Mothers, Fathers, and Others

New Essays

By: Siri Hustvedt

Narrated by: Caitlin Thorburn

Feminist philosophy meets family memoir in this “profound” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) new essay collection from Siri Hustvedt, an exploration of the shifting borders that define human experience, including boundaries we usually take for granted—between ourselves and others, nature and nurture, viewer and artwork—which turn out to be far less stable than we imagine.

Described as “a 21st-century Virginia Woolf” in the Literary Review (UK), Man Booker longlisted Hustvedt displays her expansive intellect and interdisciplinary knowledge in this collection that moves effortlessly between stories of her mother, grandmother, and daughter to artistic mothers, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Lousie Bourgeois, to the broader meanings of maternal in a culture shaped by misogyny and fantasies of paternal authority. Mothers, Fathers, and Others is a polymath’s journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art.

This moving, fierce, and often funny book is finally about the fact that being alive means being in states of constant, dynamic exchange with what is around us, and that the impulse to draw hard and fast conceptual borders where none exist carries serious theoretical and political dangers.

Inspiring!

Wonderful book. So intelligent and inspiring. I recommend it to everyone, and most of all to smart women who want to be smarter.

Great book, but distracted by bad pronunciation

Over all, the narrator was perfectly decent, but as a person who speaks both Norwegian and German, I was flabbergasted by the lack of interest in pronouncing quotes in those respective languages properly. There were multiple occasions where it took me a while to figure out what was said, because the quotes (“Det er krig”, “Was will das Weib”) were pronounced so incorrectly. It was actually disruptive. I don’t understand why there in the recording process wasn’t just spent a minute looking up the proper pronunciation of these sentences (or remove them all together).

Awful performance by the reader

Like all of Siri Hustvedt’s books this is wonderfully scholarly and enlightening, or so I think. Unfortunately the reading by Caitlin Thorburn is so horrible that I was not able to finish listening to the book. The intonation is all wrong and completely over the top. It seems she tries to outperform the book. I am most likely going to buy a printed copy. Please Ms. Hustvedt record your own books! It would add so much to know what you actually intended to say.