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A review by mghoshlisbin
Mothers, Fathers, and Others by Siri Hustvedt
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.