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    Memories of the Future
    Memories of the Future
    Memories of the Future
    Audiobook12 hours

    Memories of the Future

    Written by Siri Hustvedt

    Narrated by Katherine Fenton

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Longlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence

    A provocative, exuberant novel about time, memory, desire, and the imagination from the internationally bestselling and prizewinning author of The Blazing World, Memories of the Future tells the story of a young Midwestern woman’s first year in New York City in the late 1970s and her obsession with her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite.

    As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, S.H., aka “Minnesota,” transcribes her neighbor’s bizarre and increasingly ominous monologues in a notebook, along with sundry other adventures, until one frightening night when Lucy bursts into her apartment on a rescue mission.

    Forty years later, S.H., now a veteran author, discovers her old notebook, as well as early drafts of a never-completed novel while moving her aging mother from one facility to another. Ingeniously juxtaposing the various texts, S.H. measures what she remembers against what she wrote that year and has since forgotten to create a dialogue between selves across decades. The encounter both collapses time and reframes its meanings in the present.

    Elaborately structured, intellectually rigorous, urgently paced, poignant, and often wildly funny, Memories of the Future brings together themes that have made Hustvedt among the most celebrated novelists working today: the fallibility of memory; gender mutability; the violence of patriarchy; the vagaries of perception; the ambiguous borders between sensation and thought, sanity and madness; and our dependence on primal drives such as sex, love, hunger, and rage.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateMar 19, 2019
    ISBN9781508278788
    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 Memories of the Future

    3.5/5

    54 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      So right, so acutely perceptive and contemporary in it’s storytelling
    • 3/5
      "a portrait of the artist as a young woman"Siri Hustvedt has made us used to very thoughtful, beautifully composed novels and essays, and this surely once again is one like these. In essence, she describes the experiences of a 23-year-old girl S.H. moving to New York from the Midwest (Minnesota) to write a novel. The autobiographical slant is immediately clear, although Hustvedt in interviews has clarified that not everything is based on her own experiences, but a large part is. Inevitably, here we are confronted with the second layer of the novel: a writer who, at the age of 63, looks back on her 'pioneering time', and thus also focusses on the insidious workings of memory, on the inexorable work of time and on how narratives actively contribute to a person's life. Sounds familiar, and indeed, Hustvedt is far from the first to indulge in such a quest for lost time. Fortunately, she seasons her story with some suspense elements, such as the strange, constantly murmuring neighbor, the witch circle of which this neighbor is a part, and a terrifyingly described experience of sexual assault. By constantly harking back to a diary from that time, the book takes the form of a frame story. This is reinforced by the fact that Hustvedt also includes fragments from the first novel her main character was working on at the time, a kind of coming-of-age story about a young man with a Sherlock Holmes obsession. Naturally, there is a fascinating interaction between that diary, the real experiences from then (1979) and from now (2017), and those first writings, resulting in a wonderful whole of self-reflexive dialogue with past and present. I don't think this is her best book, but the thorough, thoughtful way in which Hustvedt writes continues to charm me.
    • 4/5
      I really love Hustvedt's writing. It is challenging, perceptive, and artistic. Sometimes I would fault her for using a few too many literary and philosophical references because it sometimes alienates from the story, but I love it anyway. This book explores a year in the life of S.H., a young woman writer who moves from Minnesota to New York to take a year off before starting her degree at Columbia. She is distracted by her neighbor who she can hear through the walls. She meets a group of friends. She is almost raped. Her year is remembered by her older self who also reads a journal that S.H. wrote in that year (I think it was 1979). The book she was working on writing is also presented in large chunks. I really liked this, but I still think [The Blazing World] is her best book. I felt a little too removed from this character to really connect to this book.
    • 4/5
      The comic, erotic, distressing, or character-building experiences of the gauche young intellectual, alone in the big city for the first time, pretending unsuccessfully not to be a self-portrait - we've all read dozens of first novels like that. But it's unusual to come across it as the theme for a mature novel by an experienced writer. Hustvedt's hook for this book, which follows her narrator "S.H." through a year out between college and postgraduate work in 1978-79, is the narrator's rediscovery of a forgotten diary from forty years ago as she's clearing out some of her mother's stuff. The book turns into a kind of conversation, moderated by the analytical "old woman" S.H. of the present day, between her remaining memories of that time, her experiences as she recorded them in the diary, and the way she reworked them fictionally in a couple of (unfinished) novels she was trying to write. So there's a lot about the nature of memory, the way we unknowingly discard large amounts of information and retrospectively rewrite other experiences to suit the patterns we expect to find, and the way incidents move up and down in the scale of importance in unpredictable ways. It soon becomes clear that neither the diary nor the narrator's memory is entirely trustworthy, but as well as upsetting our preconceptions about whether it's possible to construct an authoritative version of past events, Hustvedt also has a lot of fun playing with our assumptions about how much her fictional S.H. (decoded for us variously as "Standard Hero", "Sherlock Holmes", etc.) can be identified with the author, throwing in a baffling mixture of real and fictional biographical details cunningly designed to prevent us from settling on either side of the fence. Thrown into the mixture is the narrator's encounter with the papers of the then-forgotten dadaist, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927; she's now become famous as the probable real author of the celebrated conceptual artwork Fountain previously claimed by Marcel Duchamp). The bad Baroness's ribald anger gives S.H. a kind of virtual outlet for her frustration at the dismissive way she herself is often treated by a world that doesn't really expect blonde young women to have an opinion about Wittgenstein.And of course this is also a very engaging novel about what it's like to be a young woman setting out with high expectations into the exciting world of New York in 1978. Making friends, partying, running out of money, going hungry, getting into trouble and out of it, making up stories about strangers and then discovering that the truth is both stranger than you imagined and more banal, deciding whether to put up with casual sexism or fight back against it, and all the rest of the weird world of being 23.