![]() ![]() “Maskings” goes disastrously awry because she is so focused on her internal conflicts that she fails to take proper notice of her male collaborators’ rather different motives and intentions. ![]() But this is not merely postmodern game-playing the counterpoint between Harry’s ideas and her unruly emotions drives the plot. Harry is an unabashed intellectual, and her notebooks, which form a major part of the narrative, are crammed with citations esoteric enough to require footnotes. Following the third show, she intends to reveal this deception, “not only to expose the antifemale bias of the art world, but to uncover the complex workings of human perception and how unconscious ideas about gender, race, and celebrity influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art.” After his death in 1995, she reanimates her dormant career as an artist with a project she calls “Maskings.” She persuades three male artists to exhibit her installations as their own. Harry, as her friends call her, was the wife of Felix Lord, a suave, successful art dealer. Harriet Burden’s rage, turbulence and neediness leap off these pages in a skillfully orchestrated chorus of voices both dark and brilliant. ‘The Blazing World” is Siri Hustvedt’s best novel yet, an electrifying work with a titanic, poignantly flawed protagonist. ![]()
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