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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.
Read Online Memories of the Future Siri Hustvedt 9781982102838 Books
"There aren't any characters in this book. Just a narrator stuck in the last century having conversations with herself. She seems so lonely, isolated and without meaning. It was sad."
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Memories of the Future Siri Hustvedt 9781982102838 Books Reviews :
Memories of the Future Siri Hustvedt 9781982102838 Books Reviews
- I have read most if not all of Siri Hustvedt's novels. I came upon her sort of by accident because I read everything her husband writes and count Paul Auster as one of my favorite writers. This book to me was far and away the best thing she has done and stands on it's own in every respect. She weaves together the story of her year in New York, along with her diary she kept in NY along with the book she was writing at the time. This is all done from a vantage point some 40 years out so memory, and lack of it, is front and center. It all makes for a great read and frankly one of the best things I have read in quite a while. I do not at all compare her to Auster because they are so different but she too has mastered the story within the story which is one of his techniques as well and she does it splendidly.This left me wanting more, or another book by her sooner than usual. Well worth the read if you want something you can chew on a bit.
- Challenging but ultimately rewarding, this is one for those willing to take a leap into a literary format that would not be successful in the hands of a less skilled writer. This moves back and forth in time as SH reads through her 40 year old diaries. A transplant from Minnesota, she was living in New York next to Lucy, a very vocal and more than a little unhinged woman. SH was struggling with a novel at the time (also included and not very good). Now, with these diaries, she compares what she remembers with what she wrote about at the time. This could have made for ho-hum reading but it's not. There's anger, there's personal growth, there's an a-ha moment or two, and it will make you think about your own memories. Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC.
- Wildly imaginative and challenging, both personal and universal, this is the latest work by Siri Hustvedt writing at the top of her game. Her character (S.H.) comes across a journal kept during her first year in New York, and her 61-year-old self becomes reacquainted with her 22-year-old self. The reader, who is addressed now and again ("There is no story without a listener...) is shifted between the two time periods, seamlessly. Dubbed "Minnesota" after her home state, S.H. makes her way around New York of the late 1970's in all its grubby seediness shedding her naivete and gaining lifelong friends and experience.
As I sometimes do before adding to the dialogue, I skimmed random reviews of others in order not to be repetitive, and was amazed at the wild range of opinions. Ms. Hustvedt has mined her own life and come up with a work of true originality, and I find that most of my underlined passages concern her observations on memory and how the passage of time can warp it in its fragility ("We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward too, not only forward and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable." "Hindsight gives a shape to what is shapeless as you live it."). The weakest element for me was a third transcription of her inchoate novel she was working on back in 1978-79, but I understand its inclusion is to illustrate the way real life can influence an artist's creation. - I'm giving "Memories of the Future" three stars and I'm not sure why--I was not able to plow through it. Maybe because of the writing, which is wonderful, but the plot? I could not stick with it. "The Blazing World" was glorious, but this is a disappointment.
It sounds so appealing--a complex plot mixing past and present presented through the discovery of a notebook the writer, called "Minnesota" here, wrote about her first years in New York City. Who doesn't love that "young person in the big new city" trope? But everything is so disjointed, and her growing obsession with her downstairs neighbor Lucy . . . I couldn't hang with it.
I'm giving this novel 3 stars because someday I may go back to it. There's that something about it that can't be explained. I still think about this novel but am not ready to more spend time in that cramped apartment in the 1970s with that girl from Minnesota. - There aren't any characters in this book. Just a narrator stuck in the last century having conversations with herself. She seems so lonely, isolated and without meaning. It was sad.
- I read this book because it was recommended by a London bookseller, and I finished it despite having no interest in the fascinating lives of young people living New York. The book is well-written, but my reaction is that there was a high level of anger and self-absorption in the author. Perhaps she should have written the book and then put it away. Or perhaps it's just not a book meant to appeal to men, much like play by Libby Wolfson.
- Thought provoking!!! Wonderful it makes you travel through the intricate Web of the brain and memory and reality and it's superlative!!!!!!
