Summary and Reviews of Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt

Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt

Memories of the Future

by Siri Hustvedt
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (7):
  • First Published:
  • Mar 19, 2019, 336 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Mar 2020, 336 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

A provocative, exuberant novel about time, memory, desire, and the imagination - the story of a young Midwestern woman's first year in New York City in the late 1970s and her obsession with her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite.

As she listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, S.H., aka "Minnesota," transcribes her neighbor's bizarre and increasingly ominous monologues in a notebook, along with sundry other adventures, until one frightening night when Lucy bursts into her apartment on a rescue mission.

Forty years later, S.H., now a veteran author, discovers her old notebook, as well as early drafts of a never-completed novel while moving her aging mother from one facility to another. Ingeniously juxtaposing the various texts, S.H. measures what she remembers against what she wrote that year and has since forgotten to create a dialogue between selves across decades. The encounter both collapses time and reframes its meanings in the present.

Elaborately structured, intellectually rigorous, urgently paced, poignant, and often wildly funny, Memories of the Future brings together themes that have made Hustvedt among the most celebrated novelists working today: the fallibility of memory; gender mutability; the violence of patriarchy; the vagaries of perception; the ambiguous borders between sensation and thought, sanity and madness; and our dependence on primal drives such as sex, love, hunger, and rage.

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

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Perhaps unsurprisingly given its scope and themes—not to mention the substantial talents of its creator—Memories of the Future manages to be both broadly philosophical and deeply personal, the kind of novel that will speak to readers on many different levels...continued

Full Review (643 words)

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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).

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Beyond the Book



1970s Hangouts in New York City

Among other things, Hustvedt's novel Memories of the Future is a vivid portrait of what it was like to live in New York City as a young woman in the late 1970s. She writes evocatively about many of her character's favorite haunts, which include several establishments that are still operating today. Interested in a glimpse into "Minnesota's" NYC? Visit these landmarks on your next visit to the city!



Hungarian Pastry ShopHungarian Pastry Shop
1030 Amsterdam Ave.
This Upper West Side coffee shop and bakery is located near Columbia University and is renowned for its cream puffs, croissants, and Hungarian coffee.

Ear InnEar Inn
326 Spring St.
Established in 1817, this historic Greenwich Village destination is the oldest bar in Manhattan that has continually ...

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Read-Alikes

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