{"id":5002,"date":"2014-03-24T11:16:39","date_gmt":"2014-03-24T11:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=5002"},"modified":"2014-03-27T11:42:27","modified_gmt":"2014-03-27T11:42:27","slug":"the-blazing-world-by-siri-hustvedt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=5002","title":{"rendered":"The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Sceptre UK, Simon & Schuster US 13 March 2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

380pp hbk \u00a318.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Brainy New York artist Harriet (\u2018Harry\u2019) Burden breathes fire.\u00a0 Her work – described by one of her collaborators as \u2018passionate and sexed-up and scary\u2019 – has been overlooked by the late-twentieth-century art world.\u00a0 Inspired by the seventeenth-century Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, who wrote a utopian novel called The Blazing World <\/em>and wore men\u2019s clothes when it suited her purpose, Harry plans her revenge:\u00a0 three ambitious solo exhibitions launched under the pseudonyms of three of her male contemporaries.\u00a0 Result:\u00a0 for \u2018passionate, sexed-up and scary\u2019 read \u2018muscular, rigorous, cerebral\u2019.<\/p>\n

If only it could be that simple.\u00a0 Harry is a complicated woman:\u00a0 artist, intellectual (and how), wife and mother, she is hot-headed and full of rage and envy.\u00a0 Her experiment ends in tears.<\/p>\n

Siri Hustvedt\u2019s novel is presented as a compilation of testimonies:\u00a0 extracts from Harry\u2019s copious Notebooks; reviews and articles about her work; interviews with friends, family, shrinks and collaborators.\u00a0 We read of Harry\u2019s interest in neuroscience and theories of perception; of her lionized art-dealer husband, the voyeuristic Felix Lord, who put her down; of her turbulent romances, her fear of her father, her hurt.\u00a0 She had some good friends, but the last of her male collaborators, Rune, was not one of them.<\/p>\n

Maskings<\/em>, the group title of her exhibitions, was a clever idea.\u00a0 Who has not dreamed of greater freedom via an alias of some kind?\u00a0 But Harry wants to catch the art world out, to show it how predictable are its responses.\u00a0 The first of her male \u2018fronts\u2019 is a young Adonis who can hardly string two words together about the highly verbal work he is supposed to have produced\u00a0 –\u00a0 a \u2018complex joke\u2019 entitled The History of Western Art<\/em> which becomes a smash hit.\u00a0 The second (much the most sympathetic of the three) is a gay black performance artist, with a challenging walk-through installation called The Suffocation Rooms<\/em> (think Louise Bourgeois).\u00a0 The third, unpleasant Rune, presents the highly praised maze installation, Beneath<\/em>, and then refuses to disown it.\u00a0 At no point does one feel that Harry got what she wanted:\u00a0 amazed acclamation from the art crowd.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the problem here.\u00a0 It is a clever novel, but the lasting impression is of an awkward, brilliant woman wasting her life as the aggrieved victim of misogyny.\u00a0 Even if it is true that New York favours the male, it would have been more fun if Harry had had the last laugh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

Siri Hustvedt\u2019s novel is presented as a compilation of testimonies: extracts from Harry\u2019s copious Notebooks; reviews and articles about her work; interviews with friends, family, shrinks and collaborators. We read of Harry\u2019s interest in neuroscience and theories of perception; of her lionized art-dealer husband, the voyeuristic Felix Lord, who put her down; of her turbulent romances, her fear of her father, her hurt. She had some good friends, but the last of her male collaborators, Rune, was not one of them […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5002"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5019,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5002\/revisions\/5019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}