The Blindfold

"The Blindfold" is a riveting account of one woman's search for identity within a maze of images imposed on her by others. Iris Vegan, an impoverished graduate student in New York City, is hired by an urban recluse to provide insanely precise verbal descriptions of the possessions of a murdered woman, a photographer's portrait of her takes on an eerie life of its own; Iris, hospitalized for migraine, shares a room with a neurologically devastated woman and finds in her uncanny echoes of her own shattered existence; finally, a novel she is helping to translate invades her life and sends her into the city's nighttime demimonde to act out its brutal themes. Hustvedt brings a fierce intelligence and stunning artistic originality to the darkest conundrums of sexuality and identity.