The Blazing World

by Siri Hustvedt

This is an unusual and fascinating book, one of my favourite books of the year.

The book is about a frustrated female artist from New York.  She is angry because her art is not recognized and praised.  She blames her lack of success on the male focused art community.  She plots her revenge/recognition by collaborating with three male artists.  She works with them and they agree to pass of her work as their own.  The first artist gets acclaim but then cannot handle the fame and leaves to travel the world.  The second artist is originally a gay comedian whose act is to be painted half black and half white and perform as male/female characters dialoguing with each other.  He too achieves acclaim but leaves for South America with a male lover.

Harriet (Harry) Burden.  Her use of the name Harry and the last name "Burden" explain her wish to be equal as a male and the burden she feels she bears.  Her feelings of being disregarded are in part due to the lack of affection she felt from her father.... she suspects he would rather she be a boy and also to the fact that her husband, an art collector/agent did not really do anything to promote her work and often discounted her opinions even though she was well read and intelligent.  Her mother also was muzzled by her husband.  Harry is also tormented by the fact that her husband had other lovers during their marriage, male and female.  Why wasn't she loved?  Good enough?

Harriet fills her house with strange little rooms with words and characters, with human figures of huge or distorted shapes, some are wired so that they feel warm.  She also fills the house with stray humans... a young girl, a psychic stays for a while, a mental person, referred to as the Barometer because he seems to react to weather changes, spouts gibberish, and spends most of his life in her house.
Harriet is eventually befriended by a failed poet and they have a relationship.  The man, Bruno, loves her deeply and puts up with her rants and tantrums.  Harriet's daughter is a good dutiful daughter, always looking after her mother.  Her son, an aspiring writer, is a disappointment to her as she always cared for him and his sensitive nature and as a adult he is aloof and hardly sees her.

Harriet comes up with the idea that if she can get her art recognized after being presented by men she will be vindicated in the artistic community.  She not only works with the three artists but even creates some imaginary experts who write articles to scholarly journals to promote/present her ideas and comment on her work.

The first two artists work out okay with her, but the third artist, who calls himself Rune refuses to acknowledge his work as hers.  She and he have some strange interactions where they put on masks and they pretend to be other characters.  This brings out strong emotions and a sense of power in Harriet as she plays the role of a male character.  She finds this invigorating but Rune seems to use this experience against her.

We find out that Rune had a difficult life as a child, his mother, a beauty queen, was very unhappy in her role as housewife and mother and drank a lot.  Rune and his sister did a lot to cover for and protect her.  The father seemed to be unable to cope with his wife and her moods.  When the mother dies Rune leaves home cutting himself off from his father and sister.  He later returns to stay with his sister for a time but ends up verbally abusing her and trashing her apartment.  He moves to New York and achieves some acclaim for his art which involves some films.

When her plan to get recognition and thumb her nose at the art community fails, Harry is furious and rants and rages to her family and friends and drives Bruno away.  Later they do get reconciled and he and her family are with her as she succumbs to cancer.

The story of the book is interesting but especially interesting is the way in which the author tells the story.  The book purports to be a scholarly study of Harry by an academic.  He includes chapters that supposedly come from her diaries, interviews with people who knew her including artists, articles about art, etc.  This makes for an interesting perspective as you see the story and impressions of her from several perspectives.  It in part seems to talk about different personas people adopt in different situations, memory, how we might unintentionally or even deliberately revise our memories/past -- Rune does this creating stories about his past, telling lies about himself, etc.

The character Harry is not someone you can feel sympathetic for, she seems in good part to be author of her own misfortune.  She should have stood up to her father and her husband and perhaps also been more forceful in promoting her own work instead of trying to trick the art community.  I don't think she appreciated/acknowledged the people who really cared about her and you think she should have known how diabolical and selfish Rune was - in some ways they were very much alike -- totally self absorbed.   I think this books was brilliant.