“After she moved to Brooklyn, my mother collected strays — human strays, not animals. every time I went to visit her, there seemed to be another “assistant,” poet, drifter, or just plain charity case living in one of the rooms, and i worried they might take advantage of her, rob her, or even kill her in her sleep.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 30, 2014)

Harriet “Harry” Burden was an obscurely known artist for much of her life, and also a wife, mother, and scholar. She was criticized for her small architectural works that consisted of too much busyness–cluttered with figures and text that didn’t fit into any schema. Her husband, Felix Lord, was an influential, successful art collector, but who couldn’t help his wife for alleged fear of nepotism. After Felix died, Harriet came back with a vengeance, and under three male artist’s pseudonyms (artists that she sought out), she created a combination art (part performance, if you consider the pseudonyms as part of the process) a trilogy which was successful, and even more lauded posthumously. They were shown individually under the names of “The History of Western Art, ” “The Suffocation Rooms,” and “Beneath.” Later, when unmasked (so to speak), they were identified as Maskings. I am reluctant to reduce and categorize Harriet–although labels such as “feminist” may apply.

Harriet wanted to:

“…uncover the complex workings of human perception and how unconscious ideas about gender, race, and celebrity influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art.”

Moreover, it is about unmasking ourselves–which includes the hermaphroditic selves. We are all an amalgam of male and female, or male and female perceptions and the plurality — attributed behaviors. There’s seepage beyond the paradigm.

Again, that may be too reductionist for the complex workings of Harry’s art, and of her psychology and her life. This novel is like an exposé of Harriet’s life, as told via her friends, colleagues, children (including one passage by her son, who suffered from Asperger’s), lover (her significant other after Felix’s death), critics, roommates, and herself. The chapters by Harriet come from her private notebooks/diaries, labeled by letters of the alphabet, and found after her death.

One could call this a presentation novel — a novel that appears more as a collection of writings that make up her life, replete with footnotes. Included are esoteric and big ideas about art, art movements, and philosophy. However, Hustvedt is such a spectacular writer, that it feels very much like a biography, and often an autobiography (sometimes reliable, at other times unreliable — you as reader decide). Hustvedt combines big ideas with story. There are novels, such as written by David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, and others, who are famous for this style. The novelist Nicholas Mosley writes his story and characters as subservient to the big ideas. This alienates some readers. It is purely subjective to taste, but, personally, I love a cleavage of ideas and story/character. In my opinion, Hustvedt did a superb job of integrating the two. The character of Harriet was pervasive, even in the chapters that didn’t belong to her, because of her inimitable voice that saturated all others who populated the story. Harriet habituated these big ideas, so that it was organically composed.

Harry’s emotional and psychological presence was forceful, formidable. We learn that she saw a psychiatrist twice a week for the last eight years of her life, and her best friend was a psychotherapist. She was a dedicated wife to her husband and children, fraught over the secret life of her husband, and protective over the fragility of her son, Ethan. All vectors pointed back to Harriet–the enigma of her, and the magnitude of her vitality. She was ubiquitous in every page of this book.

I was familiar with some of the scholars/academics/artists/philosophers that Harriet mentioned due to other novels and books I had read. Parisian Guy Debord, leader of the Situationist International movement, had a prominent place in Billy Moon. The Situationists advanced the notion of the spectacularized–a mass consumerism where every experience is packaged by the market to be seductive and glamorous, and sooner or later, we experience the copy as an original experience rather than the experience itself — all is commodified. Harriet assimilated this philosophy (and others to demonstrate the conundrum of perception). One of Harriet’s favorite philosophers was the German, Edmund Husserl, who expounded on phenomenology, the study of the structures of experience and consciousness. It all ties into the assemblage of Harriet — like her art, she is made of many miniature selves that together form a whole. Or, perhaps, a panoply of selves.

And, most dear to Harry’s heart — perhaps her heroine — was Margaret Cavendish, a duchess and groundbreaking, prolific writer of science, predated science fiction, and a utopian romance called “A Blazing World,” from which the eponymous title of this novel originates. Cavendish died in obscurity, having published a memoir in which she yearns to one day be recognized. Hundreds of years after her death, her desire is realized. Is this a key to Harriet’s psyche?

One doesn’t have to be a scholar or artist to relate to this book. In fact, it is written in a highly accessible style, with a smoldering, emotional, and psychological expressiveness. In my opinion, this is a subtle meta-fiction — one that draws attention to itself as a work of art, while keys to the truth of Harriet Burden are revealed. As individuals, we all have our perception of quality and merit; therefore, readers will come away with our respective portraits of Harriet, and the thrumming purpose of her story. For fans of Siri Hustvedt, this is highly recommended. It equals the power of What I Loved, while being different in approach. Hustvedt has a nimble way of disclosing the incongruous features of her characters that make them both distinctive and sympathetic. By the end of this book, I could imagine a three-dimensional Harriet Burden walking out of the pages.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (March 11, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Siri Hustvedt
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Sorrows of an American

Bibliography:

• The Blindfold (1992)
• The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996)
• What I Loved (2003)
• The Sorrows of an American (2008)
• The Summer Without Men (2011)
• The Blazing World (March 2014)

Essays:

• A Plea for Eros (2005)
• Living, Thinking, Looking (2012)

“How far back did he envision all this—the zeppelin that serves as his tomb, the shining tin boy speaking with his voice, and someone imprisoned here to listen to him? When he started drawing up the plans for the mechanical boy, he must have foreseen his own death. He was already thinking, back then, that I would find him and kill him, and that later I would sit at this desk to hear his tales.”

Book Review:

Review by Debbie Lee Wesselmann (APR 4, 2010)

Every so often, a novel is published that is so inventive, so rich that it transports its readers deep into its fictional world and won’t let go until the end. Dexter Palmer’s steampunk The Dream of Perpetual Motion is that kind of book. Set at the beginning of the twentieth century, after “the age of miracles,” this eloquent and often playful tale, stuffed full of allusions and sly commentary, is narrated by Harold, a man imprisoned aboard the zeppelin Chrysalis, a failing “perpetual motion machine.” He is alone except for the voice of his beloved Miranda and a crew of mechanical men. As he tells of his evolution from a shy, awkward boy who wants nothing more than to ride the Tornado at the carnival to the murderer of Prospero Taligent, the father of Miranda and one of the most celebrated inventors of his day, Harold spins a mesmerizing story of how he attained his “heart’s desire,” even though that was not what he wanted.

In true steampunk fashion, the city of Xeroville teems with technology rooted in the knowledge of the day: mechanical men instead of robots; answering machines that record on drums of wax; flying cars that rattle; teaching helmets lowered by cables and operated by hand cranks; and, of course, a zeppelin powered by the first (seemingly) perpetual motion machine. The atmosphere is a combination of noir, nostalgia, and the outrageous. What is most remarkable is how Palmer holds this all together with a confident narrative voice that shifts easily from the philosophical to the satirical. His prose is astonishing at times with its rhythms and precision.

At the heart of this novel lies the archetypical Industrial Revolution theme of dehumanization. Before his imprisonment, Harold cranks out greeting card copy in a cubicle the way a factory machine spits out parts. As his co-worker Ophelia says, “This is a special thing that we do, that everyone takes for granted: people need us to say the things for them that they wish they could say themselves . . . “ Harold’s sister Astrid changes forever after she kisses a mechanical demon (a metaphor for her earlier selling her dignity for a few dollars) and starts becoming more metal than human, both figuratively and literally. And Miranda, Prospero’s adopted daughter, is so isolated from society that she cannot hold a conversation with another ten year old. Prospero wants her perfect, the way he perceives his inventions, and he cannot accept anything less than an immutable Virgin Queen without emotions and ordinary desires. The flip side to Miranda’s possible perfection is Prospero’s “son” Caliban, a creation akin to Frankenstein’s monster, cobbled together by cadaver parts and impressing Harold as being possibly more brilliant than Prospero himself but still deeply flawed.

The novel evokes Jules Verne, Neal Stephenson, the anime Metropolis, and Frankenstein, with allusions to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. It is an alternate world Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where the good boy who gets the Golden Ticket suffers in the end, and the “kid in the class who still carries disfiguring scars across his face, earned during some misadventures in the forbidden culs-de-sac of a local chocolate factory” has more respect. Unicorns are real flesh and blood, but are engineered. Real men dress up as tin men, and tin men look real.

The author flirts with metafiction and tackles the issue of society’s relationship with art and the written word. In Xeroville, art at Taligent University is evaluated by the Critic-O-Matic, a machine filled with fluid and a cash-strapped undergraduate whose physiological responses deliver grades. In a playful send-up of deconstructionism, a writing professor instructs students to cut up their copies of The Tempest and “then, as if they are writing ransom notes, they must rearrange the words into another work that is to ‘reflect the spirit of the twentieth century.’” Harold scatters random words across his desk as he daydreams. When the professor feeds Harold’s unthinking rearrangement of the play into the machine, the Critic-O-Matic declares it “absolutely brilliant.” The question of authorship gets muddled at times. Is it Harold? Or Prospero? Or Dexter Palmer, who makes an appearance in his own novel as an uncomfortable man who drones “on and on for an hour”? Is this a story a dream or a memoir? As Harold writes, “. . . these phrases have lost their meaning through endless repetition, like everything else in this modern, mechanical age . . . Stories? We have no time for them; we have no patience.”

The events that brought Harold to his fate form an eloquent tale of misguided love, dreams, and self-destruction. The novel offers such a rich array of characters, ideas, and imagery that reading it feels like eating an enormous, magical feast. I highly recommend it.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 46 readers
PUBLISHER:	St. Martin’s Press; 1 edition (March 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Debbie Lee Wesselmann
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dexter Palmer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Steampunk: The Kingdom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

Bibliography:

• The Dream of Perpetual Motion (March 2010)

“Nobody can get more than they already know from a book. They lack the ears to hear what they have not deduced from their own lived experience.”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (SEP 2, 2009)

The first several pages of this Spanish gothic melodrama might be enough to discourage even the most intrepid reader—overblown prose, trite imagery, clichés, self-conscious attempts to play on the reader’s heartstrings, and an undeniable straining for “effect.” Then in a twist, the reader discovers that this excerpt is merely the beginning of a manuscript about a child murder written by Luisa Davila, the main character in the larger novel.  And as the reader is saying “Whew,” at the thought of having escaped three hundred pages of such writing, the author introduces us to Luisa, a Madrid single mother who has written several successful mysteries starring her two detective heroes, psychoanalyst Carmen O’Inns and her partner Isaac Tonnu. Luisa, aged fifty-two and gifted with a “rampant imagination,” has just moved into a new Madrid apartment with her eleven-year-old daughter Elba, named for the island where Luisa, then aged forty, conceived her while on a “mating trip.” The new apartment will allow Elba to attend the private English High School which Luisa attended as a child.

What follows is an unusual variation of metafiction, in which Luisa simultaneously creates her over-the-top novel about the death of a child at a private school, describes the similar death of a child forty years ago when she herself was an eleven-year-old student at her private school, and then relates details about another remarkably similar death of a child at the same private school during the time that her daughter Elba is a student. Three young boys. Three deaths. Three mysteries.

When Luisa takes Elba to school on the first day, she expects that there will be no one she recognizes from the past—after all, she is older than most of the parents of children of Elba’s age by about ten years. Yet, amazingly, she finds that her best friend from school, Sofia Marquez, is going to be Elba’s teacher, and even more amazingly, that Sofia’s daughter Avril, is not only in the same class but is about to become Elba’s best friend. When Luisa was a child, she, Sofia, Miguel Gasset, and his more talented identical twin Antonio Gasset, were constantly together, until Antonio fell, broke his neck, and died, an accident that Luisa has still not fully reconciled. She also discovers that Miguel, the third living member of the group, now the survivor of four marriages, has a son Miguel (“Miki”) who is also in the same class at school. When Miki dies soon afterward in a similar fall at school, Luisa’s imagination works overtime as she tries to remember all the details about Antonio’s death and then tries to find out more information about the similar death of Miki.

Everyone she has ever known, including Sofia, Miguel, Elba’s best friend Avril, and even Elba herself come under Luisa’s scrutiny as she tries to decide if someone she has loved could possibly be a murderer. In the meantime, Luisa, a sexually liberated woman, has an affair with someone about whom she is unsure, maintains her relationship with a long-time lover, and tries to be a role model for Elba, who is sexually precocious at age eleven, with a fondness for Antonio, the 28-year-old son of Luisa’s friend Miguel, twin brother of the victim from a generation ago. The several investigations on three different levels—the imagined story, the death from forty years ago, and the recent death of Miki—all lead to Luisa’s lengthy analysis of people, how they respond to frustration, and the extremes to which they might be driven if provoked.

Author Carmen Posadas, born in Uruguay and, recently, a Spanish citizen, explores and analyzes all the people involved in this fraught situation, using Luisa (who greatly resembles Posadas in background) to reflect her uncertainties, never sure whether she is hearing the truth, whether she is imagining complications where they do not exist, and whether she is suspecting innocent people, including her own daughter, of heinous acts. The reader, in turn, is never quite sure whether Luisa herself can be trusted to be an impartial observer. On many occasions, the author provides three sentences of analysis and equivocating where one would do, and raises questions which cast doubt on what might be innocent actions on the part of other characters. By the time the novel ends and the deaths have been analyzed on the levels of all three subplots, the reader has come to believe fully in the philosophy of Julio Iglesias, which echoes throughout the novel: “Sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes you, sometimes me…” A novel which proves that gothic melodrama is still alive and well, Child’s Play raises many questions, and each reader will have to decide the extent to which these are resolved—perhaps concluding “Sometimes yes, sometimes no.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (August 4, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	Child’s Play
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Carmen Posada (in Spanish) Wikipedia page on Carmen Posada
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More metafiction: Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour First Execution by Domenico Starnone The Way Through the Door by Jesse Ball

Partial Bibliography (only translated books):

• Little Indiscretions: A Delectable Mystery (2003)
• The Last Resort (2005)
• Child’s Play (2006; August 2009)

“We Iranians take great pride in the empires we have built. If you read our extraordinary history, our country has been occupied time and again…and then, with diplomacy, intelligence, cunning, and patience, we have introduced our invaders…to our culture and, as the saying goes, we have made human beings out of them. The problem with us Iranians, however, is that because we have all these past glories, it is no longer very important for us to make a name for ourselves and to be of benefit to the world today. It seems we don’t care at all how the world will judge our current circumstances.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Mary Whipple (JUN 18, 2009)

When I picked up this book, written by a popular Iranian author, my only expectation was that it would be an interesting view of life in Iran today, and, in particular, the life of a writer trying to avoid the “thought police.” What I never expected is that the book is so funny! Witty, cleverly constructed, satiric, and full of the absurdities that always underlie great satire, Censoring an Iranian Love Story is a unique metafiction that draws in the reader, sits him down in the company of an immensely talented and very charming author, and completely enthralls him.

The author, having reached the “threshold of fifty,” tells us at the outset that he intends to write a love story, one that is “a gateway to light. A story that, although it does not have a happy ending like romantic Hollywood movies, still has an ending that will not make my reader afraid of falling in love. And, of course, a story that cannot be political.” Most importantly, he says, “I want to publish my love story in my homeland.”

The author then becomes the narrator of two stories—a fictional love story, which appears here in boldface, and a metafictional commentary by the author of the love story, in regular type. Experimenting with what to include in his love story, what direction to take, and what he hopes to get away with when his story is read, the narrator, named, not surprisingly, “Shariar Mandanipour,” writes for the censor, ironically named Porfiry Petrovich, the police investigator of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He thinks that “because I am an experienced writer, I may be able to write my story in such a way that it survives the blade of censorship.”

But the author is also true to his reader. Whenever he believes that Petrovich will reject something, he either crosses it out himself (leaving it visible so that the reader can read, literally, between the lines), or he changes direction and rewrites the action of the story, while explaining why Petrovich might object. He never rants or gets angry, preferring instead to show the excisions as silly—after all, his goal is to get his book published in his own country. He also understands that an Iranian audience has far different cultural expectations from a global audience, and he respects those differences.

The love story that evolves is the story of Sara, a college student, and Dara, a former student, who was jailed and kept in solitary confinement for two years for renting and selling banned videotapes of films by Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Ingemar Bergman. Dara is now lucky to have found a job as a house painter. He has worshipped Sara from afar for a year, having seen her briefly at a student demonstration, and he leaves her coded messages hidden in library books. She never sees him, however, since men and women remain in separate sections of the library; he sees only her shoes from beneath the card catalog. Connecting Sara and Dara’s present romantic predicament with the nation’s long cultural history, the author tells of an Iranian poet named Nizami, who, nine hundred years ago, created a romantic poem about Shirin, an Armenian princess, and Khosrow, one of the greatest kings of Persia. Their difficulties in meeting and fulfilling their romance echoes throughout the novel and offers parallels to the story of Sara and Dara.

Gradually, the two young people begin to have “whispering computer chats,” and eventually meet secretly, including once in a cemetery and once in the emergency room of a hospital, avoiding situations in which anyone from the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance will see them, since the meeting of a young man and woman who are not related is prohibited. Though they fall deeply in love, Sara is also being courted by Sinbad, a very wealthy older man, and her family knows that if she marries him, they will all be better off, financially. They do not know about Dara, or about Sara’s feelings for him.

As the story progresses, Shariar Mandanipour comments about censorship in his own life. Prevented from naming his two children the names he wanted because they were not approved names, he responded by naming his daughter “Roja,” meaning “Red Star,” a Communist symbol, and his son “Daniel,” a Jewish name. (Ironically, these names were approved.) In a hilarious episode, he talks about the “vile and filthy scenes,” that were censored from his own books, explaining to his publisher after one meeting with a censor that “Mr. Petrovich forgave us three breasts and two thighs.” Though the Iranian Constitution allows free speech, it does not say that books and publications can “freely leave the print shop.” Hence, many books get printed and then never released, unable to get the required permit. Major film masterpieces are banned or censored, and headscarves unexpectedly appear in traditional stories for six-year-olds.

Throughout the novel, the author maintains an easy-going, conversational style and a self-deprecating, wry sense of humor. His characters become real people to him—and to the reader, who wonders constantly whether Sara and Dara will be able to escape the censor with their story. A dead midget hunchback becomes an ominous, repeating symbol, and when Dara is followed and is in danger of being assaulted by dark forces, the reader cares. Mandanipour has created a “novel” so rich with ideas, cultural history, and literary references–to writers such as Dostoevsky, Gogol, Kafka, and Malraux–that anyone interested in the creative process will be fascinated by his thinking as he creates a love story within the parameters of the present climate in Iran, which is, of course, the “real” story here.

(Translated to English by Sara Khalili)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; First Edition, First Printing edition (May 5, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	Censoring an Iranian Love Story
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Shahriar Mandanipour
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	If you like this, try these: The Cyclist by Viken Berberian Or more on Iran: Caspian Rain by Gina B. Nahai In the Walled Gardens by Anahita Firouz

Bibliography:

• Censoring an Iranian Love Story (May 2009)