Honestly, it took me quite a while to get drawn thoroughly into Siri Hustvedt's novel The Blazing World, but about halfway through, things starting fitting together better in my mind, and I found it a rewarding read. This is a book I got from my daughter for Winter holidays last year, and I was delighted to finally get around to it. If you read the blurbs, you just won't really get what this book encompasses. The structure is a mishmash, deliberately. I began reading the Editor's Introduction, thinking it was an editor of the novel itself... first surprise, the editor is an invention along with all the characters, and he explains how this "book" came about... purportedly the story of a female artist who has died and her efforts to expose the reality of perception in the art world (at first you think it will be just an exposé of the bias against women and for men). But in fact, her story comes together through her own journals (many), written communications from the three men she claimed as "masks" to put her own work out into the world to great acclaim, interviews, etc. But this book is so full of philosophy (both quoted and created) that it becomes quite an intellectual challenge, and the book is the story of many people, not just Harry (Harriet). What a great book to discuss with others... but then it isn't a book club read for me, and I suspect many readers would not care for it. A snippet: "In fact, she was hell-bent on understanding the psychology of belief and delusion, which, let's be frank, are often one and the same thing. How do preposterous, even impossible ideas take hold of whole populations?" Maybe the overriding question in the book is how does one see? And that question can spin outwards infinitely. We both want and don't want to be seen; we want and fear seeing (trying to comprehend) ourselves.

on the bench near the entrances