Siri Hustvedt's THE BLAZING WORLD

My review of Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World is up at NPR Books, containing a bare fraction of all the things I want to say about it. I could’ve written an essay of the same length on the beauty and heartbreak of Harriet Burden and Bruno Kleinfeld’s meditations on their aging bodies and the cruelties of memory and narratives of self, or on the expert deployment of misogynistic voices in the text, or the complication of straightforward feminist narratives, or the straining against binary gender, or the representation of family love and tension. It’s a glorious book, and I hope people I know read it soon so I can discuss it with them while my awe of it glows so fierce. Reviewing it felt like a privilege.

In other news, I was bowled over to be included in A. C. Wise’s “Women to Read” post for March, in the company of Jo Walton, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Francesca Lia Block. These are all women whose work I’ve loved and admired for years, and to be even thought of at anything resembling their level’s immensely humbling. I think I’m also peculiarly sensitive to praise of “A Hollow Play” for reasons difficult to explain but that I keep musing on and hope to perhaps explore at some point.

But that point is not now, because today I am taking my brother on a hawking tour before sending him back south, and lunch and castles await.

#SFWApro