Memories of the Future, Siri Hustvedt
Memories of the Future, Siri Hustvedt
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Memories of the Future

Author: Siri Hustvedt

Narrator: Katherine Fenton

Unabridged: 12 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/19/2019


Synopsis

A provocative, exuberant novel about time, memory, desire, and the imagination from the internationally bestselling and prizewinning author of The Blazing World.

A young woman, S.H., moves to New York City in 1978 to look for adventure and write her first novel, but finds herself distracted by her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite. As S.H. listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, she carefully transcribes the woman’s bizarre monologues about her daughter’s violent death and her need to punish the killer.

Forty years later, S.H. stumbles upon the journal she kept that year and writes a memoir, Memories of the Future, in which she juxtaposes the notebook’s texts, drafts from her unfinished comic novel, and her commentaries on them to create a dialogue among selves over the decades. She remembers. She misremembers. She forgets. Events of the past take on new meanings. She works to reframe her traumatic memory of a sexual assault. She celebrates the legacy of the wild and rebellious Dada artist-poet, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. As the book unfolds, you witness S.H. write her way through vengeance and into freedom.

Smart, funny, angry, and poignant, Hustvedt’s seventh novel brings together the themes that have made her one of the most celebrated novelists working today: the strangeness of time, the brutality of patriarchy, and the power of the imagination to remake the past.

About Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, five collections of essays, two works of nonfiction, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her novel The Blazing World was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. She is the recipient of many other awards, including the Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities, the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize, and the Sigourney Award for expanding psychoanalytic thought. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. 


Reviews

Goodreads review by Blair on March 19, 2019

By the time I'm halfway through a book, I can usually tell what I'm going to think of it – whether it's going to be a fun-but-flawed throwaway read I'll forget in a couple of weeks (three stars) or a wonderful new favourite (five, obviously) or something in between. But with Memories of the Future I......more

Goodreads review by Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer on February 26, 2020

This book is a portrait of the artist as young woman, the artist who came to New York to live and to suffer and to write her mystery, Like the great detective who shares her initials S.H., the writer, sees, hears and smells the clues. The signs are everywhere, in a face, in the sky, in a book. A......more

Goodreads review by Robert on February 06, 2022

This book is a gem on so many levels. This is my third novel by Siri Hustvedt, and I have enjoyed them all immensely. She is definitely a really strong writer, and quite versatile as well. This one is definitely the most complex and creative of the three, and for the first time she seems to be influ......more

Goodreads review by Justo on January 18, 2023

3.5. Por momentos brillante, erudita. Aborda el tema del patriarcado en nuestra sociedad desde su propia experiencia y desde su erudición de forma magistral, a mí entender, sin caer en un feminismo militante. Entiendo que este es el hilo conductor de las varias historias que constituyen este libro, d......more