A fascinating book about perception, the veiling of reality, gender and a compelling story about layers of family love and dysfunction. Harriet both broke my heart with her story while inspiring me with her doggedness to share her vision in the world.

Finally! This was the wrong book for me at this time in my life: things have been chaotic, so I did not have the mental energy to really love this book. I loved some of the characters and sections, but felt like putting the book down during the long philosophical discussions.

Hustvedt's first novel, The Blindfold, was one of my favorite books, but I hated her second novel so much that I swore that I would never read anything of hers. I'm glad that I read this, but I would have appreciated it so much more when I was in school.

4.5 stars

In the May/June issue of Poets & Writers [a:Claire Messud|2508|Claire Messud|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1384661816p2/2508.jpg] said of her novel [b:The Woman Upstairs|15701217|The Woman Upstairs|Claire Messud|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1345666863s/15701217.jpg|18450578] and its narrator:

"As a reader, I have a favorite canon of ranters that runs from Dostoevsky to Thomas Bernhard to the Philip Roth of Sabbath's Theater ... I love a ranter ... And the girls have not been ranting."

Well, Hustvedt's Harriet, aka Harry, is, like Messud's Nora, a ranter and for similar reasons that boil down -- and Harry does boil -- to her wanting to be heard. She is an exuberant, energetic 'older' woman, "blazing" with ideas, who desperately wants full engagement with others and struggles with the idea that she was complicit with those, especially her now-deceased beloved father and husband, who sought to keep her in her place.

This novel is more complex than the Messud and only one reason for that is that it's not told from just one viewpoint. Though I don't think the overall conceit of these various writings and interviews by different voices is convincing as the "book" edited by Professor I.V. Hess that it purports to be, the different voices are absolutely convincing.

Gender-swapping via cross-dressing, and the freedom it may provide, has been a theme of Hustvedt's since her first novel, [b:The Blindfold|125496|The Blindfold|Siri Hustvedt|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1317792997s/125496.jpg|1163811] and I couldn't help wondering if Prof. I.V. Hess is also The Blindfold's main character, Iris Vegan (note the anagram of Iris and Siri; Vegan is Hustvedt's mother's maiden name). Fittingly, we don't know the gender of Hess, or much about her/him at all except that she/he seems sympathetic to Harriet, the subject of her/his book.

One of Hustvedt's main themes throughout her body of work is the idea of perception and that along with [b:The Blindfold|125496|The Blindfold|Siri Hustvedt|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1317792997s/125496.jpg|1163811]'s putting on a man's clothes to change personality are taken further here. Harry uses the 'masks' of three young men (they use her too) not just to front her art but to influence it, though I didn't find the latter idea presented as well as the former was. The dangerous mask-play between the third young man and Harriet, done privately though filmed, further complicates the roles of gender and power.

The ending, which brought tears to my eyes, reminded me of the end of my last read, [b:The Song of the Lark|48214|The Song of the Lark (Great Plains Trilogy, #2)|Willa Cather|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388631383s/48214.jpg|1385675], in that the writers surprisingly veer away from the artist's viewpoint to another character's, who in this novel has an intuitive -- literally -- understanding of Harriet's art, a touching and telling counterpoint to all the philosophy that's go on before.

*

After writing this review, I googled "I.V. Hess" and found this in an interview with Hustvedt:

Jill: I have to interject — I feel like there has to be an anagram or something in the name I. V. Hess that I'm not figuring out. It might be totally obvious.

Hustvedt: No, it's not obvious at all. It's very oblique. But I'll tell you, since you asked. The heroine of my first novel is Iris Vegan. I used those two letters for the initials and all the other letters, H-E-S-S, appear in my last name.

It's a little bit of a Kierkegaardian trick. Kierkegaard had Eremita as his editor for the book that, of course, he wrote, but inside the book, there are A and B. Kierkegaard is referred to throughout The Blazing World. I thought, these are not stolen strategies but strategies that are a kind of homage.

http://www.powells.com/blog/interviews/siri-hustvedt-the-powells-com-interview-2-by-jill/

Identity, gender, perception, self-deception…
Siri Hustvedt is known as a writer for intellectuals. Her novels usually drill very deep into the human soul, they are full of scientific, philosophical and literary references and her stories are embedded in ingenious plots with continuous changes in perspective and time. I liked most of her previous novels, and [b:What I Loved|125502|What I Loved|Siri Hustvedt|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347721158s/125502.jpg|1309881] and especially [b:The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves|7055093|The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves|Siri Hustvedt|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1312052466s/7055093.jpg|7306302] are among the best that have been published in the last decades. But with this book, "The Blazing World", I’m in doubt.

It's definitely a very interesting novel both by the theme(s) as by the format. To start with the latter: Hustvedt presents her novel as a puzzle, a collection of testimonies, interviews, essays, letters and extensive diary notes, by different characters, but it's all focussing around Harriet Burden, a 60-year-old New York artist who has been performing a particular experiment. Burden was very frustrated about the fact that women in the arts still aren’t taken seriously, and therefore she exhibited some of her work under the name of some younger, male colleagues. You can guess it: the arty farty-art world (that Hustvedt herself knows very well) is been put on display in a mockery way, but at the same time, also the gender issue is put into focus.

In my opinion Hustvedt’s most important focus is on the issue of the 'persona': what is the identity of a person (male/female/…), how is it perceived by others, how does it perceive itself? It’s no coincidence that the experiment of Harriet Burden is called “Maskings”, and the technique of hiding behind masks is continuously discussed in the different contributions to this novel. It’s an issue that already a century ago was brilliantly raised by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello and a bit later also by the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa (and his heteronyms), and which has lost nothing of its relevance. Identity, masks, perception… it are notions that always show up in the pages of this novel.

In other words, Hustvedt has combined these relevant themes with a puzzle structure (of course reference is made to Georges Perec) that puts her readers really to the test. To some extent she certainly succeeds in keeping the attention going. But I have one major point of doubt and that is the main character Harriet Burden herself. By Hustvedt she is presented as a very complicated being, in various roles (not only as an artist but also as a wife, mother, daughter, grandmother, and so on), but even after 450 pages she keeps on being an elusive creature (with some pun Harriet herself calls this ‘the burden of Burden’). At some point as a reader you even wonder whether her critics were right when they state that Harriet was a frustrated, neurotic and disturbed person. That sounds very harsh, but it shows how Hustvedt plays with the concepts of perception, self-perception and even includes self-deception.

The final chapter describes the last days of Harriet through the eyes of a rather esoteric character. And this chapter seems to suggest that all that confusion about identity and perception doesn't really matter, and that every person – including Harriet – ultimately is constituted by what he/she leaves behind. And, perhaps, that is true: every person, how normal or eccentric it might be, has to be viewed as a unique person, with his/her strengths and weaknesses, and everyone leaves behind a certain "aura" that keeps on working in the world after death. I know, that sounds very New Age-like, but it is nicely described by Hustvedt. But then: why using 450 pages of puzzle work to end up with such a tentative message? Because of the elusive aspect, to me this is not really Hustvedt's best novel, but she remains one of the most intriguing writers of the moment

The characters are amazing, but, right now, I'm in a place where I don't want to work to understand the stories I read... I don't know when I'll want that, but if I am, I'll revisit this author.