Bought @ Buecher Brocky in Zurich, an enormous and fantastic second hand bookstore :-)

taken from BC meeting

I do not think that I have ever read a book that describes the psyche of a young girl so well. SH manages to describe the small town feeling and the hot summer in such a way that you can nearly smell the food, the weather and the people. The story is simple enough. Somewhere near Des Moines (a bus leaves from the town to go to Des Moines) there lives a community of Norwegian descendants. One of them is Lilly Dahl, who is 19 and was not able to go to college because all the money was spent on her father''s illness. The parents have moved away to Florida and she now lives in a room above the cafe she works at. Opposite her building is a hotel into which a very attractive man, a Jewish artist from NY, moves. He is painting different people from the small town. Lily starts a love affair with him, which catapults her away from her boyfriend and here superficial life into the memories and lives of Mabel, her neighbor, an old lady who writes and was a teacher and other small town characters she has known all her life but was not curious about. An important part of the story are the rehearsals for “a midsummer nights dream”, the play that lots of people from the small town are part of, including Lily, who plays Hermina. Strange things start to happen, when a character called Martin starts to stalk Lily while at the same time people around town start to have appearances. Lily wants to know what is going on and her fearlessness gets her involved in these happenings in a way she probably had not expected.
A story about the growing up and learning of a young woman. Beautifully written. A bunch of interesting characters adds spice to the story. I enjoyed reading the book a lot.

of course I''m dying to know whether Paul Auster''s wife is hounded by colours, spies and double walkers too ...

She is, indeed. Hounded by spies and double walkers (ok., maybe less hounded than Auster, but at least possessed). And you could add odors, dreams and sex as well.
Hustvedt’s enchantment provokes an eerie strangeness rooted in the ordinary. In a painstakingly polished narration she weaves daydreams, reality and the Midsummer Night’s Dream into a story of mystery and suspense - not quite real, but altogether truthful.

The character of Lily goes through all incidents oddly untouched, as a princess, for whom everything comes out all right and shiny. The abyss of bad luck threatens her only from a distance. Other people suffer, other destinies lead to fatal despair. The teenager’s selfish, unaware coldness and cruelty is excellent described, as Cocojo mentioned.

Of course I felt for Martin. If this misunderstood and undervalued artist had only had a quarter of the attention people paid Lily after she had been witness of his suicide. In the neat world of Webster seems to be no place for unfit love, for fairies or weirdos. It’s a sad, sad story, mostly disenchanting.
Well ... there is one glint of hope: This is my first American novel in which the heroine rides a bicycle. Though merely because she can’t afford a car, but nevertheless ...

I just learned that Hustvedt revealed a lot of her inherent past in this book. Like Lily Dahl, she worked as a waitress after college and before moving to New York. Also the book's central event, Martin's suicide, was borrowed from real life (and served as the seed for the novel's story).

Peculiarity: Why, oh why must still remain typos in a brilliant book like this one? That is, if me with German mother tongue discover typos, there must be many, many more ... Could Hodder & Stoughton not afford a proof reader? *frowns in disbelief*

RELEASE NOTES:

Lily did enchant yet another reader at the meet-up ...

Another book that came home with me...

This book left me confused. I really liked the mood and the way it was written, but the story itself let me kind of confused.