Monday, October 03, 2011

Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt




Not the kind of book I normally read. Lame duck betrayed goes back to philandering husband in anticlimatic end. And yet, there is something here. Stories of women and girls within the context of the novel tell a bigger story, one of cruelty and catharsis.

Oh, and one quote: "Only the aged have access to life's brevity."

A list of "mad" poets: Torquato Tasso, John Clare, Christopher Smart, Friedrich Holderlin, Antonin Artaud,

Paul Celan, Randall Jarrell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, Robert Fergusson, Velimir KhlebnikovL Georg Trakl, Gustaf Froding, Hugh MacDiarmid, Gerard de Nerval, Edgar Allan Poe, Burns Singer, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Laura Riding, Sara Teasdale, Vachel Lindsay, John Berryman, James SchuylerL Sylvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz

And last but not least, a bit of bibliotherapeutic support: "A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other."