The afternoon is devoted to reading, often scientific literature on neurology and psychology since 2015 she has taught Narrative Psychiatry to psychiatric residents and junior faculty at Weill Cornell Medicine College in New York City. To allow these figures to rise up within her, she gets up early to work at her desk in the Brooklyn brownstone she shares with her husband of over 40 years, the writer Paul Auster. Characters rise up from unknown regions and begin to speak.” “My books often surprise me while I am writing them. “Although any number of journalists and some reviewers have assumed that my novels are thinly veiled autobiographies, this is not the case,” Hustvedt wrote in an essay entitled “The Future of Literature”. In the first place, Hustvedt is at pains to stress that recollection is never reliable: “Memory itself is shot through with fiction,” she reminded me when we spoke a few years ago. Yet the reader must not be drawn to direct comparison. Its heroine, SH, also comes from the Midwest to make a new life in Manhattan: the novel’s first line has a little echo of David Copperfield, too: “Years ago I left the wide, flat fields of rural Minnesota for the island of Manhattan to find the hero of my first novel.” Iris, of course, is Siri backwards SH shares her creator’s initials - in both novels, as in other of Hustvedt’s fictions, characters share background details with the author. Her most recent novel, Memories of the Future - published in 2019 - resonates against her first. The novel resists standard chronology, instead moulding its protagonist’s identity by the influences under which she falls. She becomes entangled with four powerful figures who shape her life in different ways. The Blindfold, her first novel, was published in 1992 in it, Iris arrives in New York from the Midwest with little to sustain her. Those multiple perspectives have always permeated her creations. “Wuthering Heights, The Brothers Karamazov and To the Lighthouse are sublime examples of polyphony, of multiple perspectives that dance and crash inside a single work.” “The best novels have a polyphony of voices which do not agree with one another,” she has said. As Hustvedt wrote in her essay “Translation Stories”: “Translation, more and less literal, is a form of intimate reading that calls for interpretation at the deepest level, which subsequently becomes a dynamic reality of ongoing choices.” The reader feels that dynamic reality in all Hustvedt’s work, as she plays with what we understand about the nature of narrative and the nature of self. Her first language, the language of her childhood, was Norwegian: bilingualism too can offer a version of an alternative self. Her parents met in Oslo, Norway, where her Norwegian mother was studying at the university a Fulbright scholarship had taken her father there. Hustvedt was born in Northfield, Minnesota and moved to New York in her early 20s. © Kimbilio © Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Promise, Penguin Books, 2023. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, and other publications. Griffiths is also a recipient of fellowships from many organizations, including Cave Canem Foundation, Kimbilio, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Yaddo. She is a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a NAACP Image Award. Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, visual artist, and author of a debut novel, Promise published by Random House in July 2023.
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