The Blindfold (Norton Paperback Fiction) [Paperback]

Siri Hustvedt (Author)

Book Description

Series: Norton Paperback Fiction | Publication Date: June 1993

Iris Vegan, a young, impoverished graduate student from the Midwest, finds herself entangled with four powerful but threatening characters as she tries to adjust to life in New York City. Mr. Morning, an inscrutable urban recluse, employs Iris to tape-record verbal descriptions of objects that belonged to a murder victim. George, a photographer, takes an eerie portrait of Iris, which then acquires a strange life of its own, appearing and disappearing without warning around the city. After a series of blinding migraines, Iris ends up in a hospital room with Mrs. O., a woman who has lost her mind and memory to a stroke, but who nevertheless retains both the strength and energy to torment her fellow patient. And finally, there is Professor Rose, Iris’s teacher and eventually her lover. While working with him on the translation of a German novella called The Brutal Boy, she discovers in its protagonist, Klaus, a vehicle for her own transformation and ventures out into the city again--this time dressed as a man.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Iris Vegan, a graduate student from the Midwest, finds herself in a web of bizarre circumstances and urban characters when she attends Columbia University. Iris initially accepts a role in the unbalanced lives of others hoping to find some semblance of her own personal identity. She soon discovers, however, the high cost of living blindly outside one's own reality. Hustvedt's powerful metaphors and haunting descriptions combine to make this a striking first novel that deserves public attention. In fact, two chapters were selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories, 1990 and 1991 . If you neglect this novel because its plot sounds familiar, you will miss some of the most heartfelt and profound writing today.
- David A. Berona, Westbrook Coll. Lib., Portland, Me.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Poet Hustvedt's first novel is unabashedly cerebral, a disturbing and disarming fiction that explores the mysteries of identity. It's a postmodernist puzzle with a queasy eroticism and hints of perversion, and owes much to the work of Beckett, DeLillo, and her husband, Paul Auster. But Hustvedt adds to their explorations in silence and unspeakability her distinctly feminine voice: innocent, intimate, victimized. These four related narratives circle around the life of Iris Vegan, a distraught and hypersensitive graduate student in literature at Columbia. A beautiful, blue-eyed blond from the Midwest, she's continually at the mercy of others, mostly men who shroud themselves in mystery. Iris's first story finds her working as an assistant to a strange writer, a collector of women's discarded objects, who asks her to record her observations so that he may reconstruct their previous owners. After playing this bizarre Scheherazade, Iris is unalterably changed, but not as dramatically as in her second narrative, in which a photographer's portrait of her proves an invasion of her privacy. Her boyfriend at the time admits that cruelty makes him ``feel more alive.'' As her personality begins to disintegrate, Iris (in the third piece) admits to minor hallucinations, which land her in the hospital whacked out on Thorazine and tormented by one of her roommates, a withered old woman who also desires her in some strange way. To demonstrate further that ``distortion is part of desire,'' Iris then alters herself, taking on the role of a brutal boy, a role she has adopted from a German novella she co-translates with her professor/lover. Roaming the city in drag, she indulges her fantasies until the much older professor catches her in disguise. In playful ``blindness,'' she loses all sense of self but also turns out to be as mysterious as all her tormentors, so that we wonder, just who is playing with whom? Hustvedt brings her dark urban landscape to life with her camera eye and Iris's tenacious, Midwestern common sense--the perfect balance to all the existential weirdness. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 221 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (June 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393310132
• ISBN-13: 978-0393310139
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,993,223 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Siri Hustvedt is the author of four novels, The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Blindfold, and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, as well as two collections of essays, A Plea for Eros and Mysteries of the Rectangle. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sexy and smart slow burn of a book, September 20, 2005

By 

Kelvin MacGregor - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Blindfold: A Novel (Paperback)

Siri Hustvedt's novels, to me, are like the literary equivalent of Edward Hopper's paintings: portraying that haunting sense of abandonment and alienation in an anonymous American city landscape. Coincidentally, both The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl has a a voyeur protagonist watching people through the windows of their apartments at night, a recurring subject of Hopper's work.
Told in four interconnecting short stories, narrator Iris Vegan instantly draws the reader into her offbeat world populated by quirky characters and bizarre situations. Fresh out of Columbia University in New York, the graduate student's exploration and experimentation with the darker side of life is reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis territory in Less That Zero and a little disturbing to say the least.
Hustvedt's writing is beautiful, though; a deceptively simple spare prose that is polished and powerful. An intelligent and ingenious sexy slow burn of a book that grips you from the onset and makes you think as you savour each lingering sentence.
This is the kind of cult word-of-mouth book college girls will hug and hold dearly with an honest and real female character at the heart of its story who feels like an old friend.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Visual Intimacy and Vulnerability, March 19, 2011

By 

Dianne Hunter "dianne.hunter1" (Hartford, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Blindfold: A Novel (Paperback)

Iterating scenes of visual intimacy, Siri Hustvedt's first novel THE BLINDFOLD (1992) comprises a series of four interconnected accounts of several years of graduate study in literature at Columbia University in the 1980s, told through the eyes of a Midwesterner in her 20s and new to the cruelty, darkness and pollution of New York City. She struggles with poverty, hunger, sexual desire, neurological disorder, gender role conflict, identity fragmentation and madness. There are black holes in her perceptual field through which evil achieves an opening, and which feed her fascination with knowing the tactile world, listening, and finding the right words. Fearing that she may become a footnote in a psychiatric case history, the narrator is on a path to becoming a published writer. Hustvedt details how it feels to be the object and the subject of erotic encounters that border on the uncanny. In this novel, being seen is a form of vulnerability.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Serious Emotional Intelligence, February 17, 1999

By 

Jason A. Newman (USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Blindfold (Norton Paperback Fiction) (Paperback)

Hustvedt writes with a rare and beautiful emotional intelligence, and a searching mastery. She has an acute sense-memory. This novel is so quiet in its style it gets you hearing dog frequencies. Amazing. Buy this book.