Book Review: What I Loved

2023-04-02

"What I Loved" was the first of Siri Hustvedt's books that I read.

The story unfolds in three big chapters, and what marks the subchapters is merely a larger space between paragraphs.

The story begins with a soft and beautiful narration from an art history professor in New York, how he befriends a painter, their deep friendship, and how the two men's lives and the lives of their partners and sons intertwine.

Things take a sharp turn within literally the first sentence of the second chapter. It is almost infuriating how the author catapults you into another (fictional) reality. As the reader moves through the last chapter, the story turns fairly bleak. To me, it felt like an entirely different book towards the end. It had morphed from a sweet retelling of someone's lived experience within the art scene of 1970s New York to a full-fledged thriller. Nevertheless, the story remained compelling, characters credible and the events deliberate. With only a couple of hundred pages to go, I was deeply invested in the fate of the characters, and I could hardly put the book down all the way to the end.

Much of the book revolves around the process of making art, how the artist is sometimes consumed by her work, and how to view and critique art within the context of history and previous artists who might have produced similar work. To me, this was educational.

The author does an unbelivable job in describing the multiplicity of human nature, with emotions ranging from blind rage to selfless love. There are no black and white characters, and the reader is bound to despise and empathize with all of them at some point or other.

Although the book left me feeling a little sad at the end, I enjoyed reading it very much, and I hope to pick up another book of Hustvedt's soon. Fun fact (for me): She is incidentally married to another one of my favorite fiction writers, Paul Auster.