Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
I don't really know what to say about What I Loved to effectively express how I felt about it. Although what happens is interesting, it's the quality of the writing that really makes it what it is. Hustvedt brilliantly relates a whole spectrum of emotions and makes you feel and suffer along with her characters. The atmosphere is fantastic, with a thread of suspense running throughout the novel, which intensifies in the last few chapters as the plot builds to a dramatic climax. The Teddy Giles character became so menacing to me that I felt genuinely frightened and couldn't get to sleep after the final revelations. This is just one example of how much this book gets inside your head - I still can't stop thinking about it. It's also tremendously inspiring, and apart from The Secret History, I don't think I've ever come across anything that's made me want to get out a notebook and furiously WRITE quite as much as this did. It's beautifully, sumptuously written and vastly intelligent. Update June, 2019 This month's BBC World Book Club (one of my favorite bookish podcasts!) featured Siri Hustvedt talking about, reading from and answering questions about What I Loved. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cs... This makes me want to reread this with fresh eyes after hearing her talk.
But he talks funny too, Dad." Matt stopped talking and I waited. I could see that he was thinking hard. My son thought with his face in those days. His eyes narrowed. He screwed up his nose and tightened his mouth. After several seconds he said,"He talks like me when I am pretending." Matt deepened his voice, "Like this - I'm Spiderman." Leo, our narrator, has a drawer in which he stores mementos. At one point, he puts something new in the drawer and records: "I had never put anything to remind me of Bill and Violet in the drawer before that, and I understood why. It was a place to record what I missed." Clearly, the drawer is a metaphor for the title of the book. Leo has a game he plays to help him process some of his grief or confusion. He moves the objects in the drawer around into different configurations. I was going to include a quote about this, but then I realised it gives away two key events in the story! Suffice to say, he uses different principles to arrange the objects and has to have a good reason for why he does something, for a connection that justifies one object being next to another. It helps him process what is happening to people around him and is a recurring motif in the book. Aquilo Que Eu Amava” (2003) é um romance escrito pela norte-americana, de ascendência norueguesa, Siri Hustvedt (n. 1955) dedicado a Paul Auster; o premiado escritor norte-americano, casado com Siri Hustvedt desde 1982, e que antes contraíra matrimónio com a também escritora Lydia Davis. Don’t get me wrong, the quality of Hustvedt’s prose is astonishing. What I Loved is filled with wholly-believable details. The sections of the novel that revolve around artwork and artists are clearly well-researched, and Hustvedt extracts beautiful and affecting symbols from the art that surrounds her characters. Hustvedt comes across as someone highly interested in the human condition. Hustvedt has mainly made her name as a novelist, but she has also produced a book of poetry, and has had short stories and essays on various subjects published in (among others) The Art of the Essay, 1999, The Best American Short Stories 1990 and 1991, The Paris Review, Yale Review, and Modern Painters.I had a hard time at first deciding if this novel was largely a character study or plot driven but so much happens and there is such depth in these relationships that I just stopped analyzing and became fully invested in how Hustvedt tell this story, she really does a most interesting tale justice. I love all about me books for so many reasons, but mostly because they help teach kids about themselves and how to express themselves, too. Two books - both having 5 stars - can be so very different. Isn't that what makes literature so marvelous?! Then, in the third chapter, the book really takes off. Bill has a son called Mark who will, I think, be a character who I will not forget for a long time. His actions disrupt all those around him and he becomes a central puzzle of the book. Is he mad, bad or something else? Whatever he is, he is brilliantly brought to life by Hustvedt. As, in fact, are all the other characters, but I have a feeling it is Mark who will stay with me for the longest time.
The stories on our list below help kids learn to talk about their emotions, their families, their needs and desires. They help kids discuss where their names came from, their unique attributes, and what they may want to be when they grow up. They even help kids understand all the ways in which they are smart.knyga skirta visai mažiems vaikams ir remiasi pozityvios psichologijos principais, todėl labai nustebau radusi joje tiek neiginių ir prastai suformuluotų sakinių, kaip antai: Through Hustvedt's brilliant writing, we experience both the big and the small moments of these people's lives and histories through those memories that don't let go. It doesn’t often happen, but this book really hit an emotional chord with me; days after I put it down, it kept on haunting me. The story itself is about a mix of family situations, relationship problems, moments of hapiness and despair, but also death and psychosis, and at a certain point it even evolves into an outright horror story. That sounds a bit trite but Hustvedts characters are people of flesh and blood, with big and small yearnings, very own psychological mindsets, uncertainties and wrong assumptions, and with very divers reactions on tragic events. They go through endearing, tender moments, but also through absolutely horrible experiences. The emotional load sometimes is so raw and realistic that the reading gets on the verge of the bearable (at one point it reminded me of Elena Ferrante’s early novels). There is much here about art and the growth and thoughts expressed in art, about being a parent and how central that is to a couple’s life, grief in its many forms and just the problems of living day to day. We see all of it through the eyes of Leo and how he interrupts what happens to him and those around him. The other thing that I liked about this book is Hustvedt’s ability to imprint strong images in her reader’s mind. It will take me sometime to shake off many scenes like Matthew’s death particularly when Leo thought: ”he is Matthew and he is not Matthew” or that scene when Violet was cradling the dead Bill not calling a police yet since she wanted to lay side by side with him. Or Violet wearing Bill’s work clothes or Mark wearing woman’s clothes. I was also able to picture in my mind a couple of paintings that were fully described in the story as if I saw those pictures with my own set of eyes!
Unfortunately, she chooses to probe her characters as if they were sliced up and put beneath a telescope. There’s little warmth in her characterization; she seems so intent on capturing her characters’ neuroses in fine detail that she forgets to make them compelling or likeable. The artwork that the protagonist directly engages with might be memorable and affecting, but the long descriptions of artwork that only tangentially relate to the plot become boring and repetitive. Reading a description of paintings you can’t see is a bit like hearing someone describe their favourite song – an ultimately empty experience.All about me books for preschool are ripe for connection-making. When children are able to use the stories they listen to as a means for self exploration and discovery, proverbial lightbulbs go off, and they will want to read and savor those books again and again! These all about me books help kids grow and communicate The second half of What I Loved might have made an enjoyably-erudite ‘thinking man’s’ thriller set in the art world of the ‘80s and ‘90s, but the meandering first half – about affluent Manhattanites and their dull, pretentious lives – makes the book, as a whole, perhaps admirable, but hard to like. Intense and engrossing, What I Loved could also be titled What We'll Do for Love or What Love Will Do To Us for it explores the psychology of friendships, intimate and family relationships and the actions people take for the sake of love. But I get ahead of myself . . . The story takes place in the art and university worlds of New York City, but it is not necessary,in my opinion, to be a part of them to become engaged in Leo's life and story. His story of finding a work of art he likes, the artist who becomes his true friend; two families whose lives intermingle over decades. Bendrai visa Trace Moroney knygelių serija ("Kai jaučiuosi piktas", "Kai jaučiuosi geras", "Kai jaučiu pavydą" ir t.t.) yra puiki ir labai gerai tinkanti mažų vaikų susipažinimui su emocijomis.
Leo Hertzberg is a professor of art history living in New York with his wife Erica, and son Matthew. Experimental artist Bill Weschler, his wife, Lucille, and their son, Mark, move into the apartment upstairs. Bill and Lucille divorce, and Bill marries his muse, Violet. Each character is an artist, academic, or writer. It begins in 1975 and covers a period of approximately twenty-five years. It is a psychological character study of a small number of people – primarily Leo, Bill, Mark, and Violet – revolving around the New York art scene. It is a book to be experienced, as a plot summary will not do it justice. The story focuses on our narrator, Leo Hertzberg, his wife, Erica, their son, Matthew and the family of Bill Weschler. I’m deliberately not saying much about Bill’s family as I don’t want to accidentally post spoilers. Leo recounts to us the lives of his and Bill’s families as they go from young adults to old people. There is tragedy, there is love and, being Siri Hustvedt, there is art and philosophy. The drama of the story is set against the New York art scene. There is a lot in this book about perception of art (a common theme in Hustvedt’s books, I think, although this is only the third one I have read). I’m struggling to articulate something about Bill’s art (he paints and sculpts and places the pictures and sculptures in boxes or behind doors) and Mark’s life. It’s almost like Mark lives out something his father might have created, but Mark shows us the hidden elements that come from him being human and not just a work of art. I need to think about this a bit more. I read a review in The Guardian that says: "She (Hustvedt) is interested in the gap between the shared story and the individual reading." And it is almost as if Bill’s art is the individual reading and Mark’s life is the shared story. I really do need to think on that, though, as it could be complete rubbish! Tragedy strikes in chapter 2 and this chapter becomes a very moving portrayal of grief. Each character has to come to terms with the impact of tragedy with some of them clearly more affected than others. All of them have to work out how to live in a world that is changed by a single event. No es raro que pase por nuestra mente la famosa novela de Lionel Shriver “Tenemos que hablar de Kevin” en algún momento de la lectura de esta novela, pues es, como ya muchos habrán adivinado, una novela sobre los hijos, sobre el deseo de tenerlos, sobre las conexiones que con ellos establecemos, sobre la responsabilidad que asumimos o nos echamos encima en la conformación de su personalidad, … “Supongo que todos somos producto del gozo y el sufrimiento de nuestros padres. Sus emociones permanecen grabadas en nosotros del mismo modo que la huella de sus genes.” … sobre el horror de perderlos, sobre el orgullo o la decepción y hasta la aversión que nos puede provocar su conducta, sobre la facilidad con la que nos engañamos acerca de sus virtudes y defectos, sobre como todo ello afecta a todas nuestras facetas de la vida.
Toys
Leo Hertzberg, o narrador, é um intelectual judeu, professor de história da arte na Universidade de Columbia, escritor e ensaísta, que se apaixona por um quadro, uma pintura de uma mulher, que decide comprar, pintado pelo desconhecido artista Bill Wechsler – nascendo entre os dois uma “irrevogável amizade”. I have rarely read a novel of such intensity. And it touches on so much: the art world as well as art itself, relationships of many kinds, family, love, loss, psychology and the outsider, the world that is New York City, personas......much more that I'm forgetting (or avoiding for spoilers sake). But then is is titled "What I Loved" and it lives up to it's title. There is so much in this book - add adolescence, a superb description that reflects what we have all been through. There is so much to think about. One has to stop reading to "digest" it. One minute I am in total support and then it flips and I say, no, no way do I agree with this or perhaps do I? Through it all your thoughts run non-stop.
Great Deal 
New Comment