Simon & Schuster The Blazing World 熾焰世界

“Siri Hustvedt’ “The Blazing world”: a generous art novel dedicated to masks and undervalued artists.” — Stefano Pirovano, CFA

 

A brilliant, provocative novel about an artist who, after years of being ignored by the art world, conducts an ‘Maskings’ project: she conceals her female identity behind three male fronts. The fictional character Harriet Burden, artist and wife of a powerful and rich New York art dealer. Apparently Burden has everything she could have ever dreamed of, yet there is a problem: she feels indeed a victim of cultural misogyny and she ascribes the little recognition she has received from the New York art establishment to its proven sexism. So, she decides to use three living men as her masks to show and make her own artworks finally successful.

 

Harriet chose her male foils carefully, to represent different aspects of the gratuitousness of male artistic fame: first a young, photogenic wunderkind named Anton Tish; then the "nearsighted, mulatto, queer" mask of Phineas Eldridge; and lastly the iconic persona of an artist named simply Rune, who is its macho essence. Hustvedt surrounds the reader with multiple unreliable narrators and all are implicated as misrememberers, all telling the wrong stories about ourselves, warped and blinded as we are by perspective, memory and desire.

 

Rune is the master trickster of the novel and its most uncanny creation, whose self is consciously re-represented and reimagined from one moment to the next by his relentlessly mythomaniac interaction with family, friends and critics alike. Rune’s truth is deception, and his art consists of bland manifestations of this. Faced with this fey and weightless creature, Burden – heavy in the centre of multiple orbits and desperate to be the hero of her own book – loses control of her experiment. It is the narcissistic Rune who is Harriet's undoing. According to Burden's journals, she and Rune found themselves locked in a charged and dangerous psychological game that ended with the man's bizarre death.

 

Presented as a collection of texts, edited and introduced by a scholar years after the artist's death, the book unfolds through extracts from Burden's notebooks and conflicting accounts from others about her life and work. Her anger finally stems not only from her sense of feminist injustice but also from an understanding that her consciousness is ambient in the gendered environment and that she cannot bodily access any objective platform upon which to metamorphose. There can only be perception and memory. The masks – Hustvedt uses 20 distinct voices in the book – turn out to be a tool which could protect, fake, or at the same time reveal the true of any specific role.

 

"I wanted to bite the world bloody, but I have bitten myself, made my own poor tragedy of things." Hustvedt has a lot of very entertaining satirical fun in The Blazing World, but that particular note of tragedy, though she tries to sound it, remains lost. The Blazing World is a polyphonic tour de force. It is also an intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle that addresses the shaping influences of prejudice, money, fame, and desire on what we see in one another. Emotionally intense, intellectually rigorous, ironic, and playful, this is a book you won't be able to put down.

 

Features

• Edition : -
• Binding : Hardcover
• ISBN : 9781476747231
• Publication Date : 2014/3/11

 

Materials & Care

• Imported