John De Falbe
Unknown Keys
The Sorrows of an American: A Novel of Secrets
By Siri Hustvedt
Sceptre 306pp £16.99
This complex, clever novel is narrated by Erik Davidsen, a divorced psychoanalyst. He lives in New York, where he has seen many people ‘suffering from the intricacies of a narrative they are unable to recount’. It begins with Erik and his sister Inga, a widowed philosopher, returning to Minnesota to clear out their recently deceased father’s study. His tidy effects include a memoir, a letter referring to a distant, unknown secret, and a set of keys marked ‘unknown keys’. This memoir and the gradually unfolding secrets in the lives of their immigrant Norwegian ancestors form the backdrop to the book, and they are integral to Erik and Inga’s perceptions of themselves and how they live.
Inga has recently written a book in which she tries ‘to talk about the way we organise perceptions into stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, how our memory fragments don’t have any coherence until they’re reimagined in words. Time is a property of language, syntax, and tense.’ Her own story
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
Twitter Feed
Priests have blessed armies and weapons, and sanctioned executions and massacres, but never so widely as in Putin’s Russia.
Donald Rayfield on the history of Russian Orthodoxy.
Donald Rayfield - Clerics & Crooks
Donald Rayfield: Clerics & Crooks - The Baton and the Cross: Russia’s Church from Pagans to Putin by Lucy Ash
literaryreview.co.uk
Are children being burned out by endless exams? Or does rising inequality lie behind the mental health crisis in young people today?
@Samfr investigates.
Sam Freedman - The Kids Aren’t Alright
Sam Freedman: The Kids Aren’t Alright - Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation by Danny Dorling;...
literaryreview.co.uk
Augustus the Strong’s name has long been a byword for dissipation. Yet he was also a great patron of the arts, creating in Dresden perhaps the finest Baroque city in Europe.
Ritchie Robertson examines the two sides of his personality.
Ritchie Robertson - All for the Thrill of the Chase
Ritchie Robertson: All for the Thrill of the Chase - Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco by Tim Blanning
literaryreview.co.uk