Blazing World, The (2014 Longlisted For The Man Booker Prize)

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 The artist Harriet Burden, furious at the lack of attention paid her by the New York art world, conducts an experiment: she hides her identity behind three male fronts in a series of exhibitions. Their success seems to prove her point, but there's a sting in the tail - when she unmasks herself, not everyone believes her. Then her last collaborator meets a bizarre end. In this mesmerising tour de force, Burden's story emerges after her death through a variety of sources, including her (not entirely reliable) journals and the testimonies of her children, lover and a dear friend. Each account is different, however, and the mysteries multiply. Review: I have told nearly everyone I love - and some random acquaintances - to stop whatever they are doing and read [Hustvedt's] new novel ... The Blazing World is the playful, ebullient, brainy story of Harriet "Harry" Burden, an artist in her early sixties ... The book is clearly a feminist undertaking but joyously, unpredictably so. Hustvedt eschews all feminist cliche. She throws herself into rich ambiguities ... Hustvedt's novels have always been smart, accomplished, critically acclaimed but this one feels like a departure. There is more heat in it, more wildness; it seems to burst on to a whole other level of achievement and grace ... the book will blaze through the world. -- Katie Roiphe Financial Times This novel is like a palimpsest, built from many paper-tissue thin layers, some more transparent than others, and told through many voices, put together so cleverly it is not clear where the lines are between fact and fiction, let alone between the fictions within the fiction ... Siri Hustvedt has created a complex world of play and interplay. This novel is a puzzle, a mystery, a dance, filled with intrigue, a truly wonderful intellectual work that makes you think and laugh and tickles the brain. -- Victoria Moore Daily Mail Harry is a lovable, maddening whirlwind ... The fury is brilliantly done, and so is the love affair Harry embarks on with a fat failed poet ... Hustvedt writes with a cool precision that can give her work a blistering power ... The Blazing World is a dazzling novel, the kind that makes you cry (or nearly cry) as well as think. -- Christina Patterson The Sunday Times There is a fair amount of anger in the book: feminist anger, but also disdain for journalists, for the art industry, for a gendered world that ignores women like Harriet and rewards men like her husband ... It might have become shrill in the hands of a lesser writer. As it is, it is at once a story of a privileged Upper East type who bleeds the wounds of Western liberal feminism, and also the universal, deeply affecting story of overshadowed women who are made - or make themselves - small, however big their ambition ... The Blazing World is a profound and deeply serious book on many levels, but it is most entertaining in its critique of the New York art scene - its vanities, double standards, blind-spots ... [A novel of] immense soulfulness and wisdom -- Arifa Akbar Independent The richness and playfulness of the novel is down to the way it is structured ... What is remarkable is the way Hustvedt manages to take her range of intellectual interests and this ostensibly complex format and forge a gripping narrative. -- Duncan White Daily Telegraph It is an exuberantly clever piece of work. Fascinated by disguise, play-acting and ventriloquism, it lures its readers into a maze of characters, viewpoints and apparently persuasive arguments - then insists, refreshingly, that they think their way out ... There's a central mystery to unravel in The Blazing World, but its real pleasures come from Hustvedt's startling talent for voice and register ... the narrative becomes a brilliant catfight of dogmas and orthodoxies ... a novel that gloriously lives up to its title, one blazing with energy and thought. -- Tim Martin The Times Hustvedt offers a slickly written multiplicity of perspectives ... The Blazing World ramps up thrillingly as it becomes apparent that Harriet's final collaboration has taken a sinister turn ... Densely brilliant, but terrifyingly clever ... But you don't need a PhD in Kierkegaard to enjoy Hustvedt's writing, and it's a pleasure to feel your brain whirring as it forges links and finds the cracks across differing accounts ... Hustvedt's text is carefully, impressively constructed: she's as convincing in each fictional voice as Harriet is in her masks. -- Holly Williams Independent on Sunday Her prose is brilliant, furious, teeming with intelligence and life - an experiment in reception itself. Literary Review Both intellectually and emotionally gripping ... the generosity of the storytelling leads to full and often affecting backstories for all the main characters ... [it] feels like one of those novels in which a well-established author triumphantly sums up, and possibly even surpasses, everything they've done before. -- James Walton Spectator Even by Siri Hustvedt's extremely high standards, The Blazing World is an extraordinary book ... Hustvedt juggles the many voices and many truths masterfully, drawing the reader into an intricate and a puzzling web ... The precision of the language makes each detail jewel-like and tangible. -- Clare Heal Sunday Express Prizes: Runner-up for Kirkus Prize: Fiction 2014. Long-listed for Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2014. Author Biography: Siri Hustvedt's first novel, The Blindfold, was published by Sceptre in 1993. Since then she has published The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, The Sorrows of an American and The Summer Without Men. She is also the author of the poetry collection Reading To You, and four collections of essays, Yonder, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, A Plea for Eros and Living, Thinking, Looking, as well as the memoir The Shaking Woman: A History of My Nerves. Born in Minnesota, Siri Hustvedt now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and in 2012 was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities.