“A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women - in praise of doubt”

Lara Feigel's review for the Financial Times. "According to the American novelist Siri Hustvedt, the likelihood of artists and scientists engaging in genuine conversation is now even smaller than it was when CP Snow delivered his lecture “The Two Cultures” in 1959. Scientific disciplines have become so specialised that even biologists and physicists find it hard to communicate with each other. Few writers or artists are able to understand contemporary science. More insidiously, science tends to be seen consciously or unconsciously as masculine, while the imaginative arts are figured as feminine. "I don’t read fiction, but my wife does" is a line that Hustvedt is tired of hearing from male attenders of her talks.

"Hustvedt is well placed to bridge this divide. She is the prizewinning author of six novels who also publishes frequently in scientific journals on neurology and psychiatry. In The Shaking Woman (2010) she brought her imagination, experience and scientific knowledge together in an account of her own seizure disorder. Her second essay collection is a large and wide-ranging volume that looks from almost every possible angle at art, sex, gender and the mind, and the interrelations between these."
Read the rest of the review.