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siriface's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexism and Death
Moderate: Child abuse and Racism
cassandrahpenny's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
The essays I did enjoy in this book were absolutely excellent! I only skipped one on Wuthering Heights (which I have not read yet), and I think there were only two or three that I felt not as captivated by. The essays on motherhood, reading and translation were my favourites - Siri Hustvedt is going to be a name I look out for now in essay collections!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Physical abuse, Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Injury/Injury detail, and Misogyny
mghoshlisbin's review
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
5.0
<i> "Don't do anything you don't really want to do is a way of saying; I have faith in your desire. I have faith that your desire is not purely impulsive, that you are a thoughtful, ethical person who cannot imagine how you might hurt others by what you do but also how you yourself might be hurt and made unhappy by giving into someone else." </i>
Hustvedt is powerful, emotional, informative, sensitive. Each essay in this collection disrupts and destabilizes your preconceived notions of category and difference, self and other. These essays touch on themes of memoir, psychoanalytics, biology, crime, literary criticism, feminism, and misogyny and though these topics are so utterly broad, Hustvedt reveals just how ecstatically interconnected they are. We, as people and readers and consumers, intermingle amongst one another through our ideas and emotions, and through the categories by which we assign meaning.
<i> "Openings along the border of the body or the border of a country represent the danger of leakage and intrusion. [...] From this perspective, sterility represents the perfect, pure, and inviolable state, which may be political, religious, or intellectual." </i>
The divisions that are created between categories of gender, sex, country and nationality, poor and rich, other and self, are primarily illusory intentions to preserve what is safe and predictable. But the sharedness of ourselves as a group cannot be avoided, and I think that Hustvedt unveils this reality with each essay, as they build and compound upon one another.
<i> "There is no private language. The other inhabits every word we think or speak. And language itself is translating experience into words for another, even when that other is one's self." </i>
<i> "Art cannot be fixed to a single location because lived experience is not left behind in the room where the object rests unseen at night after the museum has closed its doors. The art object travels in many bodies in multiple forms and it speaks and writes and sings in many languages. It is a living thing." </i>
I am seduced and excited, as a literature student and a reader, by Hustvedt's discussion of language and art. Her approach to their function feels undeniably true-language is an imperfect vehicle that must transmit the self. Art is alive, changed as it lives in our memory but changed the moment it exits our experience and becomes a liminal entity in our shared understanding of its emotion and value.
There are perhaps a hundred other moments of inevitable truth and beauty from this selection that I could have chosen to present here, but I think I will save those for re-discovery upon a re-read. This is the first book of Hustvedt that I have had the pleasure of reading. But it will not be the last.
Hustvedt is powerful, emotional, informative, sensitive. Each essay in this collection disrupts and destabilizes your preconceived notions of category and difference, self and other. These essays touch on themes of memoir, psychoanalytics, biology, crime, literary criticism, feminism, and misogyny and though these topics are so utterly broad, Hustvedt reveals just how ecstatically interconnected they are. We, as people and readers and consumers, intermingle amongst one another through our ideas and emotions, and through the categories by which we assign meaning.
<i> "Openings along the border of the body or the border of a country represent the danger of leakage and intrusion. [...] From this perspective, sterility represents the perfect, pure, and inviolable state, which may be political, religious, or intellectual." </i>
The divisions that are created between categories of gender, sex, country and nationality, poor and rich, other and self, are primarily illusory intentions to preserve what is safe and predictable. But the sharedness of ourselves as a group cannot be avoided, and I think that Hustvedt unveils this reality with each essay, as they build and compound upon one another.
<i> "There is no private language. The other inhabits every word we think or speak. And language itself is translating experience into words for another, even when that other is one's self." </i>
<i> "Art cannot be fixed to a single location because lived experience is not left behind in the room where the object rests unseen at night after the museum has closed its doors. The art object travels in many bodies in multiple forms and it speaks and writes and sings in many languages. It is a living thing." </i>
I am seduced and excited, as a literature student and a reader, by Hustvedt's discussion of language and art. Her approach to their function feels undeniably true-language is an imperfect vehicle that must transmit the self. Art is alive, changed as it lives in our memory but changed the moment it exits our experience and becomes a liminal entity in our shared understanding of its emotion and value.
There are perhaps a hundred other moments of inevitable truth and beauty from this selection that I could have chosen to present here, but I think I will save those for re-discovery upon a re-read. This is the first book of Hustvedt that I have had the pleasure of reading. But it will not be the last.
unidentifiedgemstone's review
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
re strong were really strong, particularly in the second half and especially the second to last one, but the essays that were mediocre were completely forgettable. Hustvedt has a kind of upper-middle class, well-educated white cis woman feminism that I’m glad she expanded on in the later essays, because I was beginning to find it a bit annoying and out of touch. Mostly she’s concerned with women not being taken seriously enough in their careers, in academia, and in the art world, and while I have empathy for her certainly disheartening experiences of sexism, it’s the kind of problem you can only encounter if you’ve crossed the threshold into working in the corporate, academic, or art worlds, and as someone not in these spaces, I often found myself thinking that there are simply more pressing and tangible material issues at hand. The text was at times very dense and academic, but when I took the time to move through it slowly and carefully there was a lot of valuable insight to take away. I’m curious to see what her novels are like!
spittingyarn's review against another edition
5.0
I am a long time admirer of Siri Hustvedt’s work, but it is her essays that always really impress me. This collection of essays on the theme of motherhood, though, is a real tour de force. Covid slowed my progress through “Mothers, Fathers and Others”, but if I wasn’t reading the book, I was thinking about it.
The essays explore motherhood from all angles, through personal reflection, scientific enquiry, psychoanalysis, art criticism and more. Despite the disparate approaches, Hustvedt’s voice is consistent throughout, as is the sense of her (and us) building a rich, many layered understanding of the concept of mother/motherhood.
So many of her ideas struck like arrows - the absence of representations of birth in art, the inexplicable disinterest of the scientific community in the placenta, her portraits of mothers and artists that reject archetypes and examine the whole person in all their light and shade.
As a mother, woman and daughter, I found myself thirsty for Hustvedt’s urgent, enquiring, rigorously intellectual excavation of mothers and the messiness of motherhood. Essential reading.
The essays explore motherhood from all angles, through personal reflection, scientific enquiry, psychoanalysis, art criticism and more. Despite the disparate approaches, Hustvedt’s voice is consistent throughout, as is the sense of her (and us) building a rich, many layered understanding of the concept of mother/motherhood.
So many of her ideas struck like arrows - the absence of representations of birth in art, the inexplicable disinterest of the scientific community in the placenta, her portraits of mothers and artists that reject archetypes and examine the whole person in all their light and shade.
As a mother, woman and daughter, I found myself thirsty for Hustvedt’s urgent, enquiring, rigorously intellectual excavation of mothers and the messiness of motherhood. Essential reading.