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    The Blazing World: A Novel
    The Blazing World: A Novel
    The Blazing World: A Novel
    Audiobook14 hours

    The Blazing World: A Novel

    Written by Siri Hustvedt

    Narrated by Patricia Rodriguez and Eric Meyers

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Named one of the New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of the Year ** Publishers Weekly’s Best Fiction Books of 2014 ** NPR Best Books of 2014 ** Kirkus Reviews Best Literary Fiction Books of 2014 ** Washington Post Top 50 Fiction Books of 2014 ** Boston Globe’s Best Fiction of 2014 ** The Telegraph’s Best Fiction to Read 2014 ** St. Louis Post Dispatch’s Best Books of 2014 ** The Independent Fiction Books of the Year 2014 ** One of Buzzfeed’s Best Books Written by Women in 2014 ** San Francisco Chronicle’s Best of 2014 ** A Nancy Pearl Pick ** PopMatters.com’s Best of 2014 Fiction

    Winner of the 2014 LA Times Book Prize for Fiction

    Finalist for the 2014 Kirkus Prize

    Hailed by The Washington Post as “Siri Hustvedt’s best novel yet, an electrifying work,” The Blazing World is a masterful novel about perception, prejudice, desire, and one woman’s struggle to be seen.

    In a new novel called “searingly fresh... A Nabokovian cat’s cradle” on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, the internationally bestselling author tells the provocative story of artist Harriet Burden, who, after years of having her work ignored, ignites an explosive scandal in New York’s art world when she recruits three young men to present her creations as their own. Yet when the shows succeed and Burden steps forward for her triumphant reveal, she is betrayed by the third man, Rune. Many critics side with him, and Burden and Rune find themselves in a charged and dangerous game, one that ends in his bizarre death.

    An intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle presented as a collection of texts, including Harriet’s journals, assembled after her death, this “glorious mashup of storytelling and scholarship” (San Francisco Chronicle) unfolds from multiple perspectives as Harriet’s critics, fans, family, and others offer their own conflicting opinions of where the truth lies. Writing in Slate, Katie Roiphe declared it “a spectacularly good read...feminism in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex or Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: richly complex, densely psychological, dazzlingly nuanced.”

    “Astonishing, harrowing, and utterly, completely engrossing” (NPR), Hustvedt’s new novel is “Blazing indeed:...with agonizing compassion for all of wounded humanity”(Kirkus Reviews, starred review). It is a masterpiece that will be remembered for years to come.

    Editor's Note

    An art world whodunnit…

    A female artist pulls off an elaborate hoax in which she has men take credit for her work. But how deep do the deceptions go? An art world whodunnit, with all of the delicious thrills you expect when dead bodies are involved.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateMar 11, 2014
    ISBN9781442370876
    Author

    Siri Hustvedt

    Siri Hustvedt, a novelist and scholar, has a PhD in English literature and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is the author of a book of poems, seven novels, four collections of essays, and two works of nonfiction. She has published papers in various academic and scientific journals and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, the European Charles Veillon Essay Prize, an American Academy of the Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction for The Blazing World, which was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for The Blazing World

    3.5/5

    220 ratings21 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Dense, angry and complicated, I think this was probably the wrong choice for an inter-continental flight - the layers of intelligence, nuance and self-reference were a bit overwhelming. Hustvedt is a brilliant writer though - nobody writes about the art world with more power and creativity - and in this book she's cramming in every idea she's ever had. There's art, feminism, neuroscience, grief, artifical intelligence, authorship and creativity, love, sex, death, illness and so much more. It's compelling stuff, but I probably need to re-read it to really get my head around everything that's going on here.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Absolutely brilliant. A wonderful commentary on the art world and the people behind it, and a touching retelling of one woman's life and legacy. Brilliantly written and performed.
    • 5/5
      This was a pleasant surprise. Great exploration of human life.
    • 3/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of this book; the exploration of gender bias and sexism was interesting and spoke to the feminist in me. That being said, the prose became so cumbersome that I almost gave up several times. I also could have done without the psychoanalysis part, although it appears that the author has made herself a de facto expert and lectures frequently on the subject. I'm giving this 3 stars simply because of how thoroughly, and, at times, beautifully the author explores the main themes.
    • 5/5
      I saw that Siri Hustvedt wrote a collection of essays about perception and identity, and I think there must be a great deal of her thinking expressed by the protagonist of this novel, Harriet “Harry” Burden. Harry is an artist in New York, who also had the possible misfortune of being married to a well-known art dealer. Her husband, Felix, has refused to show her work, and consequently the New York art world knows her as the hostess of Felix’s dinner parties rather than as an artist in her own right. Both Felix and Harry are dead at the start of the novel, which is told through Harry’s journals, academic and critical writing about her, and interviews with people who knew her.After Felix’s death, Harry undertakes a project to create and show her art using “masks”—three male artists who will show the art as if it were their own. Not only are these shows far better received than Harry’s art was when shown under her own name, vindicating her belief that she has been disregarded as an artist because she is a woman, but it gives Harry (and us) insight into how what we think and believe affects how we perceive and, perhaps even more interestingly, how her “masks” affect the art she creates.It’s clear from the onset of the novel that the art market has difficulty believing that Harry was really the creator of the projects shown under the names of her male “masks.” Rune, the final of her “masks” who was already an established artist in his own right, refuses after all to reveal that Harry was the artist behind the work. Her relationship with him is the most complex and thought-provoking in the book, though her relationships with every character shed light on the philosophical and psychological concerns about art, perception, sex, and identity that infuse the novel.This is very much an intellectual novel of ideas. There’s a touch of “Rashomon,” in that we see Harry’s life and work from a variety of perspectives, though strictly speaking not many of the same individual incidents from different points of view. We see the broader picture of Harry as housewife, mother, virago, mentally disturbed obsessive, lover, and ultimately brilliant artist.The title comes from the writing of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, a 17th-century philosopher and writer, and an icon to Harry. The title became particularly resonant at the very end of the novel, when we see Harry’s magnum opus through the eyes of the distinctly unintellectual Sweet Autumn, a New Age crystal healer. This final scene made the perfect frame, and there’s nothing I appreciate more than the perfect ending to a novel of ideas.
    • 5/5
      A rich, dense, multi-layered academic novel about an artist who chooses to present herself through the guise of three men, in protest for the poor recognition she's received as a woman. Beautifully written and imaginatively narrated. This is one of my early favorites of 2015.
    • 3/5
      I mostly enjoyed the sardonic central character railing against the sexism of the New York art world with humour and inventiveness, but I feel it would have worked better 100 pages shorter. There was a lot of repetition in the later sections, and what felt like extraneous commentaries popping in. All in all a solid 3/5.
    • 4/5
      It was easy. It's still easy. You simply refuse to answer a woman. You don't engage in a dialogue. You let her words or her pictures die.Harriet Burden is a talented artist who can't get any traction in the art world. Even her beloved husband, an important gallery owner, doesn't notice her art. So she comes up with a plan; she creates three stellar shows and has a different male artist take the credit for each one. Her plan is to then reveal herself and prove to the art world how sexist it is, but it doesn't work out as planned. This is not a gentle or tactful novel. It is an angry, vibrant portrait about living as an artist in New York, about pushing against boundaries, about mental illness and genius. Were Hustvedt to have wanted to simply preach, she would not have created Harriet Burden. Harry is wonderful; chaotic, impulsive, angry and immensely talented. Her life blazes across the pages of the novel, which is told in the form of interviews, articles, diary entries and other biographical notes. It's an effective way to tell the story, with Harry's friends and family, as well as her detractors and other artists able to give their view of the events. Harry is as controversial and colorful as Francis Bacon or any other modern artist. I was impressed by Hustvedt's writing and the depth of her knowledge. I'll certainly be reading more by this author.
    • 4/5
      Complex and subtle, dark and funny, cold and poignant all at once. When I finished I almost wanted to just turn back to the front and start over again, since I'm sure I missed lots of interesting bits.
    • 5/5
      This is a very smart novel about a very smart artist-protagonist by a very smart author. First off, I thoroughly enjoyed it and was engrossed by the journey of artist Harriet Burden, the recent widow of an famous art dealer, who decides to test and tease the NYC art world. The novel may be too clever by half for many readers who are impatient with stylistic devices and games, but I found Hustvedt's writing amusing and entertaining.The novel is told from multiple perspectives, opening with an Editor's Introduction, which explains that the text is composed of a series of journals kept by Burden as well as as other commentary on and criticism of her work and testimony of significant people and family members in her life.After her husband has died, Burden decides to present her installation works under a series of male pseudonyms -- she calls her work "Maskings." Each of the three installations garners increasing critical attention, until the third culminates in a crisis of identity and ownership. The relationships that Burden has with the three artists she hires or co-opts as fronts mirror certain aspects of her personality.The Blazing World is probably not a novel for everyone, but if you're interested in the art world, feminism or literary experimentation, I highly recommend it.
    • 2/5
      The same premise, over and over: the art world is sexist. It got tiresome, after over 100 pages of the same thing.
    • 3/5
      Some books baffle me as for whom they are written; what is their intended audience? This one seems to be written for the author’s co-citizens of her seemingly rarefied world; the New York Art Scene. Anyone outside of this sphere is made to feel it sharply. Those on the inside, and perhaps us rabble, are clearly meant to wonder at her grasp of the philosophically and the neurologically arcane. Granted, it is her background and authors are coached to write what they know and in light of that I shifted my approach to the book and came at it as if it were an anthropological project. To spend time among the strange people who glorify concepts that don’t have much rooted to the real world and to see what they’re like when they think no one’s watching. The thing is, everyone in this book is convinced everyone else is watching. To some degree they’re right; their attendance at various openings, galas and shows is a chance for them to parade their newest personas and to view others’, not necessarily to take part in the event. To see and be seen is what it comes down to. The narcissism on display was quite amusing and I hope that Hustvedt did is on purpose. I especially liked how Phineas justified his sponging by becoming Harry’s administrator. As far as characters go, he was one of the most thorough and I wish that Rune’s innate sinister quality had been emphasized a bit more. The premise and the construction are great though. The basic idea is that women’s artistic endeavors are ignored, belittled and under-valued. The construction is that an editor is gathering and presenting material about the life, achievements and potential downfall of the artist Harry Burden. I thought it would give the author a real challenge to alter her voice and she pretty much pulls it off although all the characters seem to need editorializing to explain obscure facts gleaned from their lofty intellectual heights. In one or two it could have played, but all of them? It’s easy to wonder if Harry is a stand-in for Hustvedt herself. She is a woman of high-achievement, but frequently only described as Paul Auster’s wife; something that must be REALLY annoying. Harry’s agony and frustration are palpable and pitiable, but she spent more time axe-grinding than combating the source. It’s also an easy conclusion that the editor represents Hustvedt and she couldn’t help using it as a vehicle to show off. Not knowing her or any of her other books, I tried not to linger on these ideas long. Instead absorbing the story as distantly as I could; not interpreting or assuming. Did I enjoy it? Not enough to read another of her books. The narrative kept me at arm’s length and I can’t say that I was enmeshed in the story; I put it down for days. When I use the word story I do it lightly. There was one in there somewhere, but it was so diluted by navel-gazing and intellectual claptrap that it got lost for dozens of pages, multiple narratives and sometimes months or years in the timeline. It was an intellectual exercise and an experience, but one I don’t intend to repeat.
    • 2/5
      nicht zu Ende gelesen, ich konnte nicht viel mit der Handlung anfangen...
    • 3/5
      This is a very clever book, but one that left me utterly cold., The basic premise was enticing: a widowed female artist, unable to secure any recognition for her work in a largely male-dominated market conceals her identity and passes her own work off as that of three male artists, thereby demonstrating the extreme sexism of the New York art world.I found the approach attractive too. The story is made up of a series of separate narratives, some of them drawn from a series of journals compiled by the artist (Harriet Burden) herself, while others purport to be personal memoirs from her friends and associates. Sadly, however, I found that the novel never quite sparked to life for me. All very clever, but I felt that Hustvedt almost became a victim of his own ingenuity and the succession of different narratives simply became burdensome. Rather too much emphasis on style at the expense of substance.
    • 4/5
      As several other reviewers have commented, the premise of this book — female artist adopts male personae in order to overcome art-world gender-bias — leads us to expect a good old-fashioned piece of reductionist feminist martyrology. But what we actually get is something a good deal more subtle than that. Hustvedt has fun provoking us to think about how the viewer's — and the artist's — perception of the artwork reflects the identity of the artist (and vice-versa), how factors like social status, age, gender, and money enter into the equation (on both sides), and how preconceptions about "intellectualism" and "madness" can also complicate the whole issue. Of course, all this is happening not only within the story of Harriet Burden but also in the formal structure of the text, where we have a string of different narrators with different levels of status and authority (and some of whom are actually Harriet in disguise), and it's also implicitly happening in the interaction between the reader, the author and the text, since we know that Siri Hustvedt is a formidably intellectual middle-aged woman novelist writing in the character of a dim pedantic male professor who is supposed to be editing a collection of texts about a formidably intellectual (but possibly mad) middle-aged woman artist...Fortunately, the whole thing is handled with a great deal of charm and humour. Hustvedt in the persona of Harriet enjoys blasting us out of the water with chunks of Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Lady Margaret Cavendish, but it's carefully set up so that any reader who has at least a vague general idea who Kierkegaard was should be able to keep up. (In one of her other personae, though, she undermines our self-confidence by drawing our attention to this journalistic trick and how it is done.) We don't necessarily understand Harriet and the artistic game she's been playing by the time we get to the end of the book, but we have definitely been made to think, and possibly shown just how much more complicated the real world can be than our nice theories would have it.I know next to nothing about contemporary art, but I got the impression that at least some of the satire here must have been aimed at real targets that would be recognisable to anyone who knew the New York art world of the late nineties/early 2000s. Not exactly a roman à clef, perhaps, but certainly some in-jokes.I've somehow managed to overlook Hustvedt up to now (obviously one of my many American blind spots), but she's someone I would certainly like to read more of.
    • 5/5
      A very clever book about the art world, feminism, philosophy and neuroscience. The core story is about an artist, a rich widow who wants to prove that the artistic establishment discriminates against women, and particularly older women, and devises a scheme to exhibit her work presented as the work of younger males. The book presents itself as an academic treatise, a mixture of interviews, the artist's notebooks and the accounts of her friends, family and various other players. The notebooks in particular allow Hustvedt to explore her own interests and provide her own footnotes explaining the ideas and historys of artists, scientists and philosophers. If that sounds dry and difficult, that would convey a false impression - Hustvedt is a lively literary ventriloquist, and the narrative weaves its way through the various contradictory accounts and delivers some surprising conclusions.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I am heartbroken and in love with this book. It is raw and deeply emotional on the one hand and urbane and intellectual on the other. I want more books like this. I read it slowly just so that I could savor it a little longer. Hustvedt blends PhD-level theoretical analysis with an engrossing tale populated by wonderfully and grotesquely human characters. I identified with Harriet, with her lumpy old lady body, churning emotions, her constant grasping for more, and a brain too canny for her own good. I loved to hate that insufferable moron Oswald Case. I adored Rachel Briefman and Phineas Q. Eldridge and Bruno. I came to appreciate the central importance of the characters who seemed simple and marginal but who were really essential to the lived reality of the main characters all along - the Kirstens and Sweet Autumns of the world, and the Maisies suspended indefinitely between the ordinary and the artistic. Most of the book had an eerie, ominous vibe as the novel meandered towards Rune's artistic death - but then the story veered suddenly into the gnawing brutality of Harriet's all-too-recognizable end. I sobbed through the final chapters. Earlier, I laughed. I raged. I analyzed. I was moved, emotionally and intellectually. This book and its characters will stay with me for a very long time. I believe it is the best book I have ever read. It is perfect.
    • 5/5
      This was my second installment of an Indiespensable subscription from Powell's. I couldn't be happier with that. I never would have read this novel otherwise, and found it a delight. The novel itself was almost a 'who-dunnit', set in the nearly present-day New York art world. I eventually came to enjoy the supposed philosophical asides, complete with footnotes that were equally likely to be completely fictional as real. I would recommend the book to any serious reader.
    • 4/5
      The Blazing World is one of the 2014 Booker prize nominees that jumped out at me as something I would like to read. The premise is that a woman artist, Harriet "Harry" Burden, in her 60s who feels that her artwork has been under-appreciated because of her gender, creates 3 works of art and finds a different man to claim each of the exhibits as his own. After all three are exhibited and critiqued she plans to reveal herself as the artist behind them. Unfortunately, the last artist she chooses betrays her and refuses to admit that the work was hers. Many people believe him and the whole project is ruined for her.The book is put together with different voices in Harriet's life trying to tell her story after her death. We get points of view from both of Harry's adult children, her second husband, her best friend, art critics, and others. This is very effective as a major theme of the book is perception. You see from the various points of view all of the ways the events are perceived. Also, Harriet leaves behind extensive journals where she discusses her life, her artwork, and her reading - she is esoteric, conceited, and vulnerable all at once. She reads philosophy and quotes it extensively. Luckily, the fictional editor of the book provides footnotes for the references Harriet makes. You would assume from the description that a major theme of this book is going to be sexism in the art world. This is part of the book, certainly, but it is approached more as Harriet's perception of sexism. I would say that the theme is closer to exploring how the artist is part of the work of art. As such, gender, sexual orientation, race, and personality of the artist all factor in to a work of art. Part of Harriet's experiment with her art work was to demonstrate this, though I'm not sure if she intended that from the start. This theme really got me thinking about how much the name attached to a work of art influences my experience of the art itself. I think it's a great degree, personally. Hustvedt does a great job of humanizing these philosophical themes, though. In fact, in some ways, when I finished this book I felt it was more about aging, death, and relationships with the art world as a back drop. As often happens with books with multiple narrators, there were some that I liked more than others and times where I felt the book got a bit bogged down and lost its focus. Overall, though, I thought this was a smart book with some important themes that manages to keep a human touch. That's not an easy balance to manage and why I think this was a worthy Booker nomination.
    • 5/5
      This is an amazing, engrossing novel. At times, it felt so real. It is filled with historical data that prompted me to research persons who I discovered by virtue of reading this book.
    • 4/5
      I liked the way the story weaves throughout the different masks. I'm just not as interested in the art world after reading this and the Goldfinch, but it was a well written book within a book.