The Enchantment of Lily Dahl: A Novel [Paperback]

Siri Hustvedt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 1997

Lily Dahl, the young heroine of Siri Hustvedt’s riveting novel, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, is a strong, beautiful and daring nineteen year old girl poised on the brink of womanhood. In the small town of Webster, Minnesota, Lily’s life revolves around the Ideal Café. She lives above the café in a rented room and works there as a waitress. This is the stage Hustvedt sets for a bizarre cast of characters who frequent the café and populate Lily’s life.

Weaving a fascinating spell of mystery and suspense, Hustvedt recounts the erotic adventures, unexpected friendships, and inexplicable acts of madness that usher Lily into womanhood. By skillfully mixing reality and dreams, fact and fiction, past and present, Hustvedt creates a powerful world not quite real, but altogether truthful.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Siri Hustvedt, whose debut novel The Blindfold was showered with critical acclaim, returns with The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, the coming of age story of a voluptuous and vacuous aspiring actress who lives in a small town in Minnesota. In addition to the Marilyn Monroe-esque title character, Hustvedt provides a bevy of quirky characters including Lily's former high school pal Martin Petersen, who is assembling a collection of corpse photographs, and Edward Shapiro, the college professor and painter whom Lily quickly beds. On top of that, Hustvedt layers on a nice little murder mystery, which Lily investigates and solves. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Set in a small Minnesota town whose entire population appears to consist of slightly ominous eccentrics, Hustvedt's second novel (after 1992's The Blindfold) presents a coming of age story with Kafka-esque trappings and a mystery veneer. Lily Dahl, 19, is an aspiring actress who works the early morning shift as a waitress at the Ideal Cafe, where her considerably offbeat regulars include the stuttering and intense Martin Petersen, whom she's known since childhood. Lily takes up with Edward Shapiro, an artist from New York who has separated from his wife and is doing a series of portraits of local misfits. While Lily is busy attending rehearsals for her role in A Midsummer Night's Dream and getting acting lessons from her elderly neighbor, there are multiple sightings of a man carrying a woman's corpse around town. As Lily becomes increasingly convinced that young Martin is at the root of the bizarre events, she puts herself at risk to find out the truth. In the end, however, Hustvedt's plot is far simpler than it originally appears, and the somewhat forced strangeness of her characters' behavior may make some readers feel that the narrative is simply contrived. The novel is much stronger as a coming-of-age tale than it is as an existential mystery, however, and Hustvedt has created a charming and scrappy heroine in Lily Dahl. (Author tour.)
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks (September 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805055908
• ISBN-13: 978-0805055900
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,946,607 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

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Can't help but give it 5 stars., October 30, 1999

By 

Jessica ([e-mail]) (Columbia, Missouri) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Enchantment of Lily Dahl: A Novel (Paperback)

This book reminded me very much of Jonathan Carroll's type of novels. Siri Hustvedt has created a very appealing, likable heroine in Lily Dahl, and the supporting cast is wonderful. Like Carroll, Ms. Hustvedt seems to have all kinds of ideas for this novel; she can't seem to choose which genre or storyline to use, so she hops around from one type of story to another.

Ordinarily this would annoy me, with the novel beginning as a love story (or an erotic novel, take your pick), then a coming-of-age novel, then a sort of fairy-tale, then a murder mystery, then... I don't know what. Some things are never answered or explained inm this novel, but somehow even the unexplained and out-of-place parts of the novel don't irritate the reader. Rather, they enrich the story, give it all kinds of elements. Hustvedt's dream sequences, for example, wouldn't seem to have anything to do with the novel, and yet they add to it; the story wouldn't be nearly as engrossing or lovely without them.

Ultimately, even though the novel misleads you several times, The Enchantment is still a wonderful book with all kinds of elememts in it that make it strange and engaging and beautiful. Lily Dahl is a wonderful character, and I found myself wanting to read about what happens to her after the end of the book, not an easy feat for a novel.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Check out "What I Loved" instead, January 11, 2005

By 

AppleBrownBetty "AppleBrownBetty" (Salem OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Enchantment of Lily Dahl: A Novel (Paperback)

Lucky for us, Siri Hustvedt went on to write greater things, and we can expect even more of her as she hones her craft. "The Enchantment of Lily Dahl," he second novel, will disappoint those readers who absolutlely loved her novel "What I Loved," an emotionally gripping, sophisticatedly plotted and lyrical novel about the intersections of love, art and life in 1980s and 1990s New York City. I found nothing really enchanting or enchanted about Hustvedt's protaganist in this one, a blond buxom waitress withering as in smalltown Minnesota but hoping for a career as an actress. The story might have been about a young woman discovering something within herself and her surroundings, but instead, the reader gets a murder mystery with a psycho, as well as a handful of caricatured and unbelievable characters who all seem to love Lily Dahl but never seem to get her. Don't judge Hustvedt by this one.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Enchanting the Reader, January 22, 2001

By 

Eric Anderson (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Enchantment of Lily Dahl: A Novel (Paperback)

Like `The Blindfold' a self consciously post-modern novel filled with empty signs and cultural observation. What I felt her central goal in this novel was to capture the human content of a typical American woman, star-eyed and given to thoughts of her image more than thoughts of her self. At first, it seems that the story might be sacrificed for these random but poignant observations, but by the end you are left with a fragmented image of a woman, cut up by the short-sightedness of society and the misogynistic nature of men. As with her prior novel, she always keeps a tight focus on her heroine, but has succeeded to a much better end a carefully plotted narrative. Like Atwood's `The Edible Woman', the image of what the heroine sees herself to be is eaten by the woman herself, or buried in this case, in order to be redefined by the woman herself. The novel is beautifully written and an engaging read.