What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt

What I Loved is a complex, beautifully written book. Viewed from the outside, it’s tale about friendship told through the point of view of Leo. Leo is an art historian. He befriended an artist, Bill, back in the 1970s in New York. Their friendship, or relationship, spans 25 years and involves their wives and children. We learn about the relationships and how they have developed.

All this sounds pretty simple and straightforward. Only it isn’t. For the characters are New York academics and intellectuals. And anything but simple and straightforward. They inhabit a strange, alien and somewhat elevated world of universities and art galleries. And their lives are not only slightly on the complex side, but also – of course – constantly and forever subject to analyses, interpretations, commentaries and the oh so unavoidable re-interpretations. The characters are at times so busy interpreting that you wonder how they manage to live their lives – and truth be told; they seem at times to live less than they could, as there is a real trade-off involved.

So the book is much more than a tale about relationships of different types. It is also a very clever and intelligent book about the layers our lives are laid out in – of the inner relationships between the personal and that which is shared; between that which seemingly are personality traits and those parts of “us” that are fluid and ever changing with time, situations and lived experiences. To me it is also a tale about the somewhat silly and here quite excessive style of living where interpretation is everything – and where questions about the real (whatever that is) and issues of impression management and presentation of self lurk behind the seeming intellectual discussions, more or less well-disguised among the various arrangements and rearrangements of events.

Then tragedy strikes – a death. And now the novel changes from a chronicle of relationships to something which feels almost like a psychological thriller. Now grief – a real feeling, calling for real understanding, as opposed to posturing and over-intellectualization – enters the scene. Now there is a real, existential need to understand and make sense of. And the intellectualization of the world all of a sudden meets with wild and raw feelings in need of expression too. And where do normal grief stop and hysteria of madness begin? What is normal now?

This layered, experimental novel, with all its ambition and richness, is very fascinating. It can be read as a commentary on intellectualism, an exploration of identity, a study of events and meanings, and many other things. It deserves to be read and re-read, to be interpreted and re-interpreted. As a novel should, it raises more questions than it answers; as a piece of art it lays the world open for new interpretations. What I Loved is smart, sensitive, full of restrained intensity and insights, creative and engaging.