Customer Reviews

What I Loved

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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?

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.

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.

This book ran me over with its restrained intensity, its insight, and its near-perfect execution. Here are my splattered thoughts.

She is married to my favourite author, Paul Auster, and yet until now I have not read her. I may have to admit she is as good as him, or better. I wonder if they get insecure.

Indeed, it's got the same themes as some of Auster's work - two artistic couples pulling against each other, the love and friendship and lust, and (sometime) infidelities [a common source?] - and I'm thinking here particularly of Auster's work in Leviathan, a companion novel in so many ways.

In fact, if Auster had put his name to What I Loved, I would have accepted without question that he'd written it.

But the book, her not him; indeed, I meet more people who have read her than him, and I may be jealous.

I wanted to write about the ironic couplings: she writes about Leo writing about Bill who has painted a picture of Violet which he calls 'Self Portrait'. Leo/Siri comments how the title gets us thinking about the nature of selfhood, and how a portrait of another person of another gender could possibly be a self portrait. We the readers can add another level - how can Siri write so convincingly and reveal so much of her soul through the eyes of a male art critic (Leo) writing of his friendship with a male painter (Bill)?

I like the scope of the book; it isn't a simple narrative, it has the breadth and complexity of life. It is twenty five years in the lives of the two couples, which are really two and a half couples, since Violet displaces Lucille, and then really it's about their sons anyway, Matthew and Mark (I was expecting Luke and John, but the pun was only superficial, or only co-incidental.)

And the last section made the novel feel like a Brett Easton Ellis novel told from the pov of one of the sane characters. There is the same shifting identities, extremities of violence, sex and drugs. The same world, it seemed to me. Only in New York do these things happen, you see.

And it got me wondering as to whether Siri and Paul know Brett, and what they think of his work. Because they might hate it, or they might like it.

The crazed 'artist', Teddy Giles, and his favourite movie Psycholand (about a psychopath who goes from state to state in his private plane murdering a person in each city) made me think of him, wonder whether there was some injoke in operation here.

And the other novel it made me think of, just to complete a parallel literary couple, is Donna Tartt's Secret History (Has Donna slept with Brett? Now there is a piece of literary gossip I am keen to find more on). There is the same sense of a middle class descent into the dark side, into madness. There is the same concern for art, life, meaning.

The title bears more thinking about. It is explained by Violet at the end where she asks what it is that she loved. Was it Mark or the idea of Mark? I feel like I haven't understood Siri properly here. But the title sounds elegaic, sounds like the book feels, this beautiful remembrance of things past.

Once I got into this book - which did take ninety pages, but that had more to do with me than it - I found it compulsive, un-putt-downable. I cared and wondered about the fate of the characters - even the minor ones.

It should be made into a film, and by a great director. I think Sofia Coppola.

This is a superb book which is continuing to resonate for me, hauntingly, several weeks after reading it. Whilst measured and calm, the writing is extraordinarily skillful, passionate and affecting. One critical moment had me in tears while riding the tram to work.

The plot is more-than sufficiently described in the editorial reviews here and does not, I think, need recounting. What I want to stress is the simply beautiful way in which Hustvedt explores and illuminates relationships. Between adults, friends, lovers, husbands and wives. Between children. Between parent and child...between parent and a memory of a child. No novel I have read recently comes closer to echoing my own experiences of life, love ... the whole damn thing.

For me, now, "What I Loved" is the best book I have read in years. I had not heard of Hustvedt until this novel was published and I am now eagerly looking forward to reading her earlier work.

In the past three weeks, I've read all three of Hustvedt's novels (in reverse order of when they were written). Each time I've been deeply impressed. I was first a fan of Paul Auster, and kept seeing "people who bought X by Paul Auster also bought Y by Siri Hustvedt," so I gave her a shot, not knowing that they were married until I got the book in my hot little hands and read the jacket.

What a vivid, vital novel! Of the three she has penned, it is my favorite, if only for the truly haunting characters and amazingly detailed and tactile descriptions of art work. After finishing "What I Loved," I found myself continually "remembering" Bill, one of the main characters. I still think of him, a tragic and charasmatic character illustrated so sensitively and realistically I feel I know him or want to know him.

I wish I could refrain from drawing parallels to Auster's work, but there are similarities: the story centers around writers, professors, and artists and questions of representation and narrative in art and writing; there is a writer-as-detective subplot, and a dark underrent reminiscent of pulpy Hammett or Chandler. These elements turn a telling and touching story of the complexities of family and loss into a postmodern novel that still shows empathy towards its protagonists. A complex page-turner with compelling characters, this one is not to be missed!

This is one of the best books I've read 2003! I was already a big fan of Siri Hustvedt, but "What I loved" is by far her best book. I started reading a Saturday (luckily) and just couldn't put it down. A fantastic story, fantastic characters, beautiful language, so interesting topics (art and literature), it was all just.. I wanted to move in with them, share their lives (at least in part one)!
If you want to read something that will stay in your mind for a long time, pick this one. It's just amazing!

I think the main appeal of Siri Hustvedt's novel lies in the fact that its protagonists, at least the bigger part of them, are better educated than the average reader. I still don't know anything aobut art or art history, but how Leo and Bill think and talk about art brought some insight to me, and it prompted me do have a look at some of the artists described in there. We're reading about full-fleshed characters who have the ability to constantly surprise us because there is always something we have not yet figured out about them. This is a very good read, not least because Siri Hustvedt knows about the use of language and the art of writing.

Hustvedt, in the Mark character, has created one of the more complex profiles of late 20th century, English literature; read Late Capitalism, whatever. The sociopath has been identified in psychology for a while. However, I'm unaware of its advent, until now, in fiction: an amoral charming being, profiting on the goodwill of its network, and chameleon-like, flattering all would-be intimates to seduce trust. Mark walks free, out of this tale, emotional wreckage littering his trail. True to my experience with this type, the best way to cope with him, as his 'intimates' in the book do, is to eventually close down channels and avoid him. One of the difficulties in detecting the sociopath is that their emergence and thriving has coincided with the rise of middleclass prosperity. General condoning of greed, general permissivness, post 1960s, affords immaculate cover. This is arguably, the most moving book I've read in years and the credibility Hustvedt bestows on all characters makes the narrator's record throb. She acknowledges her studies on eating disorders and contemporary culture, her love of literature(Henry James, Musil, Mann and Dostoevsky ) and in art historian/narrator, Leo and his artist friend Bill, has essayed a summary of 70s and 80s New York Art. While we have this tightly knit kaleidescope of cognescenti at the millenium's countdown, the new types of relationship between people, money, power and its fragility, it's the sociopath creature that continues to haunt me, long after my admiration for the book's myriad challenges have settled. I'd rate this book with any of the works of the aformentioned writers.

"... but the meanings of what we remember are reconfigured over time. Memory and imagination cannot be separated...." *)

Leo Hertzberg, the narrator of this powerful and deeply affecting novel, could have used this quote to introduce his intimate musings of a life lived and loved. Within the first few pages we are also introduced to Leo's inner circle of friends and lovers: Bill, Violet, Lucille and Erica. Triggered by the large portrait of a young woman (Violet) hanging in his room that he bought twenty five years ago before he knew the artist or the model and that "...has been altered by my failing eyesight" his mind drifts back to the time when he first sought out the artist, William "Bill" Wechsler. From that meeting has developed a deep and lasting friendship between the two men that, in time, has included the other protagonists and more.

While WHAT I LOVED is at one level a chronicle about friendship, love, loss and intricate interpersonal relations and chameleonic changes over time, it is, at a fundamental level, a story about the medium of art, the artist who creates through it an ever changing and complex vision of his world and the observers who can "see" it with more than his eyes alone. The readers are assumed to be as much a part of the artistic process of observing as the art lovers in the story: built into the different paintings, sculptures and other constructs as a shadow or as a "filler" of a gap or hole deliberately left for them to make the vision complete. The search for artistic expression that can reflect and represent the ever more complex realities of modern society is exquisitely evoked by Hustvedt in the personality of William, "Bill" Wechsler.

Initially a canvass painter and seen as a minor artist in the New York collectors' scene, he gains a growing enthusiastic following, especially in Europe, as his increasingly elaborate experiments with three dimensional structures and multi-media collages capture a vision of his inner and outer world that the collectors (and the reader) can connect to their own. Later on, as Bill continually searches for new and different artistic expressions for his life's dramas, a challenger appears, a sort of nemesis, who, at a personal level, is more intimately connected to Bill than he wants to admit to himself. Bill's last name, Wechsler, is without doubt deliberate: meaning "changer" in German, both in terms of "exchanging something for something else" and of "changing places with somebody". Both interpretations are valid as Leo and Bill often speak of changelings, chameleons, double vision where one person seems to be or could be the other.

Seeing the world through Leo's eyes, Hustvedt has achieved to convey very rich and convincing portrayals of Leo and Bill and their lasting friendship. In Leo the reader discovers not only the highly perceptive observer but also the sensitive lover, father and friend. There is a balance inside him of the yin and yang of his male and feminine side. When tragedy is shattering the small community that harmony is, however, seriously tested. Bill tends to express his male side more strongly through his art and withdraws into himself in response to intimacy and tragedy. Bill needs both his friend and, especially Violet, to find some inner peace. Hustvedt is less definite in the characterization of the female protagonists. Erica, Leo's wife, in particular, does not come to life and eventually fades into the background. Violet is thrust into centre stage as the result of tragic events and even then she remains difficult to understand and "see". Not having read anything else by Hustvedt, or her husband Paul Auster, I don't want to chance any deeper interpretation.

There are several additional important threads in the novel, that link characters, their experiences and visions. All (adult) protagonists are engaged in various areas of research that allows them to connect at an intellectual as well as a personal level. For example, Violet's research into mental illness and its expression in body behaviour and image, finds its creative interpretation directly in Bill's art. Art historian Leo, can relate his research both to Bill's art and to his wife's work on literature. His comparison between Goya's portrayal of the violence of his time with the "art" of Bill's nemesis, raises important questions about the artist as a chronicler of his society and how time changes the perspective of what we "see" in the artist's work. Many more crossovers are touched on or elaborated, making the novel also fascinating from that angle. These raise questions and encourage debate. A highly worthwhile outcome for a novel. In terms of a novel centred on art, artists, and perception of art, the novels of Canadian author Jane Urquhart come to mind, most recently with A Map of Glass [Friederike Knabe]

*) Siri Hustvedt in a recent article on "Seeing" published on her website