The Blindfold: A Novel

This was my first book of Siri's and it was a delightful book. I could relate to Iris and her struggles as some related to my life. What touched me was her drive to keep going even in the hardest times and yet lost herself to survive too. How many of us would just love to be some body else for a while. I cried and laughed with and at Iris. When she shared her story to Paris of her police incident I laughed so hard because I could imagine the thoughts going through his head. "What are friends for but to have a good laugh." I do hope that Siri will continue another book about Iris. I would like to find out if she ever finds love and if she is alright in other areas of her life. This is the first book that I hated to see end.

Siri Hustvedt's novels, to me, are like the literary equivalent of Edward Hopper's paintings: portraying that haunting sense of abandonment and alienation in an anonymous American city landscape. Coincidentally, both The Blindfold and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl has a a voyeur protagonist watching people through the windows of their apartments at night, a recurring subject of Hopper's work. Told in four interconnecting short stories, narrator Iris Vegan instantly draws the reader into her offbeat world populated by quirky characters and bizarre situations. Fresh out of Columbia University in New York, the graduate student's exploration and experimentation with the darker side of life is reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis territory in Less That Zero and a little disturbing to say the least. Hustvedt's writing is beautiful, though; a deceptively simple spare prose that is polished and powerful. An intelligent and ingenious sexy slow burn of a book that grips you from the onset and makes you think as you savour each lingering sentence. This is the kind of cult word-of-mouth book college girls will hug and hold dearly with an honest and real female character at the heart of its story who feels like an old friend.

The third chapter of this book is one of the best short stories I have ever read. (It is in the 1991 Best American Short Stories - titled "Houdini"). I laughed out loud at almost every line. Siri Hustvedt has a way of reporting preposterous events with in a matter of fact tone, that is funny, but it also provides an undercurrent of alienation/disconnection that gives the story gravity. Her characterizations are simultaneously absurd and real.

Hustvedt writes with a rare and beautiful emotional intelligence, and a searching mastery. She has an acute sense-memory. This novel is so quiet in its style it gets you hearing dog frequencies. Amazing. Buy this book.

Iris Vagan wanders New York in search of self. Iris first is hired as a writer to react to objects which belonged to a murdered woman. Do we have meaning and identify through our possessions? An identity so strong that it can be perceived even after death. Interesting question. She has a photograph taken and then circulated without her knowledge. She becomes the woman in the photograph. The woman in the photograph has an identity of her own separate from Iris. How many times do we remember someone through a photograph? She translates a book from German to English for a professor. She reenacts the character of the book through dressing in drag and walking the streets of New York. Towards the end of the book she has a wonderful section on perception and reality. Where does the self come from? How do we gain identity in this world of images? What is fact and what is fiction? I found her writing so enchanting that I bought her second book, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl and am working through it. (Iris is Siri spelled backwards for what that is worth)