Siri Hustvedt

Published: Sept. 15, 2019, noon

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It\\u2019s hard to sum up the extraordinary reach of Siri Hustvedt\\u2019s work. On the one hand, there are popular novels such as What I Loved and The Summer Without Men, which became international best-sellers and were translated into thirty languages. But underpinning her six novels there\\u2019s an impressive body of philosophical exploration \\u2013 about Freud, neurophysiology, painting. Then there\\u2019s her own art work: Siri Hustvedt illustrates many of her own books. She has published a volume of poetry, and she\\u2019s also a lecturer in Psychiatry at Cornell Medical College. She lives in New York with her husband, the writer Paul Auster.

In Private Passions, Siri Hustvedt admits that she enjoys being hard to pin down, because much of her work is about identity and how it shifts across a lifetime. She reflects on her own youth in New York, where she was so poor that she ate by cruising bars during \\u201cHappy Hour\\u201d and eating the free snacks. She reveals too that she has neurological episodes where she loses consciousness, sees auras, and sometimes visions and voices. She admires the visionary composer Hildegard of Bingen, and also composer Meredith Monk, who is pushing the human voice to the limit in "Scared Song". Other choices include Mozart\\u2019s Don Giovanni, John Cage\\u2019s Sonata V, Webern\\u2019s Six Pieces for Orchestra, and Berlioz\\u2019s Les Nuits d\\u2019Ete.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke\\nA Loftus production for BBC Radio 3

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