OOoh I so like this book,
Love, passion, three dimensional characters that do the kind of things that real people do, even the good ones, when hit with a bolt of passion between the eyes.
Thinking about it I love this book.
Some pages are a little warped, could be the odd tear, the Ibizian sea or bathwater as for a while I took it everywhere....

RELEASE NOTES:

Sent to Brazil, hopefully to come back one day after a journey round the world

It arrived thank you!

I just coudn´t finish it. The history is going to a sad turn and I´m not on this mood..
Will send to deadendmind next Saturnday.
Thank you

I received it today, I'll get to it as soon as I can. Thanks!!!

I just finished the book and I'm sorry for the delay. I loved it! Such wonderful, complex characters and a great, gripping story. I liked Hustvedt's writing. It kind of reminded me of her husband's (Paul Auster) writing and he's one of my favorite authors, so I was bound to like this book! All the art and psychology references were extremely intriguing as well. Thank you so much angel1509 for sharing this book with us. I discovered a brilliant author and I will definitely try to read more of her work.

I have PMed the next person on the list.

A few quotes that I liked from the book:

p. 31:
"I suppose we are all the products of our parents' joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes."

p. 43:
"I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessarry remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification."

p. 70:
"Art is mysterious, but selling art may be even more mysterious. The object itself is bought and sold, handed from one person to another, and yet countless factors are at work within the transaction. in order to grow in value, a work of art requires a particular psychological climate."

p. 120:
"We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die."

p. 157:
"Whenever an artist dies, the work slowly begins to replace his body, becoming a corporeal substitute for him in the world."
"Art, useless as it is, resists incorporation into dailiness, and if it has any power at all, it seems to breathe with the life of the person who made it.

p. 364:
"Every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense. It winds backward from where we now stand, no longer the actors in the story but its spectators who have chosen to speak."

Arrived safely here in Germany - thanks so much for the postcard and the beautiful stamps, deadendmind! And thanks for the ring, angel1509! I'm really looking forward to reading this - I've been wanting to read it for ages.

What I loved: among many other things, this book!
For me, it was a little slow to start, because I'm not into art at all and thus found the beginning a little boring and I even asked myself if I should continue reading. Now that I've finished the book, I'm so glad I did! It's hard to describe what I loved about it without saying too much about the content. The first 100 pages or so were "just" a nice story, but after that sooo many things happened! An interesting detail is the fact that you can't really understand the book's title until you've reached the last few pages!

I asked in the forum and found two more bookcrossers who would like to read this book:

- sunnee (CH)
- aava (FI)

RELEASE NOTES:

On its way to sunnee.

The book arrived today, thank you Qantaga for sending it!
I do have two bookrings lying here to be read first, but they're not huge, so it should hopefully not take too much time to get to this one - I'm really looking forward to reading it!

-- EDIT 18.3.2006 --

I am so sorry I take much longer than I thought... I've had an awful lot of work in the last weeks and started to read more or less page by page, which made it difficult to really get into it and relate to the characters. I hope I will be able to finish it within the next week!

That's it, I just finished it fifteen minutes ago. And yes, I loved it, too. I am glad I did not quit but went on reading, even though the beginning seemed long to me and hard to stick to it.

This novel has really touched me, because it tells a lot about the way life is and about how people feel and behave. I have loved the bit where Leo talks about the fact that people always do the best they can, even if it might be the wrong thing or stupid or just not enough. Of course, it all takes another turn with the story of Mark, where you just fail to understand what is going on in his head... I'll stop here, because it's hard not to tell to much for someone who is still going to read it.

The book has shaken me in some way, and it feels a bit like it will last in my mind to go on thinking about it for quite some time. Many thanks to angel1509 for this bookring! It will travel on tomorrow to Finland.

The book came this morning. The envelope was in really bad shape, but the book itself was fine. Thank you Sunnee and of course angel1509.

What a great book! Last week I had a flu and felt really bad. I read this book and slept and then I had to stay awake because I just wanted to keep on reading. As some had said, it starts slowly but after a while things really start happening and then it´s fast forward. Beautiful book, great characters...what more do you need? I really need to read more Siri Hustvedt.

Thanks so much angel1509. The book is now ready to come back home.

---
There´s a Finnish Bookcrosser who wishes to read the book so it´s on its way to her.I´m so sorry for keeping the book for so long...

The book arrived yesterday. Last week I was in a bookshop in France and saw there a book by Siri Hustvedt. The name of the author seemed familiar to me and I wondered why. I did not remember that this book was coming to visit me!

I am sorry this book has been a long time on my TBR pile. My autumn was so busy as never before.
This is my Christmas reading now. I found out that this is also on the of the 1001 books to be read before...

What I loved especially were the descriptions of the works of art. I could see the works of Bill before my eyes as if they were real. I wonder how the author is able to write that way or do the paintings really exist somewhere? Some pages of Mark and his friends were difficult to read and were unsuitable for the last thing in the evening. They might have caused bad dreams.
I'll send the book back home on Monday. Thank you for sending the book around the world, Angel!
That's what I saw yesterday when I came home from work.

Home at last, this book has been on a long journey and will now go back on my favourites bookshelf. It finds me in the same place geographically but otherwise much moved on. Thank you to all who took part,
xx