Free The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt Page A

having dates for Friday and Saturday nights. Harry and I pretended to keep ourselves aloof from such petty concerns, but what teenager doesn’t want to be admired and loved? What person, for that matter? I suppose her appearance was the arena where the more pernicious aspects of America touched her—the sense that she was too big to be attractive to men. The truth is Harriet was striking. She had a beautiful, strong, voluptuous body. Men stared at her on the street, but she wasn’t a flirt, and she wasn’t socially graceful or prone to small talk. Harriet was shy and solitary. In company, she was usually quiet, but when she spoke, she was so forceful and intelligent, she frightened people, especially boys her own age. They simply didn’t know what to make of her. Harry sometimes wished she were a boy, and I can say that had she been one, her route would have been easier. Awkward brilliance in a boy is more easily categorized, and it conveys no sexual threat.
    Not long ago, I reread the book Harry loved best when we were in high school: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. We often read the same novels, and the two of us had polished off Jane Eyre , Wuthering Heights , all of Austen, and much of Dickens by then, but Frankenstein became Harriet’s archetypal text, a fable of the self, a scripture for the reality of Harry Burden. Although I was taken by the story as a foreboding myth about the developments of modern medicine, I did not read it again and again. Dr. Frankenstein and the book’s vapid female characters held little interest for Harry. The person she loved was the monster, and she used to quote long passages from his chapters by heart, declaiming them like an old-fashioned poet, which made me laugh, even though I was bewildered by her fanatical attachment to the Miltonic creature.
    Reading the book again as an adult, however, I felt a door had been opened. I walked through it and found Harry. I found Harry in a novel that had been written by a nineteen-year-old girl on a bet. In 1816, Mary Shelley was spending the summer in Switzerland with her husband, their neighbor Lord Byron, and another person less celebrated whose name I cannot remember. The challenge was to write a ghost story for the pleasure of the others. Mary was the only one who fulfilled the bargain. In the preface, she writes that the story came to her in a “waking dream,” as one image after another possessed her. She watched as a “pale student of unhallowed arts” created a monster.
    “Behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”
    It is impossible to forget the novel’s essential story. I knew the terrible being Frankenstein makes is so lonely and misunderstood that his very existence is cursed. I knew his awful isolation is transformed into vengeance, but I had forgotten, or probably had never felt before, the ferocity of his feeling—his fury, grief, and bloodlust. And then I came across these lines spoken by the monster in Chapter 15:
    “My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions steadily recurred, but I was unable to solve them.”
    I felt as if Harry’s ghost were speaking to me.

A Compendium of Thirteen
    Characters, a Non Sequitur, a Confession, a Riddle, and Memories for H.B.

    Ethan Lord
1. H ow did Gobliatron, hero of the Fervidlies, who inhabit a country far to the north of Nowhere, disentangle himself from the ice-cold clutches of the Bobblehead, a machine man who froze great lakes by looking at them? Bobblehead froze Gobliatron solid with a mere glance. So Gobliatron, stranded in mid-step on a field of ice, began to think hot. He thought so hot he gave himself a fever. The fever melted the ice, and the hero was free.
2. A word eludes a picture. How do you draw whenever , but , and then , or last week ? Arrows.
3. R ed roosters all over