all throughout. Desire weaves in and out of the essays—“Living,” for her musings on family life; “Thinking,” for her reflections on the making of and the appreciation of literature, the academe, as well as her disarmingly easy relationship with neuroscience; “Looking,” for her meditations on art. Again: All of them fascinatingly eloquent, and all of them unafraid to draw from Hustvedt’s own life. No shame to tell the reader that this was how she felt as she thought. This unabashedness, coupled with her goddamned intellect, never fails to send happy shivers down my spine.

The first time I read her nonfiction, via her collection A Plea for Eros, I tapped into that uncanny Hustvedt worldview-then-expression I’d enumerated above. Whilst her fiction was dense and generous, tense in its examination of desire and its fathomless rewards-and-consequences—will everybody just please read her incomparable novel What I Loved now?—her nonfiction was lucid, cerebral, but relentlessly personal. At the heels of reading Eros, I wrote:

[It’s] about all things Hustvedt… [The essays are] penetrating, eerily intelligent, just the right bit of sensuality… The pieces are reflections on a wide variety of subjects, and the personal-ness is the driving force. Yeah, that’s the word—reflections. In Hustvedt’s characteristically quiet and charged, still yet voluptuous voice that I’ve known and long loved. It’s like sitting down for a cup of coffee and listen to one of your idols ramble and rave and rant and brood and celebrate. And argue! And reason against the more mundane complexities of the universe.

[There may be more to say, but I fear I have exhausted myself. This exhaustion, I hasten to add, is not an effect of Hustvedt. I think now that, hell, perhaps I could have fared better if I wrote down my thoughts on each essay, as I went on?] In a nutshell: This book has all that, yet again, and remains faithful to what I’ve known the author to be? And that, against her previous book of essays, this one manages to exhibit Hustvedt’s broad range of Awesomeness far better? And, yes, there’s wonder in this, too: The awe that someone can be so intelligent, so well-versed in a variety of subjects and familiar with so much ephemera, so masterful with her language—and yet, bafflingly, graciously, thankfully, so generous with her insight and her life. Sigh. Consider me awestruck. Yet again.

- - -

Cross-posted from the blog.

[Aurora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Siri Hustvedt has a brilliant mind. In this collection she draws from her extensive knowledge within the fields of neuroscience, psychology, literature and art, as well as from her own life and personal experiences, to explore topics like memory, identity, perception and language. What happens in our brains when we remember, when we imagine, when we look at art? What is the self? What is reality?

These essays are erudite, compelling and very accessible. My only complaint is that it got somewhat repetitive towards the end. Probably a natural consequence of the fact that she wrote these essays over a period of 8 years and for different audiences.

For anyone interested in dipping their toes into her non-fiction:
Notes on Seeing
Knausgård Writes Like a Woman

[Andrew]

Good god, Siri Hustvedt is bright. When I write nonfiction, this sort of thing is my ideal -- effortlessly jumping between art and science, continental and analytic philosophy, personal experience and heavy abstraction. Like Sontag before her -- but thankfully jettisoning a lot of Madame Sontag's more embarrassing claims about aesthetics (as many great claims as she had as well) -- she takes all that stuff that forms her framework, and, without any difficulty at all, uses it to discuss writers, thinkers, artists, scientific concepts, and the ordinary stuff of daily life.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collection of essays. I especially liked the first two parts, Living and Thinking--very interesting stuff on migraines, reality, neuroscience, psychology, perception. Enjoyed her observations in "Excursions to the Islands of the Happy Few," in which she talks about how experts in their fields inhabit disciplinary islands of the like-educated and the like-minded. Another good one is "Freud's Playground"--imaginary friends come up, as well as a missing limb and fiction writing. The last part, Looking--about art--I couldn't really follow. I think that part might be good to read on an electronic reading format that is wired so you could look up images of the art she reviews.

[Julienne Loon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is there nothing this woman cannot do well? Sir Hustvedt's essays are intelligent, interesting, inspiring. Her key passions - art, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, narrative, fiction - are not so different from my own key interests. I found this essay collection fascinating. Well researched, thoughtful, beautifully written.

[Michael Bohli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Siri Hustvedt schreibt Romane, die nicht nur auf menschlicher sondern auch kunstvoller Ebene fesseln. Es ist also nicht weiter verwunderlich, dass die Amerikanerin mit Diplom der englischen Literatur und vielen Interessen an diversen Wissenschaften auch packende Essays schreibt. "Leben, Denken, Schauen" versammelt nun solche Texte und Schriften aus den Jahren 2005 bis 2011 und zeigt auf, dass man sehr wohl in verständlicher Sprache über Neurowissenschaften, die Trennung von Geist und Körper, Kunst und Literatur schreiben kann.

So wird man nicht nur in diverse Gebiete eingeführt, sondern erhält vielseitige, spannende und lehrreiche Inputs. Mich persönlich packten ihre Texte über Künstler und das duale Verhalten zwischen Kunstobjekt und Mensch. Nicht nur sind diese Abhandlungen sehr tief, sondern weckten auch in mir wieder die grosse Lust, Künstler, Ausstellungen und Kreativität verstärkt anzugehen. Somit ist diese Sammlung auch anregend, eröffnet Horizonte und eignet sich gar als Art Nachschlagewerk.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concept of this book is great, but it would have benefited from both skillful editing and hyperlinks to the referenced artwork.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the style dry and only periodically engaging. Part one is more or less autobiography, and I didn't relate to her life or her way of thinking about life. She writes about memory but it just didn't seem revelatory or beautiful or interesting to me. Part two, "Thinking," is all about analyzing ideas to death. Throw in some Freud and neurobiology and go. I feel that if my own interests and investigations were similar to Hustvedt's, I would love this book. But it's not the case. Last, the "Looking" section is mostly on visual art and artists. I had not heard of, or did not know the work of, most of the ones she writes about, which again made it hard to dig in and enjoy it. I feel I could return to this book in the future and enjoy it more.

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite essays in this collection were "My Mother, Phineas, Morality, and Feeling" and "Critical Notes on the Verbal Climate."

Other essays I liked or affected me in some way:
"Outside the Mirror"
"The Real Story"
"Freud's Playground"

The portions called Living and Thinking affected and interested me the most. I ended up skimming through the section called Looking, bored by the unfamiliar artists and artworks referenced.

[Ivana Galapceva · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book of essays I've read in a long time. I especially like the thinking part of the essays. Her experience in various disciplines, such as psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, the arts is so grand, and her musings on interesting topics that are cross-cut between these areas are informative and really enjoyable.

[Helen King · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has so many wonderful insights and reflections, based on personal experience, research and observation. As it says in the blurb, while the topics range, the same questions recur - how do we see, remember and feel? How do we interact with others, what is 'the self'?

Its not a light read - and I attempted to read it cover to cover, whereas it is probably a book better treated as an essay or two at a time, with time then to ponder. As such, I feel overloaded with new thoughts and perspectives and haven't quite managed to finish it. However, I've gained so many ways of thinking and expressing different experiences, and as in many of my reviews, I need to quote to remember them - so:

On motherhood - 'In a country where human relationships are seen as entities to be 'worked on', as if they were a thousand-piece puzzles that only take time to complete, the pleasure to be found in ones children, the desire we have for them falls outside the discussion.'
- Parenthood can be grueling, boring, and painful, but most people want their children and love them, As parents, they are ...'good enough'. This 'good enough' is not perfection but a form of dialogue, a receptiveness that doesn't impose on the child the monologic desires of the parents, but recognises his autonomy, his real separateness'. (p12)

On novels, sleeping and transitions - "A transitional object" - D.W. coined this term for the thngs children cling to - bits of blanket or stuffed animals or their own fingers or thumb - that occupy a space between the subjective inner world and the outside world. These objectives are especially necessary at bedtime when, as Winnicott writes, "from waking to sleeping, the child jumps from a perceived world to a self created world. In between there is a need for all kinds of transitional phenomena - neutral territory" (p50)


On fathers - 'It is ordinary for children to idealize their fathers. It is also ordinary for children to grow up and recognise thay some father's humanity and blind spots.'''It is good for children to have the experience of being let down gently by a real father. The transition from ideal to real isn't always so easy, however, not for the children or for the father.....Identities, identification and desires cannot be untangled from one another. We become ourselves through others, and the self is a porous thing, not a sealed container... We do not author ourselves, which is not to say we have no agency or responsibility, but rather that becoming doesn't escape relation.' (p70)

On mothers - 'Mother love is everyone's beginning, and its potency is overwhelming... For both boys and girls, the mother begins as a towering figure, source of life, food and feeling. The sentimentality that has lain thick over motherhood in western culture, at least since the nineteenth century, strikes me as a way to tame a two way passion that has a threatening quality, if only by dint of its strength, Children must escape their mothers, and mothers must let them go, and separation can be a long tug-of-war' (p72)

On 'the real story' - 'Writing fiction takes place in a mental zone of free invention that memoir does not (or should not), for the simple reason that (the reader) expects the writer of the volume has told the truth...(However) the explicit, conscious memories we retain are only a fraction of what we remember implicitly ... memories are revised over time, their meanings change as we age ... What we recall is the last version of a given memory'(p94)
-Fraudulent or otherwise, many memoir narratives partake of the broader culture's need for crude reductions of comp[lex human realities into a salable package of victimology' (p98)
-'The art of autobiography, as much as the art of fiction, calls on the writer to shape himself as a character in a story, and that shaping requires a form mediated by language. What scientists call episodic or autobiographical memory is essential for creating a coherent narrative sense of a self over time' Memory is flux' (p103-4)
- When I'm writing a novel, it is very much like dredging up a memory, trying hard to find the 'real' story that is buried somewhere in my being, and when I find it, it feels true. But I have also written passages that are wrong, that feel like lies, and then I must get rid of them and start again. I am measuring the truth of my fictional story against some emotional reality connected to my memories' (p105)
- ''..robbing one's own memory for fiction can have a peculiar effect on the recollection itself. In his memoir, Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov addresses this change. 'I have often noticed that after I bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone, and presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than my former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the artist' (p113).

On the ever narrowing fields of 'expertise' - We live in a world of hyperfocus and expertise. 'Experts' on this or that particular subject are continually consulted ... and each field carved out a domain and pursues it relentlessly, accumulating vast amounts of highly specific knowledge ,,, these people inhabit disciplinary islands of the like-educated and the like-minded'...I've been saddened by the lack of shared knowledge. It can be very hard to talk to people, have them understand you and for you to understand them, Dialogue itself is often at risk'.(p118) The truth is that being an expert in any field,,, takes up most of your time, and even with heroic efforts, it's impossible to read everything on a given topic'

On perception 'In 1960, Giorgio Morandi said 'I believe that nothing is more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see. We know all we can see of the objectvie world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has not intrinsic mean of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. Only we know that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree'. The question is: what did Morandi mean? ... that what we see is 'filtered' through us. Subject and object are not so easily separated...looking at art can't be separated from our lived experience of the world and the image exists in my perception of it' (p232, 242, p234)

[GONZA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essays that mixes art, literature, neuropsychology and neuropsychonalisis plus her life as a writer, daughter, sister, wife and mother; they were so interesting that I got lost reading the book.... A long ago she was just the wife of Paul Auster, now I'm used to think about him as the husband of Siri the great ;)

[Susannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Shame, I really like her writing, but just did not ever get into her diverse essays. I think I'm reading too many books as of late made up of newspaper articles/blogs/speeches and I'm looking for a thread which I'm not going to find! Need to go back to some fiction written in coherent chapters!

[Ullalin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erinomainen teos siitä, kuinka näemme, muistamme ja koemme toisemme ja kohtaamamme asiat sekä siitä, mitä on olla ihminen, havainnoida, omaksua ja nähdä. Tämä teos on pakko lukea ja omaksua.

[Elke de Echte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written over a span of five years (2006-2011), Siri Hustvedt’s essays give a clear insight into her interconnected adventures in the roams of art, philosophy, neuroscience, psychoanalysis and literature. And what an intelligent, interesting and inspiring search it is! No single theoretical model can contain the complexity of human reality – so she says – but her exemplary clarity on seeing, remembering, feeling, interacting, sleeping, dreaming and speaking help to reveal how much is still to be revealed. This ‘mystification’ of what it means to be a human feels reinvigorating, all the more in these post-human times. The Section on Living and Thinkingseem to be more engaging; as for the Looking section one needs to see the art to be able to comprehend. Notwithstanding much repetition throughout, the overall bundle is well researched, thoughtful and beautifully written and urge to reread.

[J.S. Meresmaa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Huh, johan oli muhkea esseekokoelma! Viisaita ja tarkkanäköisiä esseitä mm. taiteesta, muistista, psykologiasta... niin monesta! Osa esseistä pursuili hyvin akateemista kieltä ja vaikeita lauserakenteita, osa oli selvästi laajemmalle yleisölle tarkoitettuja ja siten helppolukuisempia. Tämä ei ollut mikään nopealukuinen, kevyt teos, vaan sellainen joka vaatii lukijalta vähän enemmän aivotyötä, mutta palkitsee ehkä sitäkin enemmän ja jättää tunnun, että takaisinkin on palattava. Uudelleen ja uudelleen.

[Amy in the Desert · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only read the "Looking" portion. It had some really interesting points, but it was pretty dry. I skimmed a lot.

[Fanny Rubi]

Esque Siri!!!!!!!! La lucidez de esta mujer neoyorquina es increíble. Hace algunos años comencé a conocerla y no deja de sorprenderme. Restan muchos por leer de ella y su esposo, Paul Auster.

[Audrey Misquith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written over several years, Living, Thinking and Looking is a collection of essays by Siri Hustvedt that explicates the ‘lived’ human experience through the lens of an array of disciplines including philosophy, neurobiology, psychology, literature and art. This book is very similar to another book written by the author titled, ‘Women looking at men looking at women’, though not quite as extensive. I enjoyed reading both books due primarily to, the author’s choice of themes, her brilliant interdisciplinary analysis and her luxuriant yet ‘humane’ writing style. Hustvedt is a prolific author and what I admire most about her is her penchant for understanding human life through an extensive, almost unbridled study of various disciplines. Her ‘thirst for knowledge’ if you will, to answer some of the most pressing questions of our day appears unquenchable, as you sift through the pages of her work. She quotes hundreds of philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists and artists including, Ponty, Freud and Richter throughout her essays, the sheer number of which, is dazzling. As well as enjoying her essays for the ideas they elaborate, I also learnt a lot about some of the greatest works ever written, not to mention further added to the long list of books I want to read!

Some of my favourite themes that Hustvedt discusses in Living, Thinking and Looking include an analysis of the unconscious and prereflective self-consciousness and how these states of being influence writing, particularly the writing of novels and fiction; the theories of transference and countertransference that catapulted Freud to fame (or notoriety ) ; the notion that emotions and cognition are inter-linked; the claim that memory and imagination emanate from the same areas in the brain, and the assertion that looking at and perceiving visual art takes place in an intersubjective space/reality.

I’ll also say that while Hustvedt writes about complex and serious themes, her work is very relatable. One of the ways she makes it relatable is by recounting many of her own personal experiences, as well as third-person experiences, some of which are relatively mundane. And, this is what is most striking about her style of writing: She is able to explain a very cerebral concept using simple, everyday examples that are part of the universal human experience.
I would 100% recommend this book and Siri Hustvedt more broadly, to anyone interested in understanding what it means to be alive as a human being!

[Nick Davies · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but inconsistent. Siri Hustvedt is a Norwegian-American author (and Paul Auster's wife) and here in this collection writes about a variety of subjects - loosely gathered together under the overarching themes of living, thinking and looking.

As obviously intelligent and well-read as Hustvedt is, the overall result is a slightly patchy book. Much of this probably has to do with the nature of the beast - columns and articles from a fairly large period in the early part of this century - but there is also an extent to which I felt that the faults of the writing and of the book were down to the author's standpoint.

Hustvedt takes a particular interest in psychiatry, neurology and perception - unsurprising considering some of her previous work (including working in creative arts with mental patients and writing about her own experiences with neurological illness). She has clearly done a lot of excellent research in areas of science and literature, and some of her synthesis is extraordinary. Some, however, I felt was a little off the mark, to me it felt like scientific findings had either been misunderstood by the author, or had been wilfully disregarded as it didn't fit the point she was trying to make. It's an awkward line to take - that between an artistic philosophy and 'all of perception is just electrochemical stimulation, nothing real' - and she didn't always stay on this line for me. At times her style of writing too - beautiful as some of the language was - was a bit floral when the subject might've been better explained in blunt scientific terms.

The final third of the book was weaker than the previous two thirds, much of it just reading like reviews of art exhibitions, but overall I would recommend this book to artistic and scientific readers alike as both will get something from it (though both may find much of it less compelling).

[Barbaraw - su anobii aussi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Con parole sue, Siri Hustvedt spiega bene il senso, l'interesse, il fuoco centrale dei saggi raccolti in questo libro:
"I miei saggi sono una forma di viaggio mentale, di passeggiata verso le risposte con la profonda consapevolezza che non arriverò mai in fondo alla strada. Uso le mie esperienze esattamente come quelle degli altri - come intuizione per sostenere un'idea. Nei seguenti scritti appaio e scompaio al pari di un personaggio. La mia presenza, o assenza, dipende dal ragionamento che sto sviluppando.
Non c'è niente di nuovo in questo approccio. Agostino racconta molto di sé nelle sue Confessioni, ma quello che ci dice delle sue terribili lotte interiori non è mai gratuito: serve a illustrare una profonda indagine filosofica atta a portare il lettore stesso a un risveglio spirituale."
E non è semplicemente una bandierina iniziale, per poi fregarci, e parlare di sé, sotto copertura filosofica. Questo è un essere pensante in funzione.
Non accademica, non specialista e , grazie a questo, illuminante.
Uno dei saggi "Escursione nelle isole dei pochi fortunati" espone in modo eccellente lo stato delle nostre conoscenze: ampissime e strettissime, polverizzate in cervelli esperti di una piccola parcella di conoscenza, isolati e scollegati.
Una voce intelligente, rinfrescante rispetto ai troppo numerosi studiosi inaccessibili, un pensiero libero, che coniuga filosofia, psicoanalisi, arte e neurobiologia, senza sussiego.
I soggetti sono molto vari: dalla lettura alla fotografia, dalla malattia alla scrittura, connotati da una ricerca da archivista che restituisce profondità alle idee nel loro svolgersi lungo i secoli.

[Nageen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Literary Merit: 3.75 stars

I am happy to say that I liked this book quite a lot. I have such a personal connection with her fiction that I really wanted to explore how she writes non fiction essays. My Father/Myself was a great essay.

There is absolutely nothing 'pseudo' about writing about topics which one has self studied. Hustvedt has self studied certain scientific subjects in details and she is quite at liberty to engage in an unspoken dialogue with her readers. She is free to connect her thoughts with her scientific studies despite not being an authority in Psychoanalytics and Neuroscience. Though she takes much inferences from Freud who has been rejected quite many times by the scientific community, (she also criticises Freud by the way), she is absolutely free to write about her readings. I saw certain reviews where people have criticised her for doing so and I am amazed as to why cannot a fiction writer who holds a Ph.D in Literature, have her perceptions and views on scientific subjects.

I am so glad that I found this book, this is such an insight into the mind of someone I can relate with. Her thoughts, perceptions and inferences are so similar to the way I think, to my thought process despite her being from a different generation, social background and education. Siri Hustvedt is one of my favorite authors now.

[Marian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Denne boka har jeg brukt lang tid på. Både fordi essayene er så mettet med innhold at små porsjoner holder, men også fordi jeg synes boka er intellektuelt krevende. Sjelden krevende. Siri Hustvedt er ikke bare en sterk forfatter, hun er også særdeles intelligent kvinne med kjennskap til hjerneforskning, psykoanalyse og kunst. Første delen "Livet" er lettest å lese og også den jeg liker best. Eksempelvis er "Sove/ikke sove" veldig interessant. Neste del "Tanken" bringer perler som "Om å lese". Siste delen "Blikket", som handler om å betrakte kunst er for meg mindre tilgjengelig fordi jeg ikke selv har særlig kunnskap om kunst. Samtidig er essayene her utrolig lærerike og gode. Eksempelvis leste jeg "Hva er det med Goya?" mens jeg samtidig studerte Goyas mest kjente bilder på iPad. Essayet har uten tvil økt min interesse for å komme meg til Prado-museet i Madrid, og samtlige essay i denne delen har økt min interesse for kunst. Slik virker denne samlingen på en måte som er det beste jeg vet - den stimulerer og fyrere oppunder min tørst etter læring.

[Phoebe · Rating 4 out of 5]

April book

I assumed the essays would be composed of her meandering thoughts about what it means to be human. Well. I was wrong. Hustvedt is an academic and even though her writing is lucid and direct, she takes you all over the place: neuroscience, psychoanalysis, philosophy of modern art, linguistics, developmental science, historicism, anthropology, personal memories, reflection on academia, literary criticism, and film review. Because her approach is so interdisciplinary, she cites...a lot of people. Winnicott, Benjamin, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Kristeva, Fielding, Proust, Bloom, Sontag, Habermas, Baudrillard, Virilio, Bakhtin, Kuhn...and the list goes on. Basically I couldn’t just breeze through this book, which meant I had to carve out time to read this, or if I read this before bedtime, I’d be skimming a lot. Fav essays: the one about migraines, the one about disciplines as islands, the one about her father, the one about sleep, and the one about Goya.

[Margaryta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hustvedt's essays are insightful and very well researched and written. The sections are ordered as they are in the title and grow consecutively more complex and nuanced the further one goes into the book. Personally, the section Thinking was probably furthest from my comfort zone, however Hustvedt made me appreciate Freud a bit more than I usually due, which is a feat in itself. I haven't encountered a collection of essays before that focuses so much on neuroscience. Hustvedt's "Living, Thinking, Looking" is something rather different from what I've encountered so far and has filled a significant gap in my knowledge. It offered me another perspective that I wouldn't have considered before, making for an interesting read and potentially a useful reference material to bounce back to during future readings.

[Lee Kofman · Rating 4 out of 5]

As per usual, I really enjoyed reading another book by Siri Hustvedt. This essay collection was a little too impersonal to my liking, but her range of interests suited me well. Even her essays on art – something I usually find tedious to read unless I know the artist well – interested me to some extent, because Hustvedt introduced me to artists I liked a lot. I particularly learned a lot from her about the theories around subconscious. I also found the structure of some of her essays really interesting and felt I learned from her as a writer.

[Lost in a Good Book · Rating 4 out of 5]

I generally love Siri Hustvedt, and this did not disappoint. Her essays are erudite and fascinating and I love her cross-disciplinary approach to topics. Some of the essays felt very weighted in heavy academic writing, which made them less accessible, and I really had to work at reading them, but that's never a bad thing.
I look forward to reading more of her brilliant observations in her latest book of essays: "A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women".

[Kayla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed the living and thinking sections. The looking essays were not my cup of tea. The entire collection would have benefited from editing. I felt like I was reading her blog, which is not a bad thing but call it that, not a book of essays. I do think she is probably brilliant and one would learn from being her friend, but that is now shot, no doubt:)