"It is 1942. The incident occurs in Leningrad, during the siege, if you do not know, one of the worst moments in the history of Humanity. Only 500,000 people died in that place. And there is Bakhtin held in an apartment waiting for they kill him any day. He has a lot of tobacco but no paper to roll it in. So he picks up the pages of a manuscript he has been working on for 10 years and breaks them in strips so he can roll the cigarettes.

- Is it the only copy?

- It's the only copy ... Anyway, when you're going to die, what's more important? A book or a cigarette? So, sucking and expelling, little by little, Bakhtin smoked his own book. "

Sitting in an armchair in the living room of her house, with her legs crossed and her back perfectly straight in a position that reveals her systematic practice of yoga, Siri Hustvedt remembers - although not phrase by sentence - the conversation of the scene of the minute 102 from the movie Smoke , which won the Silver Bear of the Berlin Festival and whose script was written by her husband, Paul Auster.

Hustvedt uses the anecdote of Bakhtin to jump to another anecdote that reflects much of his life and personality. "It was at a party, a few years ago. I did not know that person, so we talked about everything and nothing, and then he said: 'I know that your husband is an expert in Bakhtin, a Russian theorist.' And I I replied: 'Actually, Paul has not read a letter from Bakhtin, but I told him the story of how the only copy of the book he had written about German literature was smoked during the Leningrad site that he later used in Smoke .' man couldn't digest that. He walked away from me. I had pricked his hero's bubble. The hero's wife was not supposed to have brought the anecdote. In social psychology, there is a word for this, negative response ( backlash ): when the woman does not adapt to what is expected of her, it generates aggression and anger, "Hustvedt explains, modulating the voice perfectly. Perhaps Hustvedt is right when he states in his collection of essays and lectures The woman who looks at men who look at women that "a work of art has no sex." But the people surrounding the work of art do.

Smoke's anecdote - and the anecdote of the anecdote - summarizes the work and interests of the winner of the last Princess of Asturias Award for Letters . At 64, Siri Hustvedt is a slightly Norwegian American - the country where she spent several years in her childhood and adolescence and whose language was spoken in her home -, born in Minnesota but a New Yorker of adoption and feeling, with a heterogeneous work translated 40 languages ​​that combine creation - novel and poetry -, philosophy and essay on issues as diverse as painting (for example, Goya or Tiepolo), neurology, psychology, and psychiatry. And that often combines all that. Perhaps because, as she herself affirms in A plea for Eros , literature "imitates memory without being memory."

Everything, in addition, with an ideological touch -Hustvedt is from the left, and, as the reader, feminist- and other staff, almost celebrity , has already detected, because her husband is Paul Auster, one of the most famous writers in the world , who The Princess - then, Prince - of Asturias won in 2006, and whose delivery she accompanied him. On October 18, the papers will be reversed, when Hustvedt picks up the award in a city, Oviedo, in which it seems that what surprised him most is that, as he says in one of the few moments in which his voice reveals a feeling of surprise, "is very curious, play the bagpipes ...".

Although Auster and Hustvedt have been married for almost four decades, she believes that much of the literary community is not able to accept the idea that a woman can be an independent creator of her husband. And not only because of the anecdote of Bakhtin. An anecdote that, to curl the rich, is false: the writer spent World War II in Moscow, not in Leningrad, and his manuscript was not smoked, but it burned in a German bombing.

Siri Hustvedt at his home in New York.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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