The Summer Without Men Siri Hustvedt
A Picador Paperback Original
Available:
April 26, 2011
192 pages
From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes.
My Life: Siri Hustvedt
Click here for more information about the movie featuring Siri Hustvedt.
Siri Hustvedt's blog at the New York Times
Siri Hustvedt's blog at Psychology Today
Search this site:
"Gert Scobel trifft die Bestsellerautorin Siri Hustvedt und den international bekannten Neurowissenschaftler António Damásio im Radialsystem V, einem Kulturareal im Herzen Berlins. Dabei geht es auch um die Frage, ob man sich selbst bis in den letzten Winkel des Unterbewusstseins kennen kann..."
The Prix Femina is a French literary prize created in 1904 by 22 writers for the magazine La Vie heureuse (today known as Femina). The prize is decided each year by an exclusively female jury, although the authors of the winning works do not have to be women. The winner is announced on the first Wednesday of November each year."
I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia I have sometimes slept without knowing it. The thoughts of waking seem to mingle with thoughts that may be part of sleep. Has the clock moved too quickly? Did I doze off? Some years ago in a rented house in Vermont, I couldn’t sleep and lay awake listening to the sounds of mice in the walls, bears that sounded like owls calling to each other in the woods and the wind in the trees. I then dreamed I was lying awake on the very bed where in fact I was sleeping, but someone had broken into the house. Because the room where I actually was and the room I dreamed were identical, the threshold between waking and sleeping had blurred and, when I woke up, I thought I heard the burglar moving ...
Sigmund Freud makes people irritable. Whenever someone mentions Freud, say, at a dinner party, I see eyes roll and listen to the nasty remarks that follow. The received knowledge, even among some highly educated and informed people, is that Freud was wrong and can be relegated to history’s garbage can where we discard outmoded ideas. There are still defenders of Freud’s theories, of course, but in my experience, the general attitude is one of out-and-out hostility. Continue reading this post at PsychologyToday.com.
1. To look and not see: an old problem. It usually means a lack of understanding, a inability to divine the meaning of something in the world around us. 2. Cognitive scientists have repeatedly conducted the following experiment and, without fail, they come up with same results. An audience is asked to watch a film of two teams playing basketball. They are given a job to count the number of times the ball changes hands. I have done this, and one has to be very attentive to follow the motion of the ball. In the middle of the game, a man wearing a gorilla suit walks onto the court, turns to the camera, thumps his chest and leaves. Half the people do not see the great ape. They do not believe that he was actually there until the film is replayed ...
This is a short piece about the novel and psychoanalysis that I did for the Lyon literary festival. Psychoanalysis proposes that we are strangers to ourselves. There were precursors to Freud’s idea of a psychic unconscious in both philosophy and science. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche each had a version of it, as did the scientists, William Benjamin Carpenter in nineteenth century England and Gustav Fechner and Hermann von Helmholtz in Germany. All of them believed that much of what we are is hidden from us, not only our automatic biological processes but also memories, thoughts, and ideas. Pierre Janet, Jean Martin Charcot’s younger colleague at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, pursued a psychobiological notion of the self. Ideas, he argued, can split off from consciousness, travel elsewhere, and appear as hysterical symptoms. Theories never bloom in nothingness. What is certain is that ...
Originally posted in Granta. The entire article is available to subscribers here. There is a distance to fatherhood that isn’t part of motherhood. In our earliest days, fathers are necessarily a step away. We don’t have an inter-uterine life with our fathers, aren’t expelled from their bodies in birth, don’t nurse at their breasts. Even though our infancies are forgotten, the stamp of those days remains in us, the first exchanges between mother and baby, the back and forth, the rocking, soothing, the holding and looking. Fathers, on the other hand, enter the stage from elsewhere. More exciting than pacifying, they often bring with them rousing games and rough and tumble play. I vividly recall my own baby’s joyous face as she straddled her father’s jumping knee. He regularly turned her into ‘Sophie Cowgirl’, and the two took wild rides ...
“‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” says Lewis Carroll’s Alice after experiencing a sudden, disorienting growth spurt. AliceAlice during a growth spurt. (Illustration by John Tenniel, 1865.) While she meditates on this philosophical conundrum, her body changes again. The girl shrinks. I have asked myself the same question many times, often in relation to the perceptual alterations, peculiar feelings, and exquisite sensitivities of the migraine state. Who in the world am I? Am “I” merely malfunctioning brain meat? In “The Astonishing Hypothesis” Francis Crick (famous for his discovery of the DNA double helix with James Watson) wrote, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are, in fact, no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Mind is matter, ...
Originally posted at the New York Times Migraine Blog. Not every migraine has a prologue or “aura,” and not every aura is followed by a headache. Nevertheless, these overtures to pain or isolated events are the most peculiar aspect of the illness and may offer insights into the nature of perception itself. As a child I had what I called “lifting feelings.” Every once in a while, I had a powerful internal sensation of being pulled upward, as if my head were rising, even though I knew my feet hadn’t left the ground. This lift was accompanied by what can only be called awe — a feeling of transcendence. I variously interpreted these elevations as divine (God was calling) or as an amazed connection to things in the world. Everything appeared strange and wondrous. The lights came later in my life — ...
