The Blindfold - Paperback

by Siri Hustvedt (Author)

From the author of The Blazing World, "a work of dizzying intensity...eloquent and vivid" (Don DeLillo), about a young Midwestern woman who finds herself entangled in intense circumstances--physical, cerebral, and existential--when she moves to New York City.

Iris Vegan, a young, impoverished graduate student from the Midwest, finds herself entangled with four powerful but threatening characters as she tries to adjust to life in New York City. Mr. Morning, an inscrutable urban recluse, employs Iris to tape-record verbal descriptions of objects that belonged to a murder victim. George, a photographer, takes an eerie portrait of Iris, which then acquires a strong life of its own, appearing and disappearing without warning around the city. After a series of blinding migraines, Iris ends up in a hospital room with Mrs. O., a woman who has lost her mind and memory to a stroke, but who nevertheless retains both the strength and energy to torment her fellow patient. And finally, there is Professor Rose, Iris's teacher and eventually her lover. While working with him on the translation of a German novella called The Brutal Boy, she discovers in its protagonist, Klaus, a vehicle for her own transformation and ventures out into the city again--this time dressed as a man.

Author Biography

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, five collections of essays, two works of nonfiction, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her novel The Blazing World was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. She is the recipient of many other awards, including the Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities, the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize, and the Sigourney Award for expanding psychoanalytic thought. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.