Name: MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE.
ISBN: 9781473694422

SIRI. HUSTVEDT

MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE.

Siri Hustvedt

A provocative, wildly funny, intellectually rigorous and engrossing novel, punctuated by Siri Hustvedt's own illustrations - a tour de force by one of America's most acclaimed and beloved writers. Fresh from Minnesota and hungry for all New York has to offer, twenty-three-year-old S.H. embarks on a year that proves both exhilarating and frightening - from bruising encounters with men to the increasingly ominous monologues of the woman next door. Forty years on, those pivotal months come back to vibrant life when S.H. discovers the notebook in which she recorded her adventures alongside drafts of a novel. Measuring what she remembers against what she wrote, she regards her younger self with curiosity and often amusement. Anger too, for how much has really changed in a world where the female presidential candidate is called an abomination?

Memories of the Future

Emily Morgan

This was a lovely book but I found myself forgetting each page as I read it. Like when I read Kundera. I had the vague sense of things happening but I couldn’t recall whether they had happened inside of this book. But the forgetting isn’t a bad thing, it makes the book more immediate, something that confronts you in the present and then dissipates, like a dream. 

There were two passages I underlined, two passages I didn’t want to forget:

1. “I was beginning to feel lonely and restless. It’s such an old feeling. I call it “the margins feeling”. Maybe it’s the gulf feeling—a chasm opens up between me and wherever I am—a great divide of difference that keeps growing and can’t be bridged. What is it that separates me from so many people?”

2. “”Don’t shut down. You mustn’t shut down. If you do, don’t you see, if you do it means he wins.” I did not answer her. At the time I felt I had no choice. I had to stiffen every part of myself. I felt that if I didn’t, if I let myself go, if I wasn’t as hard as I could be, I would dissolve into something inchoate and unrecognisable, that I would begin to scream or begin to laugh and never stop.”

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.

Daryl Houston

Weird and sort of a slow burn at first, but by the end, it was really gripping. Probably not for everybody -- perspective/voice changes, postmoderny stuff. Learned some neat (angrifying) stuff about Duchamp's appropriation of the work of others.

MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE.

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