The Blazing World - Hardcover

Hustvedt, Siri

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1476747237 ISBN 13: 9781476747231

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2014

Synopsis

Longlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and hailed by The Washington Post as “Siri Hustvedt’s best novel yet, an electrifying work,” The Blazing World is a masterful novel about perception, prejudice, desire, and one woman’s struggle to be seen.

In a new novel called “searingly fresh... A Nabokovian cat’s cradle” on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, the internationally bestselling author tells the provocative story of artist Harriet Burden, who, after years of having her work ignored, ignites an explosive scandal in New York’s art world when she recruits three young men to present her creations as their own. Yet when the shows succeed and Burden steps forward for her triumphant reveal, she is betrayed by the third man, Rune. Many critics side with him, and Burden and Rune find themselves in a charged and dangerous game, one that ends in his bizarre death.

An intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle presented as a collection of texts, including Harriet’s journals, assembled after her death, this “glorious mashup of storytelling and scholarship” (San Francisco Chronicle) unfolds from multiple perspectives as Harriet’s critics, fans, family, and others offer their own conflicting opinions of where the truth lies. Writing in Slate, Katie Roiphe declared it “a spectacularly good read...feminism in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex or Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: richly complex, densely psychological, dazzlingly nuanced.”

“Astonishing, harrowing, and utterly, completely engrossing” (NPR), Hustvedt’s new novel is “Blazing indeed:...with agonizing compassion for all of wounded humanity”(Kirkus Reviews, starred review). It is a masterpiece that will be remembered for years to come.

About this title

Product Description:

HardCover. Pub Date :2014-03-11 Pages: 357 Language: English Publisher: Simon & Schuster With The Blazing World. internationally best-selling author Siri Hustvedt returns to the New York art world in her most masterful and urgent novel since What I Loved. Hustvedt. who has long been celebrated for her beguiling. lyrical prose (The Sunday Times Books. London). tells the provocative story of the artist Harriet Burden. After years of watching her work ignored or dismissed by critics. Burden conducts an experiment she calls Maskings: she presents her own art behind three male masks. concealing her female identity.The three solo shows are successful. but when Burden finally steps forward triumphantly to reveal herself as the artist behind the exhibitions. there are critics who doubt her. The public scandal turns on the final exhibition. initially shown as the work of acclaimed ar...

Review:

I have told nearly everyone I love - and some random acquaintances - to stop whatever they are doing and read [Hustvedt's] new novel . . . The Blazing World is the playful, ebullient, brainy story of Harriet "Harry" Burden, an artist in her early sixties . . . The book is clearly a feminist undertaking but joyously, unpredictably so. Hustvedt eschews all feminist cliché. She throws herself into rich ambiguities . . . Hustvedt's novels have always been smart, accomplished, critically acclaimed but this one feels like a departure. There is more heat in it, more wildness; it seems to burst on to a whole other level of achievement and grace . . . the book will blaze through the world. (Katie Roiphe Financial Times)

This novel is like a palimpsest, built from many paper-tissue thin layers, some more transparent than others, and told through many voices, put together so cleverly it is not clear where the lines are between fact and fiction, let alone between the fictions within the fiction . . . Siri Hustvedt has created a complex world of play and interplay. This novel is a puzzle, a mystery, a dance, filled with intrigue, a truly wonderful intellectual work that makes you think and laugh and tickles the brain. (Victoria Moore Daily Mail)

Harry is a lovable, maddening whirlwind . . . The fury is brilliantly done, and so is the love affair Harry embarks on with a fat failed poet . . . Hustvedt writes with a cool precision that can give her work a blistering power . . . The Blazing World is a dazzling novel, the kind that makes you cry (or nearly cry) as well as think. (Christina Patterson The Sunday Times)

There is a fair amount of anger in the book: feminist anger, but also disdain for journalists, for the art industry, for a gendered world that ignores women like Harriet and rewards men like her husband . . . It might have become shrill in the hands of a lesser writer. As it is, it is at once a story of a privileged Upper East type who bleeds the wounds of Western liberal feminism, and also the universal, deeply affecting story of overshadowed women who are made - or make themselves - small, however big their ambition . . . The Blazing World is a profound and deeply serious book on many levels, but it is most entertaining in its critique of the New York art scene - its vanities, double standards, blind-spots . . . [A novel of] immense soulfulness and wisdom (Arifa Akbar Independent)

The richness and playfulness of the novel is down to the way it is structured . . . What is remarkable is the way Hustvedt manages to take her range of intellectual interests and this ostensibly complex format and forge a gripping narrative. (Duncan White Daily Telegraph)

It is an exuberantly clever piece of work. Fascinated by disguise, play-acting and ventriloquism, it lures its readers into a maze of characters, viewpoints and apparently persuasive arguments - then insists, refreshingly, that they think their way out . . . There's a central mystery to unravel in The Blazing World, but its real pleasures come from Hustvedt's startling talent for voice and register . . . the narrative becomes a brilliant catfight of dogmas and orthodoxies . . . a novel that gloriously lives up to its title, one blazing with energy and thought. (Tim Martin The Times)

Hustvedt offers a slickly written multiplicity of perspectives . . . The Blazing World ramps up thrillingly as it becomes apparent that Harriet's final collaboration has taken a sinister turn . . . Densely brilliant, but terrifyingly clever . . . But you don't need a PhD in Kierkegaard to enjoy Hustvedt's writing, and it's a pleasure to feel your brain whirring as it forges links and finds the cracks across differing accounts . . . Hustvedt's text is carefully, impressively constructed: she's as convincing in each fictional voice as Harriet is in her masks. (Holly Williams Independent on Sunday)

Her prose is brilliant, furious, teeming with intelligence and life - an experiment in reception itself. (Literary Review)

Both intellectually and emotionally gripping . . . the generosity of the storytelling leads to full and often affecting backstories for all the main characters . . . [it] feels like one of those novels in which a well-established author triumphantly sums up, and possibly even surpasses, everything they've done before. (James Walton Spectator)

Even by Siri Hustvedt's extremely high standards, The Blazing World is an extraordinary book . . . Hustvedt juggles the many voices and many truths masterfully, drawing the reader into an intricate and a puzzling web . . . The precision of the language makes each detail jewel-like and tangible. (Clare Heal Sunday Express)

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1476747237
• ISBN 13: 9781476747231
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 357