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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What I Loved About This Novel, January 25, 2007
This review is from: What I Loved (Paperback)
There is much to love about Siri Hustvedt's ambitious novel WHAT I LOVED, starting with the narrator, art historian Leo Hertzberg, who remembers at sixty the events of his life over the past 25 years and those persons he loved, his wife Erica and their fragile child Matthew; his best friend Bill Wechsler, a New York artist and his second wife Violet; and Bill's child Mark by his first wife Lucille, a child whom Leo would like to love. Leo is the most decent of people and all too human, as we watch him grow old and experience what all or most of us will face: love, disappointment in love, the deaths of those we hold most dear, the sometimes seemingly impossibility of relationships, and finally old age and disease associated with it. Ms. Hustvedt's other characters pulse with life and passion as well. In a story that covers 25 years, we are bound to learn a lot about them as they become real to us. Ms. Hustvedt's language is often beautiful, and her characters sometimes made profound statements about both art and life. Leo on marriage: "By then Erica and I had been together for over five years, and I often thought of our marriage as one long conversation." (As I recall Hillary Clinton said something similar about her life with Bill Clinton.) Leo's comments on nagging sound all too familiar: "But nagging is a strategy of the powerless, and there is nothing mysterious about it." Leo on age and memory: "The recollections of an older man are different from those of a young man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. . . We delete most of it [events in our life] to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die." The death of a loved one leaves a "gaping absence" in our lives. Finally there is a passage that comes close to poetry as Leo recalls only the second time he ever saw his mother weep as she holds a photo album in her hand: "She took my hands and answered me first in German, then in English. . . '"They are all dead.'" (p. 264) Besides excellent character development and profound and beautiful language, Ms. Hustvedt also tells a good story that gradually becomes a psychological thriller. Who could ask for much more in a novel?
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17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Disappointment, April 6, 2004
By A Customer
I was so disappointed by this book. The enthusiastic reviews I read made me believe this book was going to be something other than it was. In fact, the book itself tried to accomplish a similar sleight-of-hand. It sells itself -- both physically and in terms of the reviews but also in its outset -- as a traditional modern novel about the relationships between a group of adult friends. Hustvedt abandons this thread about halfway through the novel, choosing instead to turn it into a surreal detective story that's far too literally about investigation, absence and reality for my taste. It's two books mashed into one and unfortunately neither is successful. I've given it two stars because either of the books this one could have been would have been great; the writing is sharp and the characterizations vivid (though Bill I found one-note). I fear readers will be disappointed if they head into this work expecting a riveting modern novel; expect instead erudition and gamesmanship and the hollow feeling that comes at the end of the long, unfulfilling exercise of reading this book.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
emotionally rich, sometimes distressing, November 24, 2008
Here is a big, ambitious novel about four talented, intelligent people -- artists and intellectuals in New York -- who first find love and friendship and then immense suffering. Bill, a talented and original artist, leaves Lucille, his emotionally stunted wife, for Violet, his passionate, vivacious model. Meanwhile their friends Leo and Erica live upstairs pursuing their own ecstatic marriage. The two couples have sons almost at the same time -- Mark and Matt. They vacation together in Vermont, they make love, enjoy food and good fellowship -- life is good. And then two acts of unbearable tragedy occur (I won't reveal them) and everything is broken. One tragedy happens in an instant and provides the jarring fulcrum around which this book turns. The other occurs slowly over the course of years. The protagonists struggle to preserve their loves, the lives they have built, their sanity -- but the reality they face is too powerful. Everything falls apart; almost nothing survives the wreckage. This is an absorbing and in many ways an admirable book. It is a novel of ideas that takes art seriously and brings it to life. There are dozens of other ideas woven through it -- about the nature of sickness, of reality, of truth. The writing is vivid, the characters psychologically convincing for the most part. Yet there is a spiritual emptiness at the center of these lives, a sense of life imitating art rather than the other way around. I found this novel impressive and occasionally shocking but I was not ultimately moved by it. It kept me at an emotional distance. I responded intellectually rather than feeling the joy and the pain. I admired its artistry a little too much.
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