Blazing World: The Girl on the Train

The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt

I am not sure whether I should recommend this book. It will not be to the taste of many of you. It was noted as one of the best ten novels of 2014 by the New York Times and there were other glowing reviews. But I found it a bit of a struggle to get through. The novel is in the form of a scholarly work about the life of an artist, Harriet Lord, whose work is not given much attention when exhibited with her as the artist. But she arranges for three exhibitions of her work to be shown as the work of three different men--and her sophisticated and mystifying installations, when presented as the work of men, received much more attention--proving her feminist point that male artists were taken much more seriously than female artists.
The author of the scholarly work is a professor of aesthetics and his book consists of a collection of a wide range of voices--Harriet's son and daughter, the three men whom she uses as 'masks' in the three exhibitions, the man she lives with after the death of her husband, odd characters to whom she provides accommodation in her large studio premises--and excerpts from her voluminous diaries. Be prepared to read long footnotes dealing with the work of many European philosophers and psychologists, including--of course--Sigmund F. It is a very cerebral novel--much on the aesthetics of art. In all sorts of ways it is an extraordinary accomplishment. If you want to try Siri Hustvedt out with something perhaps a little lighter, this excerpt from the NYTimes review might give you some ideas:

"...ever since The Blindfold (1992)—hailed by the late David Foster Wallace as “very powerful and awfully smart and well-crafted, a clear bright sign that the feminist and postmodern traditions are far from exhausted”—to The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), What I Loved (2003), The Sorrows of an American (2008), and The Summer Without Men (2011), the judgments about Hustvedt’s fiction have been loud and laudatory. “One of our finest novelists,” declares Oliver Sacks. A writer—says Salman Rushdie—of “sexy…indelibly memorable fiction.” “A contemporary Jane Austen,” writes a UK critic; “densely brilliant…terrifyingly clever.”

Adding to the consternation: Hustvedt isn’t only a novelist. In addition to her fiction, she’s published three volumes of much-admired art and literary criticism, plus any number of squibs, reviews, and off-the-cuff autobiographical forays of charm and candor. (One is about how it felt to wear a corset for eight days as a movie extra for a film of James’s Washington Square.) In 2010 she published the weirdly gripping neuro-memoir The Shaking Woman; or, A History of My Nerves, in which she explored—in full-on brain-science-mystery mode—her struggles in early middle age with an onslaught of terrifying and seemingly inexplicable quasi-epileptic seizures. (Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio went bananas over it.)"

The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins

Pick it up, start reading, and be annoyed when you have to put it down. This is described as an 'amnesia' thriller--where the few remembered details of an event of violence, blood, a blue dress, and a man with red hair, revolve around in a mind befuddled by alcohol, and they hold the clues to what happened that night when...well, wait and see.
Told in the  first person voices of three women--Rachel, Anna, and Megan, with switches from one to the other at different times (note the times and dates of the chapter headings)--the story unfolds in a taut and gripping manner right the way through to the end.
The book starts with Rachel on the commute home from London--an ordinary worker on her way back to the suburbs, except that she has four cans of pre-mixed gin and tonic in her bag: "It's Friday, so I don't have to feel guilty about drinking on the train." Off you go, dear reader...
Paula Hawkins does a great job...I must check if she has written anything else.