Customer Reviews

The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Imagine the irony as an inexplicable shaking phenomenon befalls an author with a PhD in English Literature who has researched the field of psychiatry to the point of even taking practice exams for the state psychiatry board.

Fascinated by the title and its topic, I was hoping to learn more about this woman's extraordinarily perplexing affliction. Sadly, "The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves" is less about author Siri Hustvedt or HER own nerves and more about the history of the mind/body issue. In fact, the author's own story is frustratingly fragmentary, which is unfortunate because Hustvedt is clearly a deeply cerebral and literate writer.

Despite the title, there is very little heard from the Shaking Woman's case herself and practically NO history of her own nerves. For every brief paragraph in which we do learn about the author's disorder, there are about 30 pages of the history of psychiatry, psychology, pharmacology, philosophy, and personality research. This is disappointing, because the author's personal story is the only new topic here; all other points made about mind/body have been discussed previously and far more lucidly by others, as indicated in her nearly 200 well-documented reference notes.

As for the plethora of reference notes, this book reads more like an advanced college term paper. Open it to any page, and you will likely find 2 to 5 references to OTHER people's musings; the author simply cannot resist interjecting quotations throughout this 200 page ramble. By doing so, she deflects attention away from her own interesting case and avoids discussing herself in any deeply meaningful way.

Hustvedt writes in a stream-of-consciousness manner that makes for a bit of a messy and manic read after just a few pages. For instance, in one particular paragraph her subject flits from schizophrenia to amoebas and ends with the atom bomb.

What could be a fascinating story is further confounded by Hustvedt's writing style which involves visiting imaginary therapists and a fake neurologist. She theorizes what different hypothetical diagnoses MIGHT indicate, then expounds for pages and pages using those suppositions. These techniques make it difficult to discern the imaginary from the actual and the supposed from the observed. Instead of being provocative, this book is just exasperating and overwrought.

I admit I am a fan of the TV series "Mystery Diagnosis", so perhaps I was simplistically hoping for something similar from Hustvedt's The Shaking Woman. But there is no satisfying conclusion or resolution here; instead she just uses her own symptoms as a context for discussing the much broader mind/body dilemma, which she successfully convinces us can never truly be resolved. Ultimately, it is with resignation and not insightful acceptance that she seems to come to term with her disorder.

The very idea of this book--before it was released, when I'd just read advance reviews and couldn't wait to get my hands on a copy--was a lifeline to me, sitting in pediatric neurology. My 7-year-old daughter, an extraordinarily bright, creatively-gifted, highly-sensitive child, had begun seeing colors, visual hallucinations, followed shortly by hearing voices and sounds; she complained of dizziness and nausea and was slightly withdrawn; quickly, she adapted to the sensory phenomenon and stopped complaining of vertigo, but she then began to tell me of other sensations: her math paper at school felt "hot"; when she turned it over, it felt like ice. While the neurologist and child psychiatrist staked out their territories--and at this point, it seems unlikely we'll have a clear diagnosis--I maintained the possibility of synesthesia or a benign manifestation of her visual-spatial creativity. As a mother, I struggled to understand whether we were dealing with pathology or, on the other hand, an integral expression of my daughter's nervous system. I had, over the years, read deeply in subjects such as high-sensitivity (Elaine Aron), giftedness and superstimulabilities (Dabrowki's Theory of Positive Disintegration), as well as diagnosis and misdiagnosis of disorders among gifted persons. My bias--and I hoped Hustvedt's book would back me here--was that some people just see and hear extra stuff, and it's not a problem.

What surprised me, then, was how irritating and slow I found the book initially, as Hustvedt takes on the brain-mind dichotomy, philosophical duality, in her quest for integration of the "shaking woman" as part of her identity. I consider the either/or, neurologist/psychiatrist mentality to be part of the limitations of allopathy, and to me, this dual mode is old-fashioned (I contrast with Goethe on the spiritual dimension of science or Integral philosophers on holographics). Certainly I was repulsed by Hustvedt's impulse to demonstrate her expertise in this narrow and deep sense, by her comparisons of herself with brain-injured patients, though perhaps this reflects the difference between a middle-aged woman contemplating her own condition and one contemplating her child's; I will unapologetically go far afield, considering everything from Indigo Children to EMF fields, nutrition to homeopathy.

Sometimes her thinking on subjects like self and social construction is just achingly conventional and prosaic. "Isn't it possible that this visual metaphor is problematic, that the very idea of hierarchical levels is flawed? Can brain, psyche, and culture really be distinguished so neatly?" she asks--I have an irritable impulse to drag out Ken Wilber's maps and grids. Or, when she writes, "The conscious self's boundaries shift," or "clearly, a self is much larger than the internal narrator," I want to respond with a "duh." I'd rather read Proust. Or Lydia Davis, for that matter--"The Thyroid Diaries."

Hustvedt is a brilliant student, and she reminds me of certain other woman writers I've come across who tell you everything anyone from Aristotle to Freud ever said on a given subject, withholding their own opinions until safely establishing their competence. I liked the book in a backwards direction; towards the end, the gathering of her thoughts on empathy, extraordinary sensitivity, high I.Q., transcendence--these things I liked, this is where I'd wish for the book to start. It isn't until the very end--perhaps, having displayed her conventional competence, she feels safe--that she tells you of her beginnings--as a child seeing and hearing things. For this I am deeply grateful.

In this book, Siri Hustvedt, one of the best American novelists writing today, offers a few brief glimpses into her struggles with psychosomatic illness (shaking during public speaking related to the trauma of losing her father) and a long recital of different sorts of such illnesses in history and psychiatric practice. Her insights into her own situation were interesting, and I found tantalizing the few points where she connects her own physical problems with her emotional states, but most of the book is regurgitation of research on these topics, and I found her not only less insightful about the quality of the research she recounted, but also disorganized. The middle chunk of the book is just one story about a psychological oddity discovered by a doctor after another, and the thread of the tale gets lost. Too bad, I really wanted to like this.

Hustvedt's "Shaking Woman" has a very interesting premise. Her father dies and due to the fact that she didn't mourn his death to any real extent, she ends up with tremors so strong they border on epileptic, but only on occasion and only under stress. She embarks on a quest to find out why this happens, but answers her own question within the question. The rest of the book - which seems like a long-winded story without end, a fact I'll get back to later - is philosophical delving. Neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, parapsychology, neuropathy, philosophy, therapies of all kinds and pharmaceuticals... all are explored for possible solutions but all seem to raise more questions than they answer. Instead, these become the "meat" that give Hustvedt her base with which to let a giant pot of bland broth simmer.

And it simmers on and on without a break. The entire book is one chapter. One very long chapter. Her thoughts are not well organized, so we are taken along a somewhat stream-of-consciousness voyage that circles around to the main question, over and over. While it may be a fun experiment to create, it's not a lot of fun to read. I felt trapped in this book and I no longer cared why she was shaking after about 100 pages. There were simply too many side roads and she took them all.

This book might be interesting to those who are involved in one of the fields of study mentioned above, but for the layperson, it was not very satisfying. Not for general audiences, I'd let this one stay in the medical library.

I opted to receive this Advanced Reader's copy from Amazon's Vine program, because of my interest in medical information and stories.

The author Siri Hustvedt has written about a particular phenomena that happened to her one day while speaking at a tree dedication for her father a few years after his death. She experienced a very strange spasm of uncontrollable shaking of her body, but was able to continue speaking and completed her talk on the tree dedication.

This book centers on that one weird occurrence and the author muses through the rest of the book on her unusual health problems as well as the research she has done on this, as well as for other books.

Any one that has been unsatisfied by medical diagnoses can well understand why the author would dedicate so much time and energy to finding some answers.

The book goes into various different causes of a mind-body disconnect and covers quite a breadth of studies that support this theory or that. In fact there are 192 foot notes and all are medical or other references, so if you find something that really catches your interest you can follow up on it.

I found the book a bit dense to read as it felt like one single breath. The reason I pointed out above that I received an Advance Reader's copy is that there are no chapters in this book. I don't know if that it the author's preference or if it is an outcome of being an advanced copy. Unfortunately it makes it hard to manage such involved information, when you don't have a sense of "grouping". Since there were so many thoughts on mind-body disconnects and the various different theories associated, I found it hard to keep track of previous parts. Usually chapters do that for me. I used post-it-notes in this case.

Additionally, the author provides you with a sense she has disclosed all of the pertinent information about the shaking incident before she goes on to discuss the various possible causes. However on page 118 and 126 of this 213 page book she brings up some very pertinent data that makes you feel like it was omitted to lead your train of thought down a particular path. One was a particular incident her father had and another was her own synesthesia. These are not unrelated. I didn't like to find out that this very important piece of information was left till you had read nearly half the book.

What I did find particularly interesting was the philosophical discussions on the nature of pain and her feelings on a scientists attempt to quantify it. Also the discussions on consciousness and various ideas of what constitutes "real" were quite compelling.
I like that she leaves some ideas very open.

In summary; this is an interesting book; that would be very much improved by some structure. I think the philosophical discussions were very interesting and could create a book in them selves.

On reading the description, this sounds like the author is going to investigate her mysterious shaking disease, discover (and share) fascinating medical tidbits along the way, and presumably come up with a conclusion.

In reality... it's a lot more rambling and personal than that, and not quite as interesting.

After her initial shaking fit, Hustvedt did some research on her own into psychological disorders. She was already working with psychiatric patients, and felt well equipped to do so. She diagnosed herself with hysteria, something which has gone almost entirely out of fashion in the medical community. After deciding that was what she had, she continued to research the disease and the various perceptions its gone through over the years.

The investigation is interesting: at what point is a symptom really real? If you can scan it on an MRI, is it real then? What if conscious thought affects it? How can an illness be all in a patient's mind, when all it has actual symptoms, and looks just like the "real thing"? Associated musings explore the idea of self, the relationship between body and mind, the meaning and purpose of dreams, and how perception affects reality.

Hustvedt's symptoms come and go, and she adapts her theory, up until an incident which thoroughly disproves her idea. This leads her finally go to a doctor. She winds up with an entirely unsurprising diagnosis, given her history and symptoms.

So, while it's an interesting book, it's more geared toward fans of Siri Hustvdet, who want to know what she's like and why she writes the way she does. It honestly is an interesting book in that regard. It's not much of a medical mystery, though.

The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt is an odd addition to the seeming glut of memoirs that are overflowing in bookstores and on best-seller lists. It begins with Hustvedt sharing her experience while giving a talk for, as she was speaking, her body began to shake. Although she was able to complete the prepared speech, she was understandably concerned and began a quest to better understand what had happened to her in hopes of avoiding a repetition of the experience.

I wanted to read this book because I knew what it is to wake up one day and have a body that is no longer within one's own control, to find one's self struggling to make sense and comprehend something that cannot be easily diagnosed. I expected a typical example of creative nonfiction full of recollected moments, recreated dialogues, and a dramatic narrative arch.

Instead, I found myself reading an historical exploration of psychology from such eminent forefathers as Freud and James. When she cannot find an answer within psychology, her intellectual journey takes her through neurobiology, trying to comprehend the subtle ways in which the brain works, how memory and self-awareness inform the individual's perception of reality. Not stopping there, she infuses the text with examples from literature, sacred literature, and poetry.

Hustvedt leaves few, if any, stones unturned in trying to make meaning of her condition for, as she had feared, she does experience further episodes and it is through her intellectual quest she comes to eventual and perhaps inevitable terms with herself and her new self-definition.

For those who have become accustomed to memoirs filled with dialogue and action, memoirs that read more like novels than autobiographies, this book will probably read as tedious and dispassionate. This surprising for the author has published several novels so there is reason to believe that she could easily conceive her story with less objectivity.

However, it is this very objectivity that lends her experience a particular weight. Hustvedt's experience is unique but the emotional implications are not. Anyone who has ever hit a physical wall, who has been told that there is no cure, who knows what it is to live from day-to-day measuring hope and despair by how the body responds to particular stimuli will be able to read between the lines. By not sharing her own experience in too subjective and intimate a manner, she allows the reader to draw upon personal experience to make this memoir that much more personal.

For anyone who approaches circumstances, especially problems, with a problem solving and/or intellectual bent, this memoir will resonate above and beyond the singular experience.

Like several other readers, I found this book rather disappointing. First, Hustvedt has only had a few -- maybe two or three -- shaking incidents, all of which occurred during public speaking. (The glib response, "Well, avoid public speaking" doesn't even get a mention.) Clearly Hustvedt has a privileged life; she doesn't work for a living, she spends days consulting with doctors, sitting in on medical lectures, and doing a lot of reading. The majority of the book is a summary of historical and current ruminations on the mind-body problem (yes, Descartes, Locke, et al.), psychoanalysis, hysteria, migraines, and dreams. If you've done any reading in this area, the words "Salpetriere" and "bicameral," and the story of that darned man who thought his wife was a hat should give you an idea of the well-trodden ground here. I expected better.

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"At [my father's] funeral I delivered my speech in a strong voice without tears.

Two and a half years later, I gave another talk in honour of my father...Confident...I looked out at the fifty or so friends and colleagues of my father's,...launched into my first sentence, and begun to shudder violently from the neck down. My arms flapped. My knees knocked. I shook as if I were having a seizure. Weirdly, my voice wasn't affected...When the speech ended, the shaking stopped."

The above is found at the beginning of this book by Siri Hustvedt who has a PhD in English Literature and is known for her fiction writing.

After reading how her shaking or tremors began (as indicated above), I was looking forward to Hustvedt revealing more about herself and giving us "a history of [her] nerves." Unfortunately, this happened rarely.

Yes, she went to neurologists and they could not find anything physical or "organic." So, by default, her condition must be psychological. (This is the dangerous, simple reasoning that traditional or allopathic medicine uses.)

From here, Hustvedt delves into mainly the psychological literature (other disciplines such as neurology and neurobiology are also mentioned), telling us about those people she admired (especially Freud) and presenting those theories that seem to apply to her and even those that don't apply to her. She even looked at the literature of others (such as Tolstoy). Hustvedt documents these in great detail (to the point of tedium), but to the detriment of her own disorder and her other disorders (which are interesting in their own right).

As I was reading, I was getting increasingly frustrated (thus the title of this review) hoping that she would begin, at some point, dealing with her own story. She never really does.

Finally, this book gets better near the end where Hustvedt's psychological self-diagnosis is "debunked." (You have to read about eighty percent of the book to get to this juncture.) I thought at this point she would stop with all the psychology. She unfortunately only eases up a bit.

In conclusion, I found this to be a frustrating book. For myself, I really did not learn that much about "the shaking woman."

(first published 2009; no chapters; main narrative 200 pages; notes; acknowledgements; about the author)

<<Stephen Pletko, London, Ontario, Canada>>

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An unusual book that provides the reader with lots of food for thought about the connection between body and mind. Beautifully written, underpinned by thorough research and interesting facts about the brain and mind.

Having read and enjoyed Hustvedt's What I Loved: A Novel and The Sorrows of an American: A Novel, I was surprised at first. I expected a novel, rather than a personal account. But I very quickly realised that "The Shaking Woman" is a masterpiece of a different kind. It's a synthesis of many disciplines, intermingled with thought-provoking ideas and questions.

I would highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in neuroscientific facts, psychoanalysis, contemporary psychiatry and philosophical questions about the 'self' and the relationship between mind and body. In addition, I thought this book to be an interesting read for anyone who suffers from migraines!

Christine Maingard, Author of 'Think Less Be More:Mental Detox for Everyone'