Memories of the Future, Siri Hustvedt
Memories of the Future, Siri Hustvedt
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Memories of the Future

Author: Siri Hustvedt

Narrator: Katherine Fenton

Unabridged: 12 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/19/2019


Synopsis

Longlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence

A provocative, exuberant novel about time, memory, desire, and the imagination from the internationally bestselling and prizewinning author of The Blazing World, Memories of the Future tells the story of a young Midwestern woman’s first year in New York City in the late 1970s and her obsession with her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite.

As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, S.H., aka “Minnesota,” transcribes her neighbor’s bizarre and increasingly ominous monologues in a notebook, along with sundry other adventures, until one frightening night when Lucy bursts into her apartment on a rescue mission.

Forty years later, S.H., now a veteran author, discovers her old notebook, as well as early drafts of a never-completed novel while moving her aging mother from one facility to another. Ingeniously juxtaposing the various texts, S.H. measures what she remembers against what she wrote that year and has since forgotten to create a dialogue between selves across decades. The encounter both collapses time and reframes its meanings in the present.

Elaborately structured, intellectually rigorous, urgently paced, poignant, and often wildly funny, Memories of the Future brings together themes that have made Hustvedt among the most celebrated novelists working today: the fallibility of memory; gender mutability; the violence of patriarchy; the vagaries of perception; the ambiguous borders between sensation and thought, sanity and madness; and our dependence on primal drives such as sex, love, hunger, and rage.

About Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt, a novelist and scholar, has a PhD in English literature and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is the author of a book of poems, seven novels, four collections of essays, and two works of nonfiction. She has published papers in various academic and scientific journals and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, the European Charles Veillon Essay Prize, an American Academy of the Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction for The Blazing World, which was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Blair on March 19, 2019

By the time I'm halfway through a book, I can usually tell what I'm going to think of it – whether it's going to be a fun-but-flawed throwaway read I'll forget in a couple of weeks (three stars) or a wonderful new favourite (five, obviously) or something in between. But with Memories of the Future I......more

Goodreads review by Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer on February 26, 2020

This book is a portrait of the artist as young woman, the artist who came to New York to live and to suffer and to write her mystery, Like the great detective who shares her initials S.H., the writer, sees, hears and smells the clues. The signs are everywhere, in a face, in the sky, in a book. A......more

Goodreads review by Robert on February 06, 2022

This book is a gem on so many levels. This is my third novel by Siri Hustvedt, and I have enjoyed them all immensely. She is definitely a really strong writer, and quite versatile as well. This one is definitely the most complex and creative of the three, and for the first time she seems to be influ......more

Goodreads review by Justo on January 18, 2023

3.5. Por momentos brillante, erudita. Aborda el tema del patriarcado en nuestra sociedad desde su propia experiencia y desde su erudición de forma magistral, a mí entender, sin caer en un feminismo militante. Entiendo que este es el hilo conductor de las varias historias que constituyen este libro, d......more