Siri Hustvedt



Siri Hustvedt (born February 19, 1955) is an American ppoet, novelist and essayist. Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, five novels, two books of essays, and a work of non-fiction. Her work has been translated into 29 languages.

Life
Hustvedt attended public school in her hometown of Northfield, Minnesota, and received a degree from the Cathedral School in Bergen, Norway, in 1973. Hustvedt graduated from St. Olaf College with a B.A. in History in 1977. She moved to New York City to attend Columbia University as a graduate student in 1978.

Her first published work was a poem in The Paris Review. A small collection of poems, Reading to You, appeared in 1982 with Station Hill Press.

She met her husband, the writer Paul Auster in 1981, and they were married the following year.

She completed a Ph.D. in English at Columbia in 1986. Her dissertation on Charles Dickens, Figures of Dust: A Reading of Our Mutual Friend, is an exploration of language and identity in the novel, with particular emphasis on Dickens’ metaphors of fragmentation, his use of pronouns, and their relation to a narrative, dialogical conception of self. She refers in the dissertation to sources that would influence and reappear in her later writing, including the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Emile Benveniste, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Mary Douglas, Paul Ricoeur, and Julia Kristeva.

Hustvedt and Auster’s daughter, Sophie Hustvedt Auster, the singer and actress, was born in 1987.

After finishing her dissertation, Hustvedt began writing prose. Two stories of the four that would become her first novel, The Blindfold, were published in literary magazines and later included in Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991. Since then she has continued to write fiction and publish essays on visual art but also on diverse interdisciplinary subjects that investigate the intersections among philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience.

Writing
Siri Hustvedt’s works repeatedly pose questions about the nature of identity, selfhood and perception. In The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, an interdisciplinary account of her own seizure disorder, Hustvedt states her need to view her symptom not “through a single window” but “from all angles.” These multiple perspectives do not resolve themselves into a single view but rather create an atmosphere of ambiguity and flux. Hustvedt presents the reader with characters whose minds are inseparable from their bodies and their environments and whose sense of self is situated on the threshold between the conscious and unconscious. Her characters often suffer traumatic events that disrupt the rhythms of their lives and lead to disorientation and a discontinuity of their identities. Hustvedt’s concern with embodied identity manifests itself in her investigation of gender roles and interpersonal relations. Both her fiction and nonfiction highlight dynamics of the gaze and questions of ethical representation in the visual arts.

An example of crossover to her husband's work, Auster used Iris, the narrator of Hustvedt's first novel, The Blindfold, in his novel Leviathan.

Recognitions
One section of The Blindfold was made into a movie by the French filmmaker Claude Miller. The film La Chambre des Magiciennes won The International Critics Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. What I Loved was on the initial short list for the Prix Femina Étranger in France for best foreign book of the year. It was also short-listed for Waterstone’s Literary Fiction Award in England and the Barcelona Bookseller’s Award in Spain. It won the Prix des libraires du Quebec in Canada for best book of 2003. The Summer Without Men was also shortlisted for The Femina Prize in 2011.

Siri Hustvedt is the 2012 recipient of the Gabarron International Award for Thought and Humanities.

Poetry

 * Reading to You (1982)

Fiction

 * The Blindfold (1992)
 * The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996)
 * What I Loved (2003)
 * The Sorrows of an American (2008)
 * The Summer Without Men (2011)

Nonfiction

 * Yonder (1998)
 * Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting (2005)
 * A Plea for Eros (2005)
 * The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (2009)
 * Living, Thinking, Looking (2012)

Translated

 * Kjetsaa, Geir. Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer's Life, translated by Siri Hustvedt and David McDuff (1998)

Translation Editor

 * Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Ferber, Nadof, Tazi (1998)

Lectures and conversations

 * “Why Goya?” Fundacion Amigos del Museo del Prado. Prado Museum, Madrid. February 8, 2007. Video
 * “Embodied Visions: What Does it Mean to Look at a Work of Art?” The Third Annual Schelling Lecture. Academie der Bildenen Künste, Munich. January 27, 2010.