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Book review: the Author's anguish, does not always impression on the reader

Tell me, is there something that writers love more than writing about the actual writing? If this is to be a writer? It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that

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Book review: the Author's anguish, does not always impression on the reader

Tell me, is there something that writers love more than writing about the actual writing? If this is to be a writer? It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that each and every novel now goes into close combat with the writing essence, depicts the process of their own creation or follow the crisis-ridden author, preferably with the traits of the author himself.

the Author may have always dug in their own desk, and on a purely existential level, it's probably partly to make the reader into an accomplice in the solitude is creativity's conditions. But this trend is perhaps also, and DN:s Maria Schottenius been on in a current debate ( 25/2, 28/2) – a sign of how the I-literature with their medial logic of displacing everything else. A kind of ”click-lit” for our time, simply.

”Memories of the future” tells of an older writer, about a young woman who, in the late 70s coming to New York to, as she says, to seek the hero of his first novel. She goes on diktuppläsningar with John Ashbery (”higher” cries the crowd), overhears on his chanting neighbor and masturbating frantically: ”Involuntary celibacy had turned my desire to torment, an aching desire that I dragged with me everywhere I went while I hoped for relief.”

Our protagonist is poor in that way that she would take the pizza out of the trash cans on the Upper West Side, at the same time as she in any given moment would be able to call dad's doctor at home in the Midwest. With hunger raging in the body is no part of her that believe that this condition is permanent: ”Her skin color and social class had made her immune to such pessimism.”

So will the ”Memories of the future” a sour spot-on depiction of the artistic middle-class hunger for real reality to stop into the the great things the believe themselves to be destined for. There is also a kind of symmetry in that the young author craves the stuff to their writing, while Hustvedt, in turn, allows these tribulations to their own material. Skrivbokens notes signed, incidentally, by the not completely faded, ”S. H.”.

Photo: Anna he was not,/TT

after a long writing has given itself the freedom to poke around in the autofiktiva the toolbox and the craftsman together something that more resembles a documented work process, than a novel. She will treat themselves to a bit of postmodern willfulness, simply. From three different starting points follow the reader Minnesota through everyday life, diary entries and literary writing.

The first track is a traditional and actually very readable utvecklingsroman, in the older narrator looking back on a crucial year of youth. Second, the diary, the young woman's more or less unfiltered snapshots from another now. The third track is the young author's unfinished first novel, in the form of a pretty awful deckargåta.

There is an almost tangible dimension in Hustvedts way to distinguish berättarsfärerna to by fonts, fetningar and stilgrad, and I wonder why this prank is so annoying. Maybe because it in some sense is a grip that is outside of the actual literature – a practical sorteringsverktyg for readability without real artistic core. It is a division that is presented rather than told. And the question is how to really look at the artistic failure that is the novel in the novel, and the reader is thus forced to pass through it. When is a design of weak literature only a weak literature?

the central part in the book where Hustvedts minneslekar is rotated up and get a clear and urgent sense, as if everything that is said and written is directed towards precisely this point. In the depiction of a abuse are the diary one way to take back the subjektsposition as well as the violence blurred out. ”A girl who will with me go with me”, says the man at the party and follow her into the taxi, into the stairwell, and with a hard push into the apartment. She goes through each and every step of the from the court records: Said no but did not scream, told him to go, but didn't. ”I thought I could 'handle' the situation? It was because I didn't want to make him angry, or rather angrier than he already was?”

It is a devastating portrayal of an attempted rape and its tracks in a man. The worst thing is not the damage, and the blood, but that he prestigestudent to the perpetrators make her a nothing: ”At the same moment as he took a hold of me, I lost my boundaries because he did not believe in them. What remained after this was a konturlöst things, a puny piece of meat to penetrate, and throw it away.”

a story where this evening is somehow her own fault retains Minnesota and the aged storyteller who is still feeling the shame burn – paradoxically, the feeling of control of their own destiny. It would be to say too much to this part seriously saves ”Memories of the future” from being a mediocre metalitterärt experiments. But it gives a strong and striking image of the mind as a physical place to be in and to eventually be able to leave.

Siri Hustvedt: ”Living, thinking, looking”

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