We finally met to discuss What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt. I think it's safe to say that one thing none of us loved was this book. We all agreed that Hustvedt can write, that she has a great imagination, that she knows art, and that she felt compelled to use her sister's unpublished PhD thesis on hysteria (according to the acknowledgments). The characters were drawn fully and then left hanging—I never got a good sense of any of them. And we all wished the entire subplot (or, what became the entire plot by the end) of the lurid underground art/club scene stuff had been left out. I don't know what kind of book this was meant to be, or what kind of book it turned out to be. All in all, I was disappointed, because I enjoyed the set-up (in fact, the two couples reminded me of the two couples in Crossing to Safety, which I adored). The art descriptions worked for me, but the obsession with eating disorders and hysteria and mental illness marred the book for me.
Next month it's The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. We must be the last book group around that hasn't done it yet! One minute I'd never heard of it, and the next everyone was reading it for their book groups.
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