Rating: 
Summary: Amazing!
Review: This is one of the best books I've read 2003! I was already a big fan of Siri Hustvedt, but "What I loved" is by far her best book. I started reading a Saturday (luckily) and just couldn't put it down. A fantastic story, fantastic characters, beautiful language, so interesting topics (art and literature), it was all just.. I wanted to move in with them, share their lives (at least in part one)!
If you want to read something that will stay in your mind for a long time, pick this one. It's just amazing!
Rating:
Summary: Amazing!
Review: This is one of the best books I've read 2003! I was already a big fan of Siri Hustvedt, but "What I loved" is by far her best book. I started reading a Saturday (luckily) and just couldn't put it down. A fantastic story, fantastic characters, beautiful language, so interesting topics (art and literature), it was all just.. I wanted to move in with them, share their lives (at least in part one)!
If you want to read something that will stay in your mind for a long time, pick this one. It's just amazing!
Rating:
Summary: What I Didn't Love
Review: What I didn't love was that I wanted to read the book but two "reviewers" who were unhappy with it wanted to ruin it for the rest of us by giving away important details. You don't like it; we understand. But don't be petty and mean about it. Many people loved it--give the rest of us a chance!
Rating:
Summary: What I Didn't Love
Review: What I didn't love was that I wanted to read the book but two "reviewers" who were unhappy with it wanted to ruin it for the rest of us by giving away important details. You don't like it; we understand. But don't be petty and mean about it. Many people loved it--give the rest of us a chance!
Rating:
Summary: The Key is in the Title
Review: WHAT I LOVED is a title that grips you only after reading the final page. Siri Hustvedt is an enormously gifted writer, not only as a weel-turned craftsman with words, but a richly intelligent woman who shares a wealth of information about art, art history, about the history of psychology and the variations of 'moral insanity', all the while weaving a spellbinding story that digs its claws into our psyche until the closing words. The story of the novel concerns the interweaving of the lives of two couples (with additional persons as the story unravels) who interact on intellectual, sensual, and familial levels. There are two children who play major roles in this tale, but to explain those roles would be to destroy the page-turning suspense of a thriler. Her narrator is an art historian and writer and it is through his eyes that we are allowed entry into the histories and lives of the others. "The recollections of an older man are different from those of a youung man. What seems vital at forty my lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die."Not only has Hustvedt created fascinating poeple, she manages to bewitch us with the words and thoughts of artists, both refined and experimental."..cliches are deadening, aren't they?... By their very nature they kill meaning." And after all is said and done with WHAT I LOVED the narrator closes by saying "Every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense. It winds backward from where we now stand, no longer the actors in the story but its spectators who have chosen to speak." It is the WHAT of the story, of our lives, that is within these pages ..not just the WHO. Writing a review of a book and giving so much space to the author's own words is the highest form of compliment. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: It's a Timeless Masterpiece
Review: What I loved is exotic, erotic, and intriguing. I couldn't put the book down from page 3. Siri Hustvedt is a goddess of an artist. Her writing is mesmerizing and dumbfounding. Beautiful!!
Rating:
Summary: A Beatifully Written Book Of Friendship and Loss
Review: WHAT I LOVED is the story of two friends, who spark a lifelong friendship over a painting. Leo Hertzberg, an art historian, visits a SoHo gallery and is captivated by a large portrait of a reclining woman - one of a series of portraits depicting the same model in various stages of emaciation and obesity. He purchases the painting, and arranges for a meeting with the artist, Bill Wechsler, who ruefully admits that Hertzberg is the first person to have bought one of his paintings. The two hit it off immediately, and introduce their wives: Leo's wife Erica, a grad student eleven years his junior, and Bill's wife Lucille, an oddly stiff and unhappy poetess. At first, the women are a little reserved, but when both wives fall pregnant within months of each other, their friendship solidifies in a frenzy of baby shopping and tummy-stroking and mom-to-be fussing. Erica gives birth to Matthew, and Lucille gives birth to Mark; the Wechslers now live in the apartment above the Hertzbergs (which, I guess, is the closest equivalent to next-door-neighbors, in New York). Everything is, as they say, just peachy.
But every peach has an ugly, hard, tooth-jarring pit, and it soon becomes clear that the Wechslers' marriage is foundering. Lucille is dissatisfied with Bill and seemingly indifferent to Mark; from their downstairs apartment, Leo and Erica can hear the fights. Bill moves out and takes up residence in his studio, finding comfort in the arms of Violet, his artist's model and true love. When Lucille moves out West, Bill and Violet take up residence in the apartment once again, attempting to raise Mark together. Sadly, as often happens, Mark becomes a pawn in a turf war between his divorced parents, and ends up being shuttled back and forth across the country like so much chopped liver. Matt and Mark become close friends, and the bond between the boys is, the parents hope, a source of comfort and solidarity for Matt. Bill is happier with Violet than he's ever been with Lucille, and they dare to hope that the worst is behind them.
Of course, the worst is yet to come. The first sentence of Book Two is like a punch in the gut, reminding the gullible reader that life is always waiting to yank the rug out from under anybody who looks too contented. Both sets of parents are doomed to lose their children, one in an inexplicable, senseless accident, and one in a slow and insidious loss stretching over years. Many marriages are unable to weather the loss of a child, and Bill and Leo find their relationships with their wives strained to breaking by their grief. Battered by their disappointments and hardships, the men turn to their long-lasting friendship for solace, growing old and slow in a world that seems hell-bent on methodically stripping away everything that is dear to them.
Beautifully written, Siri Hustvedt's delicate prose sensitively and knowingly handles the rocky terrain of friendships between couples, with all the sexual tension, divided loyalties, and jealousy that inevitably set in. The dialogue is believable and well-done, convincingly rendering the characters as artsy academics: again and again, the characters turn to their fields of study to find meaning in events, overlaying their precious theories like ill-fitting grids across reality. The tragedies that tear Leo and Bill's lives apart are nothing unusual; everybody knows somebody who's suffered the same fate, or worse, and that's what makes the characters so sympathetic and realistic.
Hustvedt lets the reins slip from her fingers a bit toward the end, when a series of improbable events masterminded by a cartoonish villain abruptly shift the plot into surreal murder-mystery territory, but the ache and the loss are real enough, and partially rescue the story. If anything, Hustvedt is a little too restrained and sensitive in her portrayals of grief; her characters choke back their sorrow with a self-control that recalls the stereotypical emotionally constipated academic. Nevertheless, WHAT I LOVED is a gripping, wonderfully told examination of the complicated and unarticulated bonds of friendship, and the courage it takes to love others in the certain knowledge of death and loss. You'll enjoy this book. Another Amazon quick pick you'll enjoy is THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez, a unique and very engaging, rather obscure little novel. I pick up a used copy and truly love this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Hustvedt misfires badly in this disappointing book
Review: WHAT I LOVED, the new book by Brooklyn-based writer Siri Hustvedt, does not know what it wants to be. Is it a conventional family drama, or is it a study of the Club Kid subculture prevalent in New York City in the 1980s? Is it a book about psychological phenomena like hysteria and eating disorders, or is it an examination of a teenager's descent into lying, stealing, drug abuse and, perhaps, murder? The answer is that WHAT I LOVED is all of these things --- and that's the problem. The first third of the book introduces the Wechslers and Hertzbergs, families featuring like-minded souls bound together by their love of art. Bill Wechsler, a rising artist, has a son named Mark from his brief marriage to Lucille, an emotionally stunted poet. The marriage is doomed and Bill leaves Lucille for Violet, his artistic muse and a psychology scholar. Bill's best friend, Leo Hertzberg, is a Harvard educated art history professor at Columbia University. Leo is married to Erica, an English professor at Rutgers. They have a son named Matthew, who was born within days of Mark. The families live in the same building in SoHo and share summer trips to Vermont, where they trade ideas about art and literature and chart the growth of the boys. The author strains to make the adult characters sound like the intellectuals she wants them to be. There is no humor or even a touch of lightness in any of them. Hustvedt crams in so many French phrases, references to minor philosophers and fancy literary criticism terms like "elongation" that there is no room for any humanity to seep in. Moreover, the formal prose often clanks false and fails to advance anything --- not any plot line and certainly not our understanding of the characters. The boys do not fare much better. Matthew Hertzberg is a sensitive dreamer with artistic sensibilities, which is fine. But most eleven-year olds do not sound like this: "On the way home in the car when we were all quiet, I thought about how everybody's thoughts keep changing. The thoughts that people were having . . . turned into new thoughts when we were in the car. That was then but this is now, but then that now is gone, and there's a new now. Right now, I'm saying right now, but it's over before I've finished saying it." Although the book is set in the sensory rich locale of SoHo and the Lower East Side, the City sits limp off camera and the reader never senses the crackling spirit of downtown life. For the author, it is enough to make stray references to "West Broadway" or "the Bowery." Hustvedt invests too much energy in developing the strange world of New York's mutable art scene of the '80s and '90s. Bill Wechsler's art exhibits are painstakingly rendered, with descriptions that last page after exhausting page. The author, writing under the pretense that more is more, does not trust the reader enough to give few, well chosen details of Bill's paintings and box art creations. WHAT I LOVED is written in the first person, with Leo Hertzberg as its narrator. On two occasions, Leo delivers the news of untimely deaths --- those of his son Matthew and his best friend Bill. The deaths are treated with a matter-of-fact detachment that fails to engage the reader. But the deaths give the author room to move the story into strange, unpredictable terrain. Indeed, the last half of the book bears little resemblance to what came before it. Hustvedt surprisingly builds this part of the book around Mark Wechsler, Bill's shy son who, as he grows into a teenager, slides into the murky Club Kid world, with its bizarre costuming and fascination with horror art. Teddy Giles, horror artist extraordinaire, is a 20-something sleaze whose "art" consists of destruction and grotesque, violent images. Giles befriends Mark and the two lead a life of mayhem, culminating in the murder of a fellow Club Kid. As Mark settles into his new life, he lies to Leo and Violet --- his surrogate parents after Bill's death --- and begins stealing from them. The lies get bigger, the stealing and drug use get worse and Leo and Violet decide to save Mark, who has fled New York with Giles. At this point, Giles hijacks the story and, incredibly, plays Leo for a sap. For some unknowable reason, Leo, a brilliant art history professor with a Harvard degree, decides he will just do whatever Giles wants. Giles wants Leo to chase him and Mark in a senseless cat and mouse game that leads from Minnesota to Iowa to Tennessee. Leo does not enlist any help, call the police, or say enough is enough. No. Giles says jump and, ludicrously, Leo does. It doesn't make any sense and it doesn't lead anywhere --- there's no payoff at the end of this chase. WHAT I LOVED is marketed as an imaginative, breakout novel, but it is neither of these things. In many passages, Hustvedt does command the language in a voice that needs to be heard again. She misfires badly, but the reader senses a bright mind at work, one capable of much more than is on display in this disappointing book. --- Reviewed by Andrew Musicus
Rating:
Summary: No women?
Review: Why does Husvedt mention so many men in science, in medicin and in fine arts specially - more then hundred! And no woman!
Hustvedt is a woman. But she ignores women in high positions. Why?
This is an anti-women-book!
Rating: 
Summary: This, I loved
Review: WOW! This one grabbed me from about page three and didn't let go until the last sentence. Leo's a great narrator and you just fall in love with each of the characters. it's heartbreaking and joyful all at once. yummy!
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