What does it mean to care about things? The Blindfold, Siri Hustvedt’s first novel, dangles this question in a series of set-pieces, moments of glimpsing into the weirdness of the everyday, the objects that fill it and the ways in which these objects are, might, should or shouldn’t be handled. The Blindfold’s objects are animate or border on animation…
View More Caring about things in Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold
‘There is a bitter and dark struggle around time and the use of time’. Thus wrote Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier in an 1985 article later collected in Lefebvre’s final set of essays, Rhythmanalysis, posthumously published in 1992 (Lefebvre 83). As if the day is not long enough for all our repetitive tasks, the …
View More Duration Without Breaks: Marclay and McQueen Against the Clock
In a Granta Magazine interview with Ted Hodgkinson, Helen Oyeyemi talks about re-writing the endings of canonical texts to suit her own reading of the novel in question. Writing in the margins of library books, Oyeyemi ‘would cross out endings that I didn’t like and I would rewrite them […] I would order everything to …
View More Re-imagining Bluebeard’s Wives: Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox
In her most recent novel The Blazing World (2014), Siri Hustvedt raises the problem of sex biases in the art world. One of the central premises of the book is that works of art executed by women are rated significantly lower than the same piece by a man. “Does art really have a gender identity”, asks Hustvedt …
View More Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World: Does Art Have a Gender Identity?