1 of 1 copy available
A young woman, S.H., moves to New York City in 1978 to look for adventure and write her first novel, but finds herself distracted by her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite. As S.H. listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, she carefully transcribes the woman's bizarre monologues about her daughter's violent death and her need to punish the killer.
Forty years later, S.H. stumbles upon the journal she kept that year and writes a memoir, Memories of the Future, in which she juxtaposes the notebook's texts, drafts from her unfinished comic novel, and her commentaries on them to create a dialogue among selves over the decades. She remembers. She misremembers. She forgets. Events of the past take on new meanings. She works to reframe her traumatic memory of a sexual assault. She celebrates the legacy of the wild and rebellious Dada artist-poet, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. As the book unfolds, you witness S.H. write her way through vengeance and into freedom.
Smart, funny, angry, and poignant, Hustvedt's seventh novel brings together the themes that have made her one of the most celebrated novelists working today: the strangeness of time, the brutality of patriarchy, and the power of the imagination to remake the past.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 19, 2019 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781982102852
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781982102852
- File size: 7331 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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October 1, 2018
An author named S.H. finds the journal she kept during her first year in Manhattan in the late 1970s, unlocking memories of a quirky neighbor, a half-finished novel, and a disastrous date."We differ, my former self and I. It was impossible for me to know at twenty-three that the dreadful phrase 'life is short' has meaning, that at sixty-one I know there is far less ahead of me than behind me, and that while she wasn't terribly curious about herself as herself, I have become curious about her as an incarnation of hopes and errors that had or seem to have had a determining effect on what I am now." Back then, S.H. was called Minnesota by her friends. She was trying to write a novel about a teenage detective who worships Sherlock Holmes (hmmm, also S.H.!). She had a best friend named Whitney whom she met at a John Ashbery reading in SoHo; Whitney made "poem-objects" and wore green high heels and a yellow beret. Financially, however, things weren't going so well--Minnesota was reduced to scavenging for dinner in trash cans before she landed a job ghostwriting the memoirs of a socialite named Elena Bergthaler. Meanwhile, she spent a good portion of every day eavesdropping on her next-door neighbor, Lucy, a woman whose conversations were so strange and filled with violent imagery that Minnesota and her friends developed wild competing theories to explain them. None were stranger than what turned out to be the truth, which Minnesota learned after Lucy emerged from her apartment one night to save her from an evil young man. The book includes whimsical illustrations by the author, among them a caricature of Donald Trump with S.H.'s 94-year-old mother's comment as caption--"Can that man be president?"Like all the best postmodern novels, this metafictional investigation of time, memory, and the mutating self is as playful as it is serious.COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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October 15, 2018
In her New York City apartment in the late 1970s, fresh-from-the Midwest S.H. records the increasingly disturbing rants she hears through fingernail-thin walls from Lucy Brite next door. Forty years later, S.H. discovers the notebook of Lucy's monologs, along with a never completed novel, and cross-cuts them with recall of events to offer a clearer understanding of time, memory, and self. From Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Hustvedt; with a 50,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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