The American writer Siri Hustvedt (Minnesota, 69 years old) fears that Donald Trump's return to the White House, as some polls suggest, will once again “destabilize” the United States. “Being nervous is an understatement, I am terrified (of the upcoming November elections),” the author confessed this Wednesday afternoon at a press conference at the Ritz hotel, prior to the OpenBank Literature by Vanity awards ceremony. Fair, where he was given the award for literary career. Hustvedt was always critical of the Republican from her first term. She called him racist and misogynist, and in 2017 she signed a letter alongside dozens of writers criticizing the order banning citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the country.
He recalled that “autocratic” movements are not exclusive to the United States, but also lurk in Spain, France and Italy, and he has appealed to literature as a response. “I don't believe that books save us from fascism, but poetry, novels and some essays are capable of describing the experience of other people who seem alien to us and in a way that no newspaper can describe.” The author remembered Paul Auster, her husband since 1982 and sick with cancer since January of last year. “Today I spoke with him and for the first time since he started treatment he is working on something,” she said. It was she herself who reported Auster's illness in an Instagram post in March. “He is stable at the moment. It has been a year full of emergencies, not so much because of the cancer itself, but because of the treatments. Living with someone who suffers from a lethal disease changes your life,” said she, who was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in 2019.
Hustvedt met Auster in 1981 and married him the following year. When she announced the terminal illness of her partner, she said that she was living in “cancerland”: “You have to be close enough to feel the debilitating treatments almost as if they were your own and far enough away to be a genuine help,” he wrote in that publication. Hustvedt and Auster are the parents of the singer and actress Sophie Auster (New York, 36 years old), who had a son earlier this year. “One of the great ambitions of my life has been to be a grandmother,” Hustvedt confessed while admitting that there has also been joy in recent times: “We don't know what the future holds for us, without the treatment we would not have Paul today. ”.
The author of twenty novels and essays stated that she has a special affection for Spain, where in 2003 she completed a residency at the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes in Barcelona. “I am a lover of literature and its history, and any literary work owes a lot to Don Quixote.” Her acceptance speech has been marked by feminism, art and memory, elements that run through all of her production. She rose to stardom with her third novel, everything I loved (2003), with which she began to combine her main obsessions: the relationship between life and art, the historical role of women in that world and the blurred border between memory and imagination. In the book, an art critic, Leo Hertzberg, narrates in first person a period of 25 years in which his life and that of his family are linked to that of a painter he admires, Bill Wechsler. . “Art is always a translation of the experiences we live,” the author told EL PAÍS when the work was published.
Five years after everything I lovedHustvedt again used a man as the protagonist in Elegy for an American, this time to tell a story about how personal memory forges our identity. “I wanted to know what it means to be a male storyteller. In our culture, a male voice has more authority than a female's. “It is fun to take that position,” he told EL PAÍS in 2009. The dazzling world (2006), her most recent publication in Spain through a reissue of Seix Barral, takes up this idea of contempt for women. The novel fictionalizes the art world of New York in the eighties through the creator Harriet Burden, overshadowed by her partner, a popular art dealer. In search of greater transcendence, she uses three male artists as a facade/alter ego to present her own work.
“It has been shown that it is impossible to describe the genre behind a text. It's not particularly interesting to talk about the binary, there are writers that I love, like Henry James, who have many feminine qualities, and Gertrude Stein has masculine elements, in the terms that we have been culturally taught. “We all have masculine and feminine attributes,” she said this Wednesday afternoon. Despite her constant concern against the disparagement of women – as her essay demonstrates Mothers, fathers and others (2022), in which she explores the origins of misogyny and the male vision of culture, Hustvedt does not agree that there is a Women's Day. “It is a good idea and necessary for the moment in which we find ourselves, but we are the ones who are writing history and not only on Women's Day. “Just imagine an international men’s day.”
Openbank Literature Awards 2024
For the second consecutive year, the Openbank Literature Awards have awarded nine personalities related to literature and the publishing industry. Alana S. Portero won the award for best fiction in Spanish for Bad habit (Seix Barral). In the best non-fiction section in Spanish, Juan Villorio triumphed with The figure of the world (Random House).
The list of winners is completed with Fortuna (Anagrama) by Hernán Díaz in best translated fiction; Emperor of Rome (Review) by Mary Beard in Best Translated Nonfiction; Francisco Socas was chosen as best translator for his work in Epistolary (The Acantalide) by Francesco Petarca; Mar García Puig was chosen as best new author for her novel The history of vertebrates (Random House); I just wanted to dance (Transit) was better cover design; Cálamo (Zaragoza), best bookstore and Silvia Sesé from Anagrama, best editor.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
Subscribe
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
RECEIVE IT