This time, Hustvedt has turned to the grey zone between her fictional and non-fictional aspirations. The Blazing World caps a particularly strong run of books for the author that includes the 2011 novel The Summer Without Men, as well as two potent non-fiction works, 2009’s The Shaking Woman or a History of my Nerves and 2012’s Living, Thinking, Looking, in which her handling of her long-running grand themes has crystallized into one of the most individual perspectives in contemporary American literature. The complexities of gender roles, the space between object and objectification, the vagaries of perception - these often heady and always contemporary themes have centered Hustvedt’s most original writings since her first book, The Blindfold.īut if her 1992 debut read as if it was intended expressly as fodder for graduate dissertations, some two decades later The Blazing World demonstrates that Hustvedt’s imagination has been rounded out by deft portrayals of psychological texture and an uncanny ability to balance intellectual concerns with primal tensions. In that novel, her third, the art world afforded the author a humanizing balm sufficiently textured enough to carry the weight of her wide-ranging ideas. Siri Hustvedt’s masterful sixth novel, The Blazing World, emerges as a companion to her most famous work to date, the 2003 breakthrough bestseller What I Loved.
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