It’s the best news for the publishing market to kick off the new year by offering readers a work by Siri Hustvedt. The American author comes up with a novel that is not new, but is an opportunity for him to return to his literary talent and for new readers to discover him. This is The Dazzling World, a work that Anagrama published ten years ago and has now been rescued in a magnificent edition by Seix Barral.
The dazzling world can be considered as a summary of the themes that mark the Norwegian-American author’s extensive works of fiction and essays. New York, art and the complex world surrounding it, feminism, the struggle against heteropatriarchy, which is still in effect ten years after the publication of this novel, and all of this in an equally interesting, original, different narrative fiction. Although there is a trace of intellectuality and mastery on every page, there is a need for mastery.
Our protagonist, Harriet Burden, is an artist accompanied by numerous personal ghosts as she confronts the sexist reality of the early 21st century in the New York art scene. On paper, she is a privileged person, well-positioned, well-connected, the widow of an important dealer, and with a significant past that has sunk into oblivion. The common point of this complex story, where there are no good guys and bad guys, no winners and losers, is an art expert. After discovering his work, he decides to investigate who Harriet is after the death of the protagonist and tries to understand the reasons for this, and this is how he connects with his family and the necessary collaborators in the charade devised by the artist to show that art is art. It’s still a world dominated by men. So, she decides to publicize their work anonymously and portray them as male writers. The texts he collected in his personal notebooks convey to the reader his inner world, his fears, his traumas, as well as his most personal and family experiences, while also witnessing the success of his experiment. Harriet and Harry live in a world that is not ready for them and find themselves in the middle of a tangle of dangerous, poisonous, tumultuous consequences.
“Why am I not like them? Why am I different? Why have I always been a stranger, an intruder, but never one of them? This reflection of the hero, who attended as a spectator one of the samples of his work hidden under another name, can be a good summary of what is happening throughout the whole story. Women are up against a system based on male hegemony, a hegemony that sneaks even into areas where there is supposedly more modernity, such as the arts. But ‘The Dazzling World’ is also almost a psychological thriller, as well as a study of art, featuring artists and pioneering women who have left their mark on human history, such as Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, author of a novel in the 17th century. The name is the inspiration Hustvedt drew for himself.
Hustvedt’s regular readers will find in ‘The Dazzling World’ many of the characteristics that make him a unique and avant-garde writer; Those who have not yet had this opportunity should not miss it. This is not just a portrait of art, it is a perfect snapshot of the unequal society we still live in.