Hustvedt is always a cerebral writer, but I found The Blazing World significantly more challenging than What I Loved and Memories of the Future. Harriet Burden has struggled for artistic recognition all her life, and now, in early old age, she conducts an experiment that she calls the 'Masking': she stages three art exhibitions using three different male artists as her alter egos, and watches as the accolades roll in. The book is told via a compilation of Harriet's notebooks, written or spoken accounts from other key players, and reviews of the shows. I've no doubt this novel will stay indelibly fixed in my mind. Hustvedt brilliantly explores how Harriet's art changes as she imagines herself as each of the three men she chooses, and how she creates a complicated web of self-reflection, writing to an art journal under yet another male name to both reveal and critique her own project. You get the sense that Harriet's fatal flaw is that she can't quite recognise that the rest of the world are not as clever as she is. She's a marvellous character. Having said that, though, I felt this worked better as a thought experiment than as a novel. I found some sections nearly unreadable, and others dragged down by the weight of academic footnotes that added very little. Like Harriet, it's a bit too smart for its own good. Hustvedt's follow-up, Memories of the Future, is a much better piece of fiction; still, I'd rather read a book like this than many tidier novels. 3.5 stars.

[Could not read proof copy due to file errors. Finally read in hard copy!]