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The Sorrows of an American: A Novel
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Product Description
The Sorrows of an American is a soaring feat of storytelling about the immigrant experience and the ghosts that haunt families from one generation to another
When Erik Davidsen and his sister, Inga, find a disturbing note from an unknown woman among their dead father’s papers, they believe he may be implicated in a mysterious death. The Sorrows of an American tells the story of the Davidsen family as brother and sister uncover its secrets and unbandage its wounds in the year following their father’s funeral.
Returning to New York from Minnesota, the grieving siblings continue to pursue the mystery behind the note. While Erik’s fascination with his new tenants and emotional vulnerability to his psychiatric patients threaten to overwhelm him, Inga is confronted by a hostile journalist who seems to know a secret connected to her dead husband, a famous novelist. As each new mystery unfolds, Erik begins to inhabit his emotionally hidden father’s history and to glimpse how his impoverished childhood, the Depression, and the war shaped his relationship with his children, while Inga must confront the reality of her husband’s double life.
A novel about fathers and children, listening and deafness, recognition and blindness; the pain of speaking and the pain of keeping silent, the ambiguities of memory, loneliness, illness, and recovery. Siri Hustvedt’s exquisitely moving prose reveals one family’s hidden sorrows through an extraordinary mosaic of secrets and stories that reflect the fragmented nature of identity itself.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #188625 in Books
- Published on: 2008-04-01
- Released on: 2008-04-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In her fourth novel (following the acclaimed What I Loved), Hustvedt continues, with grace and aplomb, her exploration of family connectedness, loss, grief and art. Narrator and New York psychoanalyst Erik Davidsen returns to his Minnesota hometown to sort through his recently deceased father Lars's papers. Erik's writer sister, Inga, soon discovers a letter from someone named Lisa that hints at a death that their father was involved in. Over the course of the book, the siblings track down people who might be able to provide information on the letter writer's identity. The two also contend with other looming ghosts. Erik immerses himself in the text of his father's diary as he develops an infatuation with Miranda, a Jamaican artist who lives downstairs with her daughter. Meanwhile, Inga, herself recently widowed, is reeling from potentially damaging secrets being revealed about the personal life of her dead husband, a well-known novelist and screenplay writer. Hustvedt gives great breaths of authenticity to Erik's counseling practice, life in Minnesota and Miranda's Jamaican heritage, and the anticlimax she creates is calming and justified; there's a terrific real-world twist revealed in the acknowledgments. (Apr.)
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From The New Yorker
"I’m lost," a patient tells her psychiatrist in Hustvedt’s fourth novel. "I’m cold. I’m all alone." She might be speaking for all the characters in this sombre meditation on the isolation of urban professionals, in which daily routines are nothing but "pillars in an architecture of need," erotic love is ephemeral, and friendship is the only source of consolation in a post-9/11 New York where everyone is always having nightmares. Hustvedt’s interest in the ways in which language can form both a bridge and a barrier between individuals leads her into digressions on Plato, Kierkegaard, and theories of psychoanalysis. This didactic turn has the unfortunate effect of making her plot—stories of loss and disappointment connected only tenuously through the character of the psychiatrist—start to seem almost beside the point.
Copyright ©2008
Review
"I think I am in love. . . . This is one of the most profound and absorbing books I’ve read in a long time."--Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"Beautiful . . . both a large-scale examination of the idea of America and a close inspection of the experiences of coping with trauma and loss."--Margot Kaminski, San Francisco Chronicle
"The Sorrows of an American is a thought-provoking book that offers pleasures across many different registers. . . . Here again [Hustvedt] proves herself a writer deftly able to weave intricate ideas into an intriguing plot."--Sylvia Brownrigg, The New York Times Book Review
"The Sorrows of an American takes on elements of a suspense novel as the various mysteries unfold, but the real question is how we reconcile ourselves to the hard truths in our lives."--Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald
"The pages turn themselves. The old story, the search for the self, holds water once again."--Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
"Like all enduring novelists, Hustvedt combines riveting storytelling with philosophical rumination as she dramatizes and contemplates the legacy of sorrows born of the struggles of immigrants and the psychic wounds of war, betrayal, and unrequited love."--Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
Customer Reviews
Cannot understand the 1-star reviews
I really enjoyed this novel; fascinating reading, intelligent, well researched on neurobiology (which is my line of work, and found it well represented without errors). Hard to put down. So full of material it is bursting at the seams.
In short, I am with the other 4-5 star reviews and cannot follow the 1-star criticism.
Doesn't live up to its beginning
I don't recommend reading the first of this book if you are trying to decide if you want to buy it. It would serve you better to read a random part in the middle. The the narrative voice, like the voice of so many psychiatrists, lulls; and even though this is a book about very personal matters, the effect is disturbingly impersonal.
Just This Side of Madness
This is a complex novel that reads like a literary mystery and at other times like a psychological drama. Everyone in the book hovers at the edge of the abyss. Even the mild-mannered, kind psychoanalyst, Erik Davidsen, who narrates the story which takes place in the year following the death of his father, Lars. Excerpts from Lars memoir appear occasionally: descriptions of his service in World War II or at his Norwegian family's farm. Interestingly, Siri Hustvedt states in her acknowledgments that they are nearly verbatim quotes from a journal by her own father, who died in February, 2003.
There is an engaging plot and suspense, but what makes this novel stand out is its intellectual clarity and prowess. I find the word "American" in the title ironic as I felt throughout my reading that the book was written by a European and I kept picturing London instead of New York, where it is set. This was because the book totally lacks a certain cultural element that is typical of American fiction: a kind of sentiment, or faith or anti-intellectualism. This novel is very interior, clinical and mentally disciplined. At times it read like a Bergman film, full of secrets and repressed emotion, characters haunted by past experience, yet never sentimental or romantic. The book's European intellectualism and lack of American surface-as-story romanticism is articulated by one of the characters, Inga, Erik's sister. She is describing a former actress who had an affair with her husband. Inga tells Erik that the actress had been an alcoholic but recovered by getting involved in New Age ideas. "She touts that half-baked, naïve, shiny American brand of mysticism, you know, Far East via California and Hallmark..." But what, I wondered, is both "half-baked" and "shiny"? The element mercury comes to mind and in fact is descriptive of American culture: amorphous, quicksilver fast, directionless. This quality is embodied in another character, a young hip New York artist, Jeff Lane, who documents everything with a high-speed digital camera, intruding everywhere, immortalizing the banal, he is a walking blog with spiky hair. But as he says of life, "The world is going virtual anyway."
As in every novel set in New York recently, there are frequent references to 9/11, but they are peripheral to this story which is primarily about the psychoanalytic approach to awareness. In fact, it could be an advertisement for psychoanalysis in that the brief case-histories narrated by Erik always show the analyst as deeply attuned and insightful, and the process of analysis as producing remarkable breakthroughs, lifting years of depression or allowing patients to experience a "reincarnation" in this life. If this novel veered into romanticism at any point it was its seeming faith in psychoanalysis.
There is much that is thought provoking and intriguing in The Sorrows of an American. It's a fascinating read.
