Yonder [Hardcover]

Siri Hustvedt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 1998

Sparkling essays on a variety of subjects--literature, art, popular culture, autobiography--by a renowned young American novelist.

In her brilliant and daring novels The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, Siri Hustvedt has won critical acclaim and a rapidly expanding international audience. But she is also a wide-ranging essayist and critic, frequently reexamining in her fascinating nonfiction many of the central leitmotifs of her fiction.

The six pieces in Yonder, Hustvedt's first book of essays, are all meditations on the complex relationship between art and the world. They include a personal essay on memory and place, which investigates the images we retain from our lives, the lives of others in the world, and the lives of characters in books. In "Vermeer's Annunciation," Hustvedt gives an entirely original interpretation of the Vermeer painting Woman with a Pearl Necklace. In "Ghosts at the Table," she examines the essence of still life as a genre in painting from Cotan and Chardin to Philip Guston. Other essays include a profound piece about Dickens, a reassessment of The Great Gatsby, and a witty and provocative assault on contemporary pieties entitled "A Plea for Eros."

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Hustvedt's heightened sensitivity to the aesthetic experience and its revelations of the self is evident in her novels, The Blindfold (1992) and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), and she brings this fruitful orientation to her essays with equal force, elegance, and originality. In the title piece, Hustvedt muses on her dual Norwegian and American heritage and analyzes the role language plays in shaping memories. She loves "words that wobble," a clue to her profound curiosity about the nature of duality and the pervasiveness of ambiguity in our lives. This slippery line of inquiry inspires her to try to describe the shifting emotions she feels while studying in a library, or the varied interpretations that arise in the mind while contemplating a painting, a subject she pursues with ardent specificity in "Vermeer's Annunciation." Hustvedt further explores the act of looking, identifying it as a key aspect of eroticism in her frank yet subtle "Plea for Eros." Even at her most "personal," Hustvedt is acutely intellectual: precise, questing, and disarming. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews

In this slim medley, novelist Hustvedt (The Blindfold, 1992; The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, 1996) ranges freely from autobiography to Vermeer's Woman with a Pearl Necklace to Dickens to The Great Gatsby. The fine title piece takes as its subject the dichotomy of here and there, and the space in between, or ``yonder'': Hustvedt's native Minnesota and her parents' Norway, Norway and New York City, where she makes her adult home. She writes about time, space, early memory, or what we ascribe to memory. She wonders what the world is like from her child's point of view, and considers children's sense of place, their preference for order in repetition. (``Yonder'' and ``home'' are the twin poles of the child's universe, notes Hustvedt.) In ``Vermeer's Annunciation,'' a flash of insight into the painting of a young woman trying on a string of pearls leads Hustvedt to seek inspiration for the Dutch artist's composition and figurative gesture in Renaissance depictions of the announcement of the incarnation to the Virgin Mary. Then, in the early master Fra Angelico's Annunciation fresco in Florence, she finds an image as motionless as Vermeer's. ``A Plea for Eros'' considers the mysterious attraction of strangeness and enchantment Hustvedt is able to feel for her longtime lover. Less personal and memorable but showing Hustvedt's appreciation for Dickens's dense metaphorical structures is a longer, scholarly piece on his last finished novel, Our Mutual Friend. In the closing essay, on still life, Hustvedt locates the primacy of ``things'' in our experience of solitude and considers the immediacy of the great allegorical paintings of the Dutch. Later painters of still life wanted something different. As she writes epigrammatically: ``I am not tempted by Czanne's pears in Still Life with Ginger Jar and Eggplants, because they are not pears. They are forms in the space of my perception.'' A strong collection. Hustvedt's essays, like the ordinary objects she identifies as the genesis of still life, are ``dignified by the metamorphosis we call art.'' -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (May 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805050116
• ISBN-13: 978-0805050110
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,241,610 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

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Some compelling essays, July 5, 1999

By 

Eric Ziegenhagen - See all my reviews

This review is from: Yonder (Hardcover)

Considering the attention and praise Siri Hustvedt's novels have received, I was surprised that this book was published almost invisibly a year ago. I just discovered Yonder a few weeks ago (mid-1999) and haven't found any reviews of it outside of the trades -- which is unfortunate, since I'm pretty sure that fans of her novels (as well as Auster's novels) would enjoy these essays if they knew the book existed at all. Yonder's a quick but memorable read -- Hustvedt's essays focus on the same preoccupations as her novels: the parallel worlds of language and experience; defining self and landscape through absence and presence; etc. Best are the title essay and the other personal/autobiographical essays -- the literary essays (on Dickens and Fitzgerald) are less compelling but still have some memorable parts. I enjoyed Yonder as much as I did The Blindfold, both for its clear style and its ideas. At its best, the essays in Yonder are freed from the constraints of fiction, presenting compelling ideas and resonant images in a compact, finely made form.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoughtful and beautifully written essays, June 29, 2010

By 

Gwen (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Yonder: Essays (Hardcover)

Initial note: 3 of the 6 pieces in this volume are already part of the 12-essay collection "A Plea for Eros", which I have previously reviewed (the duplicates are "Yonder", A Plea" and "Gatsby's Glasses.) Siri Hustvedt doesn't disappoint. In fact reading her this morning lifted my spirits, offering a much-needed respite from my life. In "Ghosts at the Table" she takes a fascinating look at the art form of still life and the role of the spectator, with particular focus on Chardin and Cotan (who she describes as occupying "the psychological poles" of still life) and Cezanne. In "Vermeer's Annunciation" we are witness to her emotional experience at a exhibition of the artist's works, with a detailed focus on the magic of "Woman with a Pearl Necklace" and "Girl with a Pearl Earring." I started reading "O.M.F. Revisited" (Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend") and became so intrigued I've decided to stop until I get a chance to read the novel first myself - hopefully very soon! I highly recommend this and the other collection to anyone who appreciates thoughtful and beautifully-written essays.