Reading on our South American Journey

      In mid-January, we flew to Buenos Aires, spent a night there, and then went on to El Calafate (three and a half hours by plane) and met up with a group for a week of hiking in Patagonia. At the end of the hiking week--on the day after my eightieth birthday--we went back to Buenos Aires and joined a cruise ship--The Azamazara Journey. Before we sailed from Buenos Aires, we flew to the Iguazu Falls on the border between Argentina and Brazil. Very spectacular--considered more impressive than Victoria and Niagara Falls. Then our cruise took us to Punta D'El Este and Monevideo in Uruguay, and a couple of ports in Brazil before we ended up in Rio. Plenty of time for reading, and I finished What I Loved by Siri Hufstedt and the recent Richard Ford book.

    The first person narrator of the Hustvedt novel is Leo Hertzberg, an art historian. He is struck by a painting in a gallery, which he buys, and he makes the acquaintance of the artist, Bill Wechsler, with whom he establishes a life-long friendship. There is a close attachment between his family and Wechsler’s, and there are complicated emotional connections between him and Wechler, their wives, and their sons. The families live in the same apartment building in Soho and for many years spend their summers together in a rented house in the country. Within this framework, the novel develops in a variety of ways,  particularly when the dynamics of the relationships are thrown into confusion by a tragedy. There is a great deal of philosophical discourse and extremely detailed analysis of the various situations, including much about the highly unconventional art of Bill Wechsler.

Siri Hufstedt is an extraordinarily skilled writer, and what she has done in this novel is a major accomplishment, to use an apt but well-worn cliche. My problem with it as a reader is that it seems about a third too long, and—let’s face it—I was beginning to get bored well towards the end. I agreed with my partner Joan’s view that in the final third the story becomes so weird as to be unbelievable.

         To give you a bit more perspective on Siri Hufstedt, here is a brief excerpt from a Guardian review of her book The Shaking Woman or a History of my Nerves:

"Her book is a personal investigation, a philosophical inquiry, and a pithy, compacted consideration of how both psychiatry and neurology have evolved in the last two centuries. Where is her malaise located? Can it be pinned down anatomically, or is it free-floating, abstract? She undergoes brain scans, which show nothing; she ventures into psychoanalysis, in which she has a long-standing but wary interest. How, she asks, would her symptoms have been classified by doctors in different eras? The 19th century might have called it hysteria, the 20th a "conversion disorder" – a symptom caused by the mind, manifesting in the body. How does physiology impact on personality? Where does the self begin and end? What is pain, and can it be abstracted from the body that suffers it, or the cultural context in which it is suffered? In these interwoven fields of knowledge, simple or single explanations barely cover the overt facts, let alone do justice to the experience of the suffering individual. Hustvedt's exploration of mind and body embraces material that is inter-­disciplinary, complex and contentious."

It seems to me that this fascination with psychology and philosophy is readily apparent in her novels.
      On the cruise I also 'borrowed' my first e-book from the DC Public Library--Let Me Be Frank With You, by Richard Ford--three--or was it four--short stories, with growing old the common theme. Thoroughly recommended.

      Recently, in the wake of a new biography, there has been a renewed interest in the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald, an English author who won the Booker prize with the novel ‘Offshore,’ which was published in 1979. I bought the book for a dollar or two from Abe Books, read it with enjoyment, but I now need to try to analyse what was so good about it that won it the Booker Prize.

The following quotes from reviews are listed inside the book' cover:
"The finest British writer alive"
"No writer is more engaging than Penelope Fitzgerald"
"Wonderfully accomplished and original"
"Vivid...elegant...astonishing"
I am going to read it for a second time....not something I usually do.
And a final note, I am slowly reading "All The Light We Cannot See," by Anthony Doerr