The Greeks told two different stories about Eros, god of love and desire. One argued he was born to Aphrodite, while the other claimed he emerged from Chaos along with the Earth itself. Novelist Siri Hustvedt is clearly a fan of this wilder, more powerful Eros, and in her new collection of essays she welcomes ravishment with a glee that is almost titillating in our post-feminist world.
In “Eight Days in a Corset,” for instance, Hustvedt likens wearing the 19th-century garment to an erotic embrace “a squeeze that lasts.”
“Being a Man” starts with an image of the writer dressing up as a fellow for Halloween, and then bleeds into a meditation on the gender of ambiguity of being a writer.
Seeing and being seen is important to Hustvedt, for in her mind we do not read, think or remember without an image. And it is through viewing that we learn to long. Thus, in a series of memoirs, she emerges like a character in the movie of her own life, her relatives a series of players. “Yonder,” one of three essays borrowed from a previous collection, describes her ancestors as if they are faces on playing cards that can be shuffled and reshuffled. “Extracts from a Story of a Wounded Self” carries that story forward, adding new wrinkles.
Hustvedt is wise to point out there is a long tradition of writing this way – in one piece she points to the visual quality of Charles Dickens’ metaphors – but there are limits to how much images can enrapture us. Our lives are not movies – or pictures – but they sometimes look that way, as Hustvedt remarks in “9/11, Or One Year Later.”
Yet to focus on the spectacle of an event captures only so much. We can look and look at something and not fathom it, as many feel about that worst day, four years later.
John Freeman is a writer in New York.
“A Plea for Eros”
By Siri Hustvedt
Picador, 228 pages, $15
