A Plea for Eros by Siri HustvedtPicador, 2006

Essays about place and memory and imagination and language, all-around pleasing, from the descriptions of New York, of Minnesota, of Norway to stories of word and wordplay. I suspect I would have enjoyed the longer essays on Henry James and Charles Dickens more if I’d read either of the works that are discussed the most in them (The Bostonians, Our Mutual Friend), but even without being familiar with the work, I enjoyed Hustvedt’s explorations of it. The title essay, meanwhile, with its talk about the messiness of “legislating desire,” sometimes struck me as stating the obvious — except that maybe it’s less obvious than it seems to me, because I’m young and queer and the idea that there can be (and is ) sex-positive feminism, and also kink-friendly feminism, is something I take for granted. While I understand Hustvedt’s claim that “American feminism has always had a puritanical strain, an imposed blindness to erotic truth,” it’s not something that resonates with my personal experience with feminist thought.