Call number
FIC HUS
Collection
Genres
Publication
Simon & Schuster (2019), 336 pages
Description
"From international bestseller and Booker Prize-nominee Siri Hustvedt comes a provocative novel about time, desire, memory and the imagination, Then tells the indelible story of a young Midwestern woman's fixation with her mysterious neighbor over the course of a threadbare year in 1970s New York" --
Media reviews
Memories of the Future is a portrait of the artist, certainly, and of New York in the 1970s, which Hustvedt joyously depicts as hot, dirty and cacophonous. But it’s also far more than that. As layered as a millefeuille, as dense and knotted as tapestry, it feels, by the time you reach the final
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pages, less like a novel and more like an intellectual reckoning; an act of investigation into how, as a woman, it is possible to live well in the world, and enter effectively into the conversation about it. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member thorold
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
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.
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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.
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LibraryThing member japaul22
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
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.
This book explores a year in the life of S.H., a young woman
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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.
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LibraryThing member bookomaniac
"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
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
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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. Show Less
Awards
Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction (Longlist — Fiction — 2020)
Pages
336
ISBN
1982102837 / 9781982102838