Review by Marcus Schaapveld.

I haven’t recently read a novel with such a complete and well thought-out character as Harriet Burden in Siri Hustvedt’s latest, The Blazing World. As multi-faceted and complex as she is, she is never contradictory and always completely convincing, something not many novels can achieve when it comes to character.

The Blazing World is about Harriet's troubled relationship with the hollow, insincere and deeply sexist art industry in the New York of the novel, Husdvedt having already tackled this subject in What I Loved.  The book is written in a way that can very easily become hackneyed and glib, through a series of posthumous letters and diary entries written by Harriet and her close friends, family, associates and critics compiled by an art historian. As the novel unfolds the portrait completes itself, never with any cheap thrills or twists, only a grimly satisfying confirmation of the world that surrounds Harriet and how it shapes her. Harriet is placed awkwardly into the upper echelons of the art world, marrying a successful art dealer while still young and aspiring. After his death (very early in the proceedings, never fear) shakes her out of comfort and a veneer of well-maintained sanity, she resolves to prove what she has always known about her creative community by exhibiting a series of her work through the successive guises of three male artists. The results are not so much disastrous (at the time) than a cruel reality check for Harriet and those that care about her.

Harriet's surrounding family, friends and lovers are perfectly placed within the story, both within their own voices and without, their presence really communicating the emotional reality that Harriet experiences. The literal and figurative heart of the novel lies here, when we experience Harriet both and her most vulnerable and at her most self assured, her most self-doubting and most triumphant.  The thing about the way The Blazing World unfolds provides us and Harriet's legacy with closure. We catch her posthumous truth on the verge of it's explosion into the wider world, propelled not least by the revelations uncovered by the book itself. such is the fascinating circularity created by the novel. 

All in all, I cannot recommend The Blazing World enough. Go get it!

Marcus Schaapveld

Daniel Woodrell fan






Recently, I've really been enjoying Daniel Woodrell. His short, sharp and gritty fiction has been quietly simmering away for the better part of two decades. Woodrell's profile was raised markedly with the publication of Winter's Bone, his most well known work; which was adapted into a film in 2010.

Woodrell's stories all share hard-worn protagonists who take it upon themselves to right the injustices heaped upon them. The Death of Sweet Mister and Winter's Bone twist into harshly redemptive narratives which come across in starkly different ways. Winter's Bone takes the shape of a mystery, telling the story of Ree Dolly, a sixteen year old from desolate Ozark region of Arkansas who is shouldering the the weight of her entire family: her near-catatonic and incomprehensible mother and two younger brothers on the cusp of an adulthood. Ree's father has gone missing, ostensibly because of drug debts, and for Ree to challenge his disappearance is to come up against a wall of family and blood ties which hold the Ozarks together. In the Death of Sweet Mister, Shug Akins is a 13 year old boy who has already seen too much for his years, living a precarious and troubled existence between the affections of his perpetually drunk mother and the abuse of his step-father. What unfolds is inevitable: This is a beautiful and heartbreaking story of innocence already in the process of being lost.

Woodrell's most recent, The Maid's Version, sweeps the reader through generations of familial history. In its 160 odd pages Woodrell manages to pack the history West Table, Missouri into a brief and glittering novella complete with the scandals, grievances and infidelities that surround and an explosion at a dance-hall in the 1920's. Woodrell deftly switches decades and characters throughout the book, illustrating the ways that the tragedy haunts the town for generations. Woodrell's classic motifs return here, but in a more expansive fashion. While his earlier novels are unforgiving, rough-spun and immediate, The Maid's Version is more narratively thematically ambitious, illustrating an entire community's relationship to itself.

What really comes through in Woodrell's work is his his intensely unique language, born of a suspicious and wizened hardship which ties together the places and people of his stories. He mixes vernacular and a kind of loose, shimmering third-person-esque description in an incredibly strange blend that I've never quite come across before. If you've enjoyed Cormac McCarthy or Donald Ray Pollock, You'll definitely love his novels.

The Death of Sweet Mister (2001)
Winter's Bone (2006)
The Maid's Version (2013)