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    A Plea for Eros: Essays
    A Plea for Eros: Essays
    A Plea for Eros: Essays
    Ebook241 pages4 hours

    A Plea for Eros: Essays

    By Siri Hustvedt

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    From the author of the international bestseller What I Loved, a provocative collection of autobiographical and critical essays about writing and writers.

    Whether her subject is growing up in Minnesota, cross-dressing, or the novel, Hustvedt's nonfiction, like her fiction, defies easy categorization, elegantly combining intellect, emotion, wit, and passion. With a light touch and consummate clarity, she undresses the cultural prejudices that veil both literature and life and explores the multiple personalities that inevitably inhabit a writer's mind. Is it possible for a woman in the twentieth century to endorse the corset, and at the same time approach with authority what it is like to be a man? Hustvedt does. Writing with rigorous honesty about her own divided self, and how this has shaped her as a writer, she also approaches the works of others--Fitzgerald, Dickens, and Henry James--with revelatory insight, and a practitioner's understanding of their art.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 1, 2007
    ISBN9781429900492
    A Plea for Eros: Essays
    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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    • 3/5
      “What I loved” van Siri Hustvedt was een revelatie voor mij. Daarom ben ik vrij snel aan dit bundeltje eerder verspreid verschenen essays begonnen. Hustvedt toont zich daarin als een heel zelfbewuste, fijnzinnige observator van de wereld (cfr het essay over New York, 1 jaar na 9/11), maar vooral van zichzelf. Ik hou vooral van het openingsessay “Yonder”, over dat onbereikbare gebied tussen hier en ginder, dat ze relateert aan haar migratieverleden, maar meteen ook spiegelt aan haar literaire werk. Ook het titelessay “A Plea for Eros” is een weldoordachte waarschuwing aan het puriteinse feminisme om de ambiguïteit van seksuele gevoelens niet te onderschatten of verwaarlozen. In het slotessay vervalt Hustvedt naar mijn smaak iets te veel in navelstaarderij: ze fileert zichzelf daarin ongenadig, op het ongemakkelijke af.
    • 4/5
      The essays that I truly enjoyed are worth 5 stars, but Hustvedt's elaborate essays on Dickens and James are more suited for afficionados. The rest of the collection is magnificent, warm, inclusive, wise, and exciting, proving that Siri Hustvedt is not only a brilliant novelist, but a truly decent human being.
    • 3/5
      This is the second book I've read by Siri Hustvedt. The first was her novel 'What I loved', which I think shared some of the same strenghts and flaws with 'A plea for eros'.The strenghts, as I see it, have to do with Hustvedt's elegant writing style, richness of thought, and breadth of knowledge. She very obviously is an intellectual, a woman who has been reading books and thinking about books (and art) all through her life; she also has a good understanding of human psychology, of the vicissitudes and peculiarities of sexual relationships, of the complex fabric of parenting and child-adult relations. Essays such as 'Yonder', where she explores her double (American / Norwegian) roots, or others where she explores her relationship to her mother and daughter, are nicely written, insightful, and provide food for thought.In a way 'A plea for eros' could have been split in two parts, since the essays in it belong to two quite distinct categories- one part is Hustvedt's literature essays, the other is her essays about human relationships, sexuality, family, parenting etc. I think the latter are more appealing but also more problematic- as I said, I think they share the same strenghts and flaws with 'What I loved'.The problem is an exhibitionism, a kind of self-consciousness which is as if Siri Hustvedt is providing us with a glimpse into her life, a life that I get the feeling we should be admiring (even though this is done in a most subtle way). A good example is her description of her first few days in New York, where she moved as a young woman from a small-town in Minnesota: 'My first few days' she says 'were spent rereading Crime and Punishment in a state that closely resembled fever'. Now is it just me or is this a pretentious phrase, which does not ring true at all? In a nutshell, there is a sense in this book, as in 'What I loved', of frequent name-dropping (mostly intellectual name dropping...which doesn't make it any less so!) and of sharing quite private moments, like her description of meeting and falling in love with her author-husband, Paul Auster. As I said, these characteristics could be considered strenghts, since Hustvedt's books end up being quite personal, direct and often very true. But they are also flaws, since her descriptions of herself and her life often become quite idealized and a bit pretentious.

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    A Plea for Eros - Siri Hustvedt

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