A Country Falling Apart: Siri Hustvedt and Karin Haugen

No, reading novels is not a solution to our political miseries. For that organization, active resistance, and harder rhetoric is required. But we need stories.

Author Siri Hustvedt said these words during a lecture at the House of Literature in 2017, in Donald Trump’s first term as president.

Hustvedt is one of those writers who turns to literature as well as organized resistance faced with a harsh political reality. Together with her late husband, the author Paul Auster, she founded Writers Against Trump (today Writers For Democratic Action), a coalition that organizes town hall meetings, protests and political theatre. Hustvedt writes about the beginning of the movement in her latest book, Ghost Stories: A Memoir.

Faced with Trump’s curbing of rights, and ICE’s conduct in a number of American cities, Hustvedt has been a staunch critic. Raised in Minnesota by Norwegian parents, she soon learned of her mother’s resistance to the Nazi occupation of Norway during the second world war. In a much-shared Facebook post, Hustvedt points to a parallel between the Norwegians’ resistance and today’s protests in the US: «the moral choice between accepting fascism and opposing it is the same,» she writes.

What is the current situation in the US like for someone like Hustvedt, seeing ICE patrol her hometown? How are Americans responding to the continuous dismantling of their democracy and constitutional state? What is the role of the writer in critical times, and how may literature confront the material and interpersonal challenges that we are currently facing?

Siri Hustvedt is among the most central writers and thinkers in the US. She has written a number of critically acclaimed novels and essay collections, including The Summer without Men, The Blazing World, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, and A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women.

At the House of Literature, she was joined by writer and journalist Karin Haugen for a conversation about a US unraveling, and about the resistance in art and community.

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