Siri Hustvedt – The Summer Without Men

I read Siri Hustvedt’s earlier book, What I Loved, on my first holiday with the Husband and so I have fond and fuzzy memories of it even though it’s not a fond and fuzzy sort of book – featuring lots of arty symbolism, a vaguely threatening teenager, and creepy puppets (puppets in books are always creepy, it’s book law). I was very much looking forward to The Summer Without Men and I was not disappointed.

The premise of the book is a routine tragedy – husband leaves wife for younger, more attractive model – which sparks Mia’s nervous breakdown. The story starts when Mia is putting her life back together by spending the summer with her ageing mother and teaching poetry to a bunch of witchy thirteen year olds.

The abbreviated version of the book would read something like this: teenage girls are cruel and spiteful, twentysomethings are harrassed and overworked, middle aged women are abandoned and underappreciated, elderly women are neglected and lonely. But The Summer Without Men is not bleak at all. There may be no men, but there is irony and spikiness and self-discovery and unexpected friendship.

Mia herself is a pickle of contradictions. At the start she is stable but very tentative, with a very lyrical voice. As time goes on, she both gains in confidence and seems more rocky. She has odd conversations with an internet stalker, directly addresses the reader in a very disconcerting way, and strikes up an unlikely friendship with an old lady who puts her crafty powers to subversive arty uses.

This is a lot of things in not a lot of pages. There are also little pictures of angels which I do not understand but I guess it would not be a Siri Hustvedt novel if I didn’t understand several layers of it.

I’ve made this book sound dark and weird. And it is, but that’s the undercurrent. The surface is simply a fine read and I seriously recommend it for an afternoon.