Vibration analysis: The Shaking Woman

“At one time or another all of us go to pieces,” writes Siri Hustvedt, “and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” I first heard of Hustvedt though her husband, the writer Paul Auster, and first encountered her writing through Mysteries of the Rectangle, her collection of astute, insightful, and engagingly personal essays on various works of visual art, before digging into her novels, starting with her debut, The Blindfold, which among other things fictionalizes her experiences with chronic debilitating migraines. Her new book, The Shaking Woman, or a History of My Nerves (Henry Holt, $28), is a relatively slim memoir and a seeming departure from her body of work. Yet The Shaking Woman is in many regards a synthesis of nearly every major theme she’s ever dealt with. It’s a nonfiction, existential detective story with faint promise of any neat resolution, concerning the search for a missing diagnosis. It explores lingering mysteries of behaviour and perception, of the body and the mind—if you’ll excuse the dualism—while attempting to uncover established facts with a discipline and fervor rare in writers of fiction. It’s at times scary, always fascinating, and a pleasure to read.

The Shaking Woman was prompted by an experience Hustvedt had in 2006, two years after the death of her father. She was giving a speech in his memory at the university where he taught when her body began to violently convulse. She was already in her 50s by this point and had no history of seizures. As her limbs began to shake and flail, she noticed that her ability to speak wasn’t impaired in the slightest. She gripped the edges of the podium and went ahead and gave the speech while from the neck down her body went nuts. The shaking woman returned three more times, once while giving another public presentation, once while appearing on a low-key Norwegian television programme, and once while hiking in the Pyrenees. The attacks are obviously triggered by something more than stage fright, a particular memory, or repressed mourning. Four years have passed and Hustvedt still doesn’t know where this shaking woman came from.

“I can’t really see where the illness ends and I begin,” writes Hustvedt, addressing how neurological or psychiatric illness is identified with self in a way that corporeal illness isn’t. A large part of this book is devoted to trying to come to terms with what feels like an experience with a separate Other, despite the fact that this Other comes from within. Hustvedt provides readers with a brief history of hysteria, a condition and/or a term that’s been used and abused, discarded or renamed, yet whose real significance remains ambiguous. She consults a number of doctors, both real and imagined, including psychiatrists, a group who, despite her obvious interest in psychology, she’d previously avoided. “I have the vague sense that there are hidden recesses of my personality that I am reluctant to penetrate,” she writes. “Maybe that’s the part of me that shook.”

Hustvedt at one point describes the shaking woman as “a speechless alien who appears only during my speeches… an untamed other self, a Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll, a kind of double.” She interrogates the shaking woman, and tries to befriend her. She emphasizes the essentiality of language to reflexive self-awareness, of putting together words so as to find meaning through making a story of one’s life. Of course, she questions that, too. “Am I looking for a narrative,” she asks, “a confabulation, to interpret a debility that is no more and no less than synaptic wiring and firing?” Yet she accumulates ample evidence of the scientific and therapeutic value of storytelling, quoting physician Rita Charon, who describes how “narrative knowledge, by looking closely at individual human beings grappling with the conditions of life, attempts to illuminate the universals of the human condition by revealing the particular.”


While hurling herself into what seems a very personal search it’s interesting, and endearing, to observe how Hustvedt is continually fascinated by other people, among them Neil, the boy who can remember things exclusively through the act of writing, only to forget the information written as soon as he sets down his pen; Bertha Pappenheim, Breuer’s famous hysterical patient who lived with a “double consciousness,” one basically normal, one who was always observing the other from the outside; S., the man from whom everything was involuntarily associated with images, even numbers and individual words, so that reading a single sentence overwhelmed him with myriad detailed and competing pictures; or the psychiatric patients to whom she teaches writing. Hustvedt also looks to fictional people for help in her investigation, such as Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych, unable to accept death, Dostoyevsky’s epileptic Prince Myshkin, or Borges’ Funes the Memorious, who can’t forget a thing.

Hustvedt is a truly voracious reader, as fascinated by psychology, philosophy and science as she is by art, poetry, and fiction. At times her points of reference are so esoteric, so indicative of deeply obsessive research, as to be nearly comical. I had to laugh out loud when she pulled a quote from Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Yet this all-inclusive devouring of literature provides Hustvedt with a healthy skepticism, a view of various phenomena so broad and alert to contradiction as to keep her from latching too readily onto any one theory, however fashionable. It allows her to be as judicious as she is promiscuous, so that every time she seems in danger of losing the thread, of digressing far off from her personal detective story, she always manages to loop back to the essence of her search and feed it with more insight and precision. “The search for the shaking woman takes me round and round because in the end it is also a search for perspectives that may illuminate who and what she is.” And, inevitably, what Hustvedt comes to accept is that the shaking woman is her, or one part of her, an individual like any other, unfixed, unimaginably intricate, and alive.

Sleep, shadows, secret lives: Murakami, Hoffmann, Stevenson

Sleeping Beauty Edward Burne-Jones 1870

The days close early, and soon they’ll change the time on us and darkness will fall before we even leave work. October brings with it a surplus of night, but not, for some of us, any extra sleep. Me, I wake up in the wee hours, and most often pass the time reading. Come autumn I get hooked on spooky stories, and I got to thinking on stories about sleep itself. A favourite from Haruki Murakami—you can find it in The Elephant Vanishes—is actually called ‘Sleep.’ A seemingly normal middleclass woman stops sleeping. She reads Anna Karinina. The problem is that she never catches up—I’m told by experts that no one ever actually “catches up” on sleep, but it’s a handy expression—and she kinda likes it, the freedom, the hours no longer spent idly—think of all the gigantic Russian novels to read. She feels energized, renewed, as though undergoing some transformation. But into what?

E.T.A. Hoffmann

I don’t know if E.T.A. Hoffmann had trouble sleeping, though it’s easy to imagine how the writing of ‘The Sandman,’ first published in 1818 in a collection entitled, aptly enough, The Night Pieces, might have troubled his rest of the author. “Something terrible has entered my life,” writes Nathaniel to his dear friend Lothario—the first part of the story is delivered through a series of letters. He recounts a childhood marked by his mother’s nightly demands that he be off to bed lest the sandman come and find him, and indeed, he hears him mounting the stairs as he lay awake in the dark. This sandman is eventually discovered to be a lawyer—like Hoffmann—and colleague of Nathaniel’s father, a man with hairy hands who scares children away with the mere threat of his touch, “a repellant, spectral monster bringing misery, distress and earthly and eternal ruination wherever he went.” Nathaniel believes him to be the murderer of his father. Now Nathaniel is an adult student, living in another city, but he claims the sandman has reappeared in his life, posing as a seller of barometers.

Hoffmann, with friends

Clara is Lothario’s sister and Nathaniel’s fiancée. She reads the letter intended for her brother and writes back to Nathaniel, assuring him in so many words that he’s basically just a little crazy. She suggests that he simply endeavour to “be cheerful.” But Nathaniel’s caught up in something clearly beyond Clara’s understanding. He’s convinced his will is subject to some power mysterious and vast. He’s confronted again by the barometer seller, who covers a table in glasses, and later telescopes, one of which is purchased by Nathaniel, who begins to feel foolish about his suspicions and becomes fascinated by the object. And it strikes me as interesting that this fascination with seeing, specifically with seeing through the aid of a mechanical object, is what seems to lead Nathaniel to his downfall. He falls in love with another woman, one not so cheerful as Clara, but whose strange stillness is transfixing. She’s more like a coveted object than a person. Something inside of Nathaniel begins to split apart. The ending of ‘The Sandman’ is rather ambiguous, and brilliantly chilling. It’s referenced at length in Freud’s ‘The Uncanny.’

Grave of Hoffmann

Hoffmann himself has been characterized as a guy with two distinct faces, and the theme of man’s dual nature is given further expression in ‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry,’ his most famous story, one often considered the prototype for detective fiction—it predates Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ by 20 years. It certainly must be the first example of this odd convention of having mysteries solved by old ladies—its title character petitions numerous local authorities to reconsider their assumptions about the murder of a celebrated maker of jewelry named Cardillac in 1680 Paris. Cardillac is actually the story’s most memorable character, with Hoffmann’s portrait compelling us to draw parallels between virtuosity and villainy, art and evil. Cardillac claims to have been followed all his life by an “evil star,” and we start to see how the jewels he so admires twinkle just like that heavenly eye. Of course ‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry’ isn’t terribly macabre, which is what I’ve been in the mood for and, with Halloween approaching, what I aim to steer you toward. But it led me to finally read a horror classic I’d previously neglected, one regarded as the definitive narrative investigation into the multiplicities of self, and the beast within.

Portraits of Stevenson by John Singer Sargent

Imagine you have an old friend so beloved to yourself, held in such high esteem by others, that were he to change radically, to alter his behaviour in a wildly grotesque fashion, you wouldn’t even recognize him standing before you. That’s one of the questions that lingers with you after reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson was inspired by the true story of Deacon Brody, respected businessman by day, burglar and thief by night. But the story of Dr Jekyll and his slow surrender to his shadow self also lends itself to being read as a parable of drug addiction, and it’s notable that after having his manuscript destroyed Stevenson rewrote the whole thing during a six-day cocaine binge. The work lends itself to so many interpretations, and nearly all of them work because Stevenson’s storytelling is so geared toward realistic detail and the rich evocations of its relationships. His is a world of bachelors, of intense male friendships, allegiances that defy law or even logic in the actions that inspire. (There’s surely a queer reading out there, too.)


“I have lost confidence in myself,” Jekyll tells his friend Utterson—another lawyer. Indeed his self is not what he thought it to be. The cruel and murderous Mr Hyde is the result of some fantastic experiment, but he was surely waiting within Jekyll’s psyche all along. It takes a drug to shake “the fortress of identity,” but the more important ingredient in Hyde’s birth was surely Jekyll’s urge to let loose his demons and to do so without punishment, to have his evil other hide in plain sight. Stevenson closes the novella with Jekyll’s own words, which elevates its horror by leaving us not with Utterson’s “I thought I knew the man…” but with something rather more frightening: the man never really knew himself.

A book as daunting as this beard: War and Peace, Part One

The signs preceded the announcement of the book’s publication. I moved house in July, and my new neighbours turned out to be Russians, a whole shwack of them whom I could watch go about their yard work and endless renovations through a series of large windows as though they were the subjects of some Bruegelesque panorama. They’re cute. They shout a lot. Later on I attended a normal party that my friend Peter mistook for a costume party. He came dressed as Napoleon, brought with him a bottle of brandy, sort of sulked much of the night. Finally, I got talking to this homeless guy who camps out front of a coffee shop I frequent. He never says much, just leaves out a collection plate and hunches over a book. I decided to ask him what he was reading. It was a dog-eared copy of War and Peace.

I’m not especially superstitious but I am fond of coincidence. Mere days after my chat with homeless guy I saw it on Amazon: a brand new translation of War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the Sonny and Cher of Russian-into-English translation, superstars in their field, and rightly so. The new hardcover edition looked regal, enormous, glorious. Its appearance was accompanied by trumpets in my mind, a proclamation that now, now the time has come for me to finally read Leo Tolstoy’s gargantuan magnum opus about Russian society during the Napoleonic era. I felt a surge of readiness and ordered a review copy.

Full disclosure: I am not qualified to be a books columnist. Among my chief deficiencies are two items that apply directly to this column: 1) I haven’t read all the classics of world literature, I mean like not even the top five. 2) I have a problem with big books. Now, the first deficiency might come down to my lack of education or, more self-flatteringly, my diversity of interests that keep me from pursuing any sort of regimented reading program. The second deficiency however I consider to be a professional hazard. I review books. I read slow. There’s a lot of books out there. So tell me how a guy’s supposed to pay the bills reviewing all these new books and still have time to catch up on every literary doorstop in the Everyman’s Library?

But enough excuses. The moment had come, and along with it the holidays. Surely Christmas in Cowtown with the folks would provide ample time for Tolstoy. Yet it proved impossible. There were visits. There were sudden meals occurring at strange hours. There were walks in need of shoveling. There was booze. More problematically, every time I endeavoured to dig in my heels and just get going already I found the book unexpectedly forbidding. The entire first paragraph is in French for god’s sake. I’m a bad, bad Canadian. Je ne parle pas francias. I’m from Alberta. Okay, so there’s footnotes with all the English, but still…

This pathetic farce continued. I spent a promising night in the mountains, but got sidelined by two books I purchased at The Banff Book and Art Den –F. González-Crussi’s On Seeing and John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed, both of which are really good. Then came my Christmas gifts –Brad Pager’s critical study of Werner Herzog and some long out-of-print volume with the delicious title of Sex and the Occult– which added further, enormously pleasurable distraction from what I was now thinking of as my War and Peace self-betterment project. Then January came, deadlines were looming. I was, it seemed, an utter failure.

Then a funny thing happened. This time, not a coincidence exactly, but a sort of accidental gift. Having finished with writing for the day, I decided to hike over to a quiet coffee shop a good half-hour’s walk away to get in some reading. I scooped up my satchel and left, not realizing until I got there and ordered something hot that I scooped the wrong satchel, not the one containing whatever book I should be reading for work but the one with, you guessed it, War and Peace. Fuck it, I thought, and settled into it.

…And having made it past the first few pages this time, I realized something: it’s terrific, even fun. The French bits began to feel rhythmically appealing, of a piece within the social pretensions of the many characters, who gradually didn’t seem so difficult to keep track of but rather came vibrantly to life through sly descriptions –“Being an enthusiast had become her social position”– and even more so through the dialogue –“Opinions are opinions, but you see what a good and nice fellow I am,” says Pierre, not long before we find him tying a police officer to a bear and tossing them into the Moika. “Precisely because you’re father is rich, I don’t consider myself his relation,” Boris tells Pierre –as Pierre’s father lays dying and Boris’ mom is hanging around making an embarrassingly desperate play for the gasping man’s pity cash.

I’ve still barley cut into War and Peace’s 1224 pages, but I am now officially under its spell. I’m equally aware of course that it’ll probably take me a while to get through it, to truly savour it, and so I will report on my progress in future columns. For now, adieu, mon petit liseur. And please feel free to correct my miserable, condescending French.

"You'd laugh like it was the end of the world": Daniil Kharms

If we’re to take his testaments at face value, it would seem that the rather strange Russian writer known as Daniil Kharms was born twice. Actually, make that three times. Mmm… okay, maybe four. He emerged from the womb four months ahead of schedule. His father, very concerned that the child should be born precisely on New Year’s Day, was so enraged with this premature arrival that he pushed the boy back in the womb. When next little Daniil entered the world he was immediately placed in an incubator. Was his eventual emergence from the incubator his final, proper birth? Or was it many years later, when, drawing upon with the English words “charms” and “harms,” the adult Daniil adopted the surname by which we refer to him?

The entire notion of face value is questioned tirelessly throughout the work of Daniil Kharms. A literary artist and fixture of the salons aligned with a number of radical movements, he was a devout terrorist in the battle against causality and common sense. In his writings, not even the sequence of prime numbers is to be taken for granted. By the time you’ve read just a handful of his mostly very short, spare, often cruel and poetic texts, his words have so effectively cleansed the imagination’s palate that each new phrase seems to invent the world one object at a time, giving birth to it piece by piece like some baffled, amnesiac God trying to familiarize Himself with each and every tool in his workshop.

Kharms sought not ambiguity but a certain aesthetic “correctness” that could only be achieved through the destructive mastering of language, along with the consistent insertion of some sort of error to set his proposed truths in stark relief. Nevertheless, certainty is indeed a rare thing in Kharms’ worldview. And he did indeed live in particularly uncertain times. The one thing we do know for sure is that Daniil Kharms –or at least the man born as Daniil Yuvachev– starved to death in the psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital during the siege of Leningrad having only ever seen his children’s prose published in his lifetime. He was 36. And apparently, he hated children.

Frequently, if quite misleadingly, linked to the Absurdists and their ilk, Kharms is very much the sort of writer I should have discovered in my teens, when my appetite for forthright nonsense and heroic madness was probably at its all-time peak. Fortunately, coming to it now, Kharms’ work strikes me as possessing a richness that would have likely gone underappreciated by my younger self. In any case I’m only now aware of him thanks to the recent publication of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook/Duckworth, $35), a superb introduction to Kharms’ work edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich.

Chains of destruction proliferate. In ‘Events’ a man dies from gluttony, another from bad news, a woman perishes after falling from a cupboard, children drown in a pond, an old woman takes to drinking and wanders the highways. “All good people,” Kharms laments, “But they don’t know how to hold their ground.” In another piece old women tumble from windows one after the other, until the author tires of witness them. In ‘Lynch Law’ our collective desire for blood is coolly surveyed. In other pieces people disappear into woods or even one body part at a time. Reading these works as having been written in defiance of Stalinist purges is tempting, interesting in its own right, but also limiting. Kharms’ imaginings are too wild and resonant to be contained purely within their political context.

The darkly compelling, very funny, and altogether remarkable story ‘The Old Woman,’ one of the only pieces in Today I Wrote Nothing that exceeds a few pages in length, conveys a strong sense of the diverse forms of dream logic Kharms employs. An old woman –a archetype always to be feared in Kharms– enters the house of the protagonist and dies, or rather seems to die, upsetting his plans to write, to pursue a budding romance, to simply relax in his home. He fears that her death, thought owing nothing to any action of his, will be blamed on him, perhaps because he loathes her so. In this and other works, Kharms shares something with Kafka in his chilling distribution of guilt.

Kafka, and even more so Gogol –who he proudly points to as a major influence– are perhaps the writers most readily comparable to Kharms. Though, in terms of his troubling equations of cause and effect, of things appearing and disappearing, of things living and dying –see ‘Father and Daughter’ for a haunting example– one could argue he outdoes both of them. He reveals both the humour and the wonder in things that fail to fully materialize, in events that disrupt order only to pass by and be shrugged off. There is always this fear of proceeding, of ambition itself –the world is so dangerous, after all. It’s a terrifying perspective that feels more real the more it screws with our agreed upon reality. It’s like what Kharms himself promises at the end of one of the pieces included here: “You’d laugh like it was the end of the world.”

Queasy, Cruel, Comic: Margot at the Wedding

Margot at the Wedding is a movie that, above all else, turns on the delicious discomforts of recognition. Recognition of self in family, family in self, and, just as importantly, the lack of any recognition altogether. Discomfort is of course rarely all that delicious in real life, but when sculpted into taut, tense, witty scenarios by writer/director Noah Baumbach, and embodied by the superlative casts he and Douglas Aibel assemble, it can frequently reach queasy, effervescent heights of comic wonder.

The movie begins with successful novelist Margot (Nicole Kidman) wiggling through a corridor on a train leaving her comfort zone of New York City for some island near Long Island. That our titular heroine starts her story in a state of disequilibrium is made complete by the rather ingenious way in which she’s introduced to us: mistaking him for her own teenage son Claude (Zane Pais), she sits beside a complete stranger. Her failure to recognize the hapless, approval-seeking Claude speaks volumes about Margot’s difficulties with and resistance to motherhood, as it does about the sort of humour that Margot at the Wedding runs on. As with Baumbach’s break-out hit The Squid & the Whale, laughs escape from our recognizing the dynamics of dysfunctional families, if not, crucially for the sake of comic surprise, the particularities of the family in question, confirming Tolstoy’s famous line about how all unhappy families are different.

A defining factor in Baumbach’s dissection of family is his emphatic interest in giving his adults very adult stories and his kids stories focused around their eager ambition to penetrate the banal mysteries of adult life. Adults and kids intermingle without having to compromise the overall tone of the movie, which hums along, fuelled by need, injury and the distribution of emotional collateral. With child in tow, though conspicuously sans husband, Margot ostensibly arrives on the quiet island to attend and support the marriage of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to tubby, nervy ex-rocker Malcolm (Jack Black), who she met only recently. Once enveloped by the affluent, small community Margot and Claude are confronted with scenes of sexual and fraternal manipulation and expectation, and in these scenes their disparate age groups become irrelevant. Insecurity becomes an equal opportunity threat to all involved.

Squaring off against sea, shrubs, childhood mementos and a lonely, bare tree, under overcast east coast light rendered with muted beauty by ace cinematographer Harris Savides, Margot and Pauline’s interaction forms a consistent centre to this movie that handles story in the loosest terms it can get away with. Things don’t progress a whole lot in Margot at the Wedding, but the static nature of the drama is engagingly offset by how terrifically funny it all is –and its funny because we keep discovering more and more about how these wildly antagonistic sisters operate. And its hard to imagine this relationship playing as well as it does without one of the most inspired strokes of casting in recent memory.

Kidman and Leigh as sisters still strikes me as an utterly bizarre, unlikely choice, the former actor distinguished by her elegance, taste and understatement, the latter by her ballsy, go-for-broke, sometimes deeply mannered performances. My first thought was: this movie’s not big enough for the two of them. My second was: that’s goddamned brilliant! They’re both so good, so mutually attuned to Baumbach’s style while coming to it from very different sensibilities, that they dangle side by side from this family tree with inspired incongruity: Margot the privately grotesque star of the family, Pauline the more sympathetic, if hopelessly lost black sheep. And when you throw the added wild card of Black into the mix, playing a character that no one, his fiancée included, seems entirely comfortable with, you’ve pretty much sealed the deal as far as comic tension is concerned.

The cruelty that constitutes the stock in trade of Margot never really gets shaken off. Thankfully. But that Margot is such a compulsive bitch most of the time makes her role in the family all the more compelling to work through. Its not just this movie that needs Margot to function, her family needs her too, as a way to reflect back their own weaknesses and conflicted feelings with success as defined by the outside world. And, as jarring as the final gesture made in Margot at the Wedding is, it displays a remarkable flicker of optimism in this mostly nasty, mostly pleasingly shapeless world Baumbach’s created. Out of nowhere, the movie seems to be telling us that we never know when our deeper moral impulses might just leap out, yank us by the lapels, and force us to live up to something better than our conditions promise.