Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt (2014)

Siri Hustvedt [ ˈsɪɹɪ ˈhʊstvət ] (born February 19, 1955 in Northfield , Minnesota ) is an American writer .

Life

Hustvedt is the eldest of four daughters of Lloyd Hustvedt (1922-2004), a professor of Norwegian and American history, and the Norwegian-born Ester Vegan. Siri Hustvedt grew up bilingual. She had wanted to be a writer since she was fourteen and was already writing poetry in high school. She studied English literature and received her PhD from Columbia University in 1986 .

In 1982 Siri Hustvedt married the writer Paul Auster , whom she had met a year earlier. The couple lives in Brooklyn near Prospect Park , at times with their daughter Sophie, who was born in 1987, and Auster's son from his first marriage. Her first book published in 1981 ( Reading to You , dt. I read you before (2012)) contains a selection already during their studies written poems. Her novel The Invisible Woman appeared in 1993 only after a long time lag, due to the birth of her daughter and the complex structure of the material . Hustvedt's best-known novels are The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1997) and What I Loved (2003).

After the novel The Sorrows of an American (2008) appeared in January 2010 The Trembling Woman. A story of my nerves . In it she tells of a tremor that made itself felt in her body while she was giving a lecture. She set out to find the cause of the tremor. In the book she presents the theses from neurology and psychology that she came across during this causal research.

Hustvedt now also publishes neuroscientific articles and teaches doctors in New York in narrative psychiatry .

She took over the title for her novel Die Gleißende Welt (2015) from Margaret Cavendish , whose novel of the same name is an inspiration for the artistic work of her main character Harriet Burden.

In the essay The Illusion of Certainty (2018), Hustvedt explores the philosophical-biological questions of the separation of mind and brain . Influenced by her intensive self-study of neurosciences, she finds that psychiatry and neuroscience are underlaid with a dualism between the physical and spiritual of the human being, which, in her opinion, does not exist with this distinction. She criticizes the strong tendency to categorize the natural sciences and at the same time criticizes their lack of clarity, for example in the definition of the genome . For the French version of this essay ( Les Mirages de la certitude ), Hustvedt was awarded the Prix européen de l'essai Charles Veillon in 2019 . Also in 2019 she was awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize for Literature.

Works

Siri Hustvedt signing (2011)

I will read to you. Poems . gutleut verlag , Frankfurt am Main / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-936826-70-8 (English: Reading to You . 1981. Translated by Brigitte Landes).
The invisible woman . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, ISBN 3-498-02910-X (English: The Blindfold . Translated by Uli Aumüller ).
The Enchantment of Lily Dahl . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1997, ISBN 3-498-02942-8 (English: The Enchantment of Lily Dahl. A Novel . Translated by Uli Aumüller).
Not here, not there. Essays . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2000, ISBN 3-498-02952-5 (English: Yonder. Essays . 1998. Translated by Uli Aumüller).
What I loved . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2003, ISBN 3-498-02971-1 (English: What I loved. A Novel . Translated by Uli Aumüller).
Mysteries of the Rectangle. Essays on Painting . Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2005, ISBN 1-56898-618-1 . Table of contents online
Being a Man . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2006, ISBN 3-499-24391-1 (English, English: A Plea for Eros. Essays . 2006. Translated by Uli Aumüller).
An American's sufferings. Novel . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2008, ISBN 978-3-498-02985-2 (English: The Sorrows of an American . Translated by Uli Aumüller, Gertraude Krueger).
The trembling woman. A story of my nerves . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2010, ISBN 978-3-498-03002-5 (English: The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves . 2010. Translated by Uli Aumüller, Grete Osterwald).
Summer without men . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2011, ISBN 978-3-498-03010-0 (English: The summer without men . 2011. Translated by Uli Aumüller).
Live, think, look. Essays . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2014, ISBN 978-3-498-03022-3 (English: Living, Thinking, Looking. Essays . 2012. Translated by Uli Aumüller, Erica Fischer, original with ISBN 978-1-250-00952-4 . ). Table of contents of the German edition
The glittering world . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2015, ISBN 978-3-498-03024-7 (English: The blazing world. A novel . 2014. Translated by Uli Aumüller).
The illusion of certainty . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2018, ISBN 978-3-498-03038-4 (English: The Delusions of Certainty . 2017. Translated by Bettina Seifried).
A woman looks at men who look at women: essays on art, gender, and spirit . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2019, ISBN 978-3-498-03041-4 (English: A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind . 2016. Translated by Uli Aumüller, Grete Osterwald).
Back then . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2019, ISBN 978-3-498-03041-4 (English: Memories of the Future . 2019. Translated by Uli Aumüller, Grete Osterwald).
When feelings meet words. A conversation with Elisabeth Bronfen . From the American by Grete Osterwald. Kampa Verlag, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-31114010-8 .