Customer Reviews

The Blindfold: A Novel

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

That the book is dedicated to Paul Auster, you will find in the first chapter. The tone is similary to that of Auster's New York Trilogy. But after this it is really her own style of writing and with every word you read the atmosphere of mystery and adventure turns more and more to hopelessness and cruelty. But this cruelty is not expressed in cruel pictures as one is used to but in words and moods much more subtle so that you are not able to escape from. That's what makes this novel so fascinating. I wonder why the covertext speaks only of the heroines search of identity but not of the cruelty, the underlying theme of every word.

Iris Vagan wanders New York in search of self. Iris first is hired as a writer to react to objects which belonged to a murdered woman. Do we have meaning and identify through our possessions? An identity so strong that it can be perceived even after death. Interesting question. She has a photograph taken and then circulated without her knowledge. She becomes the woman in the photograph. The woman in the photograph has an identity of her own separate from Iris. How many times do we remember someone through a photograph? She translates a book from German to English for a professor. She reenacts the character of the book through dressing in drag and walking the streets of New York. Towards the end of the book she has a wonderful section on perception and reality. Where does the self come from? How do we gain identity in this world of images? What is fact and what is fiction? I found her writing so enchanting that I bought her second book, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl and am working through it. (Iris is Siri spelled backwards for what that is worth)

This was my first book of Siri's and it was a delightful book. I could relate to Iris and her struggles as some related to my life. What touched me was her drive to keep going even in the hardest times and yet lost herself to survive too. How many of us would just love to be some body else for a while. I cried and laughed with and at Iris. When she shared her story to Paris of her police incident I laughed so hard because I could imagine the thoughts going through his head. "What are friends for but to have a good laugh." I do hope that Siri will continue another book about Iris. I would like to find out if she ever finds love and if she is alright in other areas of her life. This is the first book that I hated to see end.

I had drifted away from American writing for a while and this book re-acquainted me with the brilliance of modern American writers. Intriguing and insightful, it made a lasting impression on me and I have recommended it to many. Although the heroine is hard to identify with, I think everybody who has ever been a poor student, struggling with self-awareness and coming-of-age angst will find one of their chords being struck by this narrative.

The third chapter of this book is one of the best short stories I have ever read. (It is in the 1991 Best American Short Stories - titled "Houdini"). I laughed out loud at almost every line. Siri Hustvedt has a way of reporting preposterous events with in a matter of fact tone, that is funny, but it also provides an undercurrent of alienation/disconnection that gives the story gravity. Her characterizations are simultaneously absurd and real.

In this spare and compelling novel, a series of interconnected stories, Iris Vegan, a graduate student of literature living in New York, is drawn to a series of men who seem to have what she does not: a clear identity. These men include her cruel boyfriend Steven, who embraces the avant garde but recoils from anything truly strange; the brilliant, distant professor Rose whose repressed longings Iris stirs, and the confident and voyeuristic photographer who knowingly violates her privacy. In their showy and various plumages they flash through her life, but it is she, not they, who is the complicated and truly interesting character. They all turn out to be types, predictable in their actions, often unpleasant in their demands. Hustvedt's depiction of Iris's vulnerability, alone in the city, short on money, struggling through piles of books as she prepares for her orals, yet still talking like a dutiful daughter to her parents back in the Midwest is wonderfully true.

I have to add that in glancing through some of the reviews, I was astonished to see Hustvedt's marriage to Paul Auster repeatedly invoked as a way of explaining (or complaining about) her style of writing. I'm certain that readers discussing Auster's books don't feel compelled to mention his marital status. I'm glad I heard the writer Curtis Sittenfeld recommend this book in a recent interview on NPR. See what you think!

The Blindfold is a novel, yet it reads more like series of interconnected short stories - all concerning the same character: Iris Vegan - skipping back and forth through time. The premise of each chapter/story lures you in: she works for a collector of a dead girls objects and is asked to examine each one and whisper about it in detail on a tape recorder; she has a strange affair with a man named Stephen, never knowing where things stand... he has a friend who takes her photograph, and the picture circulates like some kind of urban legend - everyone knows who she is, although her face is never shown; she ends up in a hospital due to severe migraines and has a strange encounter with the old woman next to her; she translates a disturbing german novella and then takes the main character's identity -roaming the streets of NYC at night dressed as a man; in the final section she has an affair with a married man that ultimately ends badly - then there's a strange ending that I won't give away, but it left me with a feeling of "that's it? this is the place you were leading us to?"
The book, rich with oddity and intensity, ends on a bland, the author got bored, note.