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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.
Siri Hustvedt is the author of three previous novels, What I Loved, The Blindfold, and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, as well as a collection of essays, A Plea for Eros. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster.
The Sorrows of an American is a story about the immigrant experience and the ghosts that haunt families from one generation to another. When psychiatrist 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. Starting with the note, brother and sister uncover the Davidsen family's secrets and unbandage its wounds in the year following their father’s funeral.
The grieving siblings return to New York from Minnesota, and they continue to pursue the mystery behind the note. While Erik struggles with emotional vulnerability to his psychiatric patients and his fascination with new tenants in his building threatens to overwhelm him, Inga is confronted by a hostile journalist who seems to know a secret connected to her dead husband, who was 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. At the same time, Inga must confront the reality of her husband’s double life.
The Sorrows of an American is a novel about fathers and children; listening and deafness; recognition and blindness; the pain of speaking and the pain of keeping silent; and the ambiguities of memory, loneliness, illness, and recovery. Siri Hustvedt’s prose reveals one family’s hidden sorrows through a mosaic of secrets and stories that reflect the fragmented nature of identity itself.
"One of the most profound and absorbing books I've read in a long time. Hustvedt pushes hard on what a novel can do and what a reader can absorb, but once you fall into this captivating story, the experience will make you feel alternately inadequate and brilliant—and finally deeply grateful . . . This is a radically postmodern novel that wears its po-mo credentials with unusual grace; even at its strangest moments, it never radiates the chilly alienation that marks, say, the work of Hustvedt's husband, Paul Auster. The remarkable conclusion of The Sorrows is a four-page recapitulation of the story's images racing through Erik's mind—and ours. It's a stunning, Joycean demonstration that invites us to impose some sense of meaning on a disparate collection of events, to satisfy our lust for 'a world that makes sense.' I reached the end emotionally and intellectually exhausted, knowing how much I'll miss this book."—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"A jarring, long-echoing evocation of the existential vertigo induced by the loss of those whom we miss most desperately, and thus of our place in their world."—Ben Dickinson, Elle
"One of the most profound and absorbing books I've read in a long time. Hustvedt pushes hard on what a novel can do and what a reader can absorb, but once you fall into this captivating story the experience will make you feel alternately inadequate and brilliant—and finally deeply grateful . . . Hustvedt seems unwilling to turn away any tangential character; she practices a kind of authorial hospitality that gives the book an ever-growing list of side stories. Not the least of these is told in arresting excerpts from the memoir by Erik's father that describes his childhood during the Depression and his experiences as a soldier in World War II. Erik studies this manuscript with rapt attention, knowing it contains the best chance of understanding his heritage and perhaps his own troubled soul as well. Hustvedt reveals in the acknowledgments that these stirring passages from the senior Davidsen's memoir were, in fact, taken almost verbatim from her own late father's memoir, making The Sorrows of an American a striking demonstration of its own theme: the blending of fiction and nonfiction that gives coherence to our lives . . . Hustvedt elegantly knits together these subplots, often from different genres: elements of the thriller, the hospital drama, the historical novel and even the spy caper and noir film, along with autobiographical, philosophy, letters, case studies and art criticism . . . This is a radically postmodern novel that wears its pomo credentials with unusual grace, even at its strangest moments, it never radiates the chilly alienation that marks, say, the work of Hustvedt's husband, Paul Auster. The remark
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #475227 in Books
- Published on: 2008-04-01
- Released on: 2008-04-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780805079081
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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
"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
Not her best - but a good read
In a day when smart, thoughtful fiction seems few and far between, I have been impressed with the thoughtful work of Siri Hustvedt. However, her latest book, 'The Sorrows of an American' was a bit too labyrinthian for me. While still finding much to like about the book, I was too often trying to place who was who, what was reality and what was a dream, etc. and it all interrupted the fluidity of the novel, for me at least. While usually enjoying free-flowing novels of uncertain trajectory (I'm a fan of her husband's work), I felt frustrated with 'Sorrows of an American.' Maybe it was my own mind, in a state of being pulled in one direction and then another due to some complexities in my own personal life that didn't allow me to appreciate this as much as her last work, 'What I Loved.' I will definitely revisit this book when my own mind is cleared of cobwebs and give it another try. Too many good reviews from critics I respect that fly in the face of my initial thoughts as I worked my way through this book. At any rate, with Auster and Hustvedt writing under the same roof, there's some seriously strong work being turned out that deserves much praise at a time when there's such a dearth of intelligent fiction.
Par Excellent
I had never heard of this author until I heard her speak at the Key West Literary Seminar last then. Since then I have bought and read all of her books.
How can she do what she does on a page? How does she make the pages fall away and take me into a world that I never forget? I don't know the answer, but I do know as soon as I saw she had a new book out, The Sorrows Of An American I rushed right out to buy it -- and in the last two days have been transported, once again by a world I did not know I was missing.
Like her previous books, the characters (Erick, Miranda, Eggy, and Inga, and Max) in Sorrows of an American are now a part of my life. I shut the book last night and am still thinking of their world. Missing it, actually.
While following a mystery - edged with both agitated grief -- I learned about memory, light, darkness, and art.
No question about it -- this book will not disappoint you: the kind of reading experience that makes you re-remember the power that can be found in bound pages when created by a true artist. Plus, the story here is simply - INTERESTING.
"The Sorrows of an American" from www.lanew-yorkaise.com
"Dream economies are frugal. The smoking sky on September eleventh, the television images from Iraq, the bombs that burst on the beach where my father had dug himself a trench in February 1945 burned in unison on the familiar ground of rural Minnesota. Three detonations. Three men of three generations together in a house that was going to pieces, a house I had inherited, a house that shuddered and shook like my sobbing niece and my own besieged body, inner cataclysms I associated with two men who were no longer alive. My grandfather shouts in his sleep. My father shoves his fist through the ceiling. I quake."
Siri Hustvedt's The Sorrows of an American explores generations of memory overlapping in the present. At its simplest, the novel is about three watershed events burned into the memory of many American families: the Great Depression, World War II, and September 11th, 2001. But to say this is to over-simplify a rich book with incredibly present, whole characters, made real for the layers of memory wound within each of them.
One has the sense that Hustvedt's characters have always existed, that she did not create something new but captured all the lovely loneliness, all the complexity of baggage-heavy humanity. This sense of realism can be attributed to the backwards and forwards chronology of the text (a pre-existing history that informs the present), the exploration of dreams that make the "reality" of the text seem more real in contrast, and references to real events (September 11th, World War II) and fictional creations (poems, films) that impact the lives of the characters.
The novel opens in media res: the narrator's father is dead, and he has to wait until spring to bury his father on the farmstead of his youth. The first-person narrator is a psychoanalyst and a divorcee, a Brooklynite by way of rural Minnesota. We see the push and pull of his disturbed patients and his own changing moods as he goes over his dead father's memoirs and attempts to comfort his sister, Inga, an author mourning both her father and her legendary literary husband. Meanwhile, Inga is consumed with warding off threats to her husband's reputation while raising their world-sensitive daughter alone in the wake of September 11th (an event the girl witnessed from her window, and writes about obsessively in her poetry).
The conversations between brother and sister often return to the farm of their childhood, and some of Hustvedt's most beautiful passages are those memories told through the eyes of the young pair. Their memories, and those of the remaining members of their father's generation, are all they have to unravel a mysterious event mentioned in their father's papers.
The effect of this excess of memory--memories of his own life, and the written memories of his father--manifests itself in the narrator's loneliness. He continually finds himself saying, "I am so lonely" aloud in his empty apartment, most often after interactions with his alluring tenant, a brooding painter and loving single mother to an enchanting little girl named Eggy. The young girl takes a liking to the doctor upstairs, and her childish musings inspire dreams that mix the narrator's childhood with the daytime play of the girl downstairs, his own father and Eggy's mother, Miranda.
Dreams pervade the text; characters tell the stories of their dreams and memories and the narrator analyzes them until there is hardly a distinction between the two. The narrator dreams he is talking to his father on some nights, while on others he occupies the place of his father, "reliving" whole passages from his father's journal- his World War II experiences in particular. It is as if, in his dreams, he is living out his father's episodes of posttraumatic stress.
Miranda recounts violent dreams mixing Jamaican folklore she was told as a girl with the experience of childbirth, vivid dreams which she paints in her waking hours. Her canvases are full of snarling teeth, defecation, violence and altered bodies, bright colors and shrunken heads.
"There is no clear border between remembering and imagining," states the narrator. "When I listen to a patient, I am not reconstructing the `facts' of a case history but listening for patterns, strains of feeling, and associations that may move us out of painful repetitions and into an articulated understanding." The entire book is a search for understanding, a repetition of the actions of dead fathers and lovers articulated and turned over by those left behind.
The mourning wife obsessively watches images from her husband's film.
The narrator can't stop remembering his father's nocturnal strolls, and is driven to carry on the same behavior, as if the memories and urges of a dead man live on in his son.
The search for understanding-- both of the self and of the dead--is made difficult through the blurring of fiction and fact throughout the text. The narrator claims: "we make our narratives, and those created stories can't be separated from the culture in which we live." He continues, "There are times, however, when fantasy, delusion, or outright lies parade as autobiography."
One of the characters pursues a relationship with their own fictional creation; the dreams, paintings, and poems created by individuals in the book are each fragmented narratives created to make reality bearable. Yet all of the artistic output created and described in the book is, of course, the fictional creation of one author: Siri Hustvedt.
Except, of course, for the inclusion of a bit of pure reality: the journal entries of the narrator's deceased father are lifted word-for-word (with minimal edits) from the journal of Hustvedt's own father.
How's that for separating story and autobiography?
In a panel conversation at The Festival of French Writers, Hustvedt confessed: "writing fiction is like remembering what never happened." The memory of the whole people she created--some with cloth from her own life--is made real in the space of her text, lingering long after the last page is turned.
For more reviews on books with memory as a theme, please visit www.lanew-yorkaise.com
