Robert Yates
A Woman and Four Men
The Blindfold
By Siri Hustvedt
Hodder & Stoughton 221pp £8.99 order from our bookshop
Love Your Enemies
By Nicola Barker
Faber & Faber 184pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
‘I’m not sure “like” is the right word,’ answers Iris Vegan, the narrator-protagonist of The Blindfold, when asked if she likes the German novella she is translating. Appraising The Blindfold itself, one is tempted to echo her judgement. Its qualities are the sort one admires rather than warms to: its style is cool and analytical, its architecture precise and its themes disquieting. Hustvedt, a Minnesotan, lives in New York, and the city, particularly downtown Manhattan, leaves its neurotic, soiled imprint all over the novel, her first. This is a New York shared with such as Mary Gaitskill and Hustvedt’s husband Paul Auster. Modernist themes – alienation, troubled identity, the irrational – are given contemporary trappings and fixed in the collapsing city.
The Blindfold consists of four stories, each an episode in the life of Vegan, a graduate student at Columbia University, and each revolving around her relationships with men. The first, Mr Morning, asks her to record on a cassette her impressions of a series of objects which, she discovers, belonged
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Rivalries are intense and dangerous, and someone has to die.'
@NJCooper_crime on new thrillers by @HenryCPorter, @k_faulkner, @annafbailey, @mserinkelly, @JoelDicker, @AlanJParks, @whartonswords and more.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/april-2021-crime-round-up
This spring, give the gift of reading.
Give a friend a gift subscription to Literary Review for only £33.50.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/spring21/
'It’s long been known that there is an optimum reproductive window and that women enjoy a considerably shorter one than men. For both sexes this window is opening and closing earlier than it used to.' (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-end-of-babies