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Hausfrau
For readers of Claire Messud and Mary Gaitskill comes a striking debut novel of marriage, fidelity, sex, and morality, featuring a fascinating heroine who struggles to live a life with meaning.
Hausfrau
haus·frau \haus-frau\ n 1: Origin: German.
Housewife, homemaker. 2: A married woman. 3: A novel by Jill Alexander Essbaum
Anna was a good wife, mostly.
Anna Benz, an American in her late thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno—a banker—and their three young children in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zürich. Though she leads a comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable Bruno or even with her own thoughts and feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises even her.
But Anna can't easily extract herself from these affairs. When she wants to end them, she finds it's difficult. Tensions escalate, and her lies start to spin out of control. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back.
Intimate, intense, and written with the precision of a Swiss Army knife, Jill Alexander Essbaum's debut novel is an unforgettable story of marriage, fidelity, sex, morality, and most especially self. Navigating the lines between lust and love, guilt and shame, excuses and reasons, Anna Benz is an electrifying heroine whose passions and choices readers will debate with recognition and fury. Her story reveals, with honesty and great beauty, how we create ourselves and how we lose ourselves and the sometimes disastrous choices we make to find ourselves.
Hausfrau
haus·frau \haus-frau\ n 1: Origin: German.
Housewife, homemaker. 2: A married woman. 3: A novel by Jill Alexander Essbaum
Anna was a good wife, mostly.
Anna Benz, an American in her late thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno—a banker—and their three young children in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zürich. Though she leads a comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable Bruno or even with her own thoughts and feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises even her.
But Anna can't easily extract herself from these affairs. When she wants to end them, she finds it's difficult. Tensions escalate, and her lies start to spin out of control. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back.
Intimate, intense, and written with the precision of a Swiss Army knife, Jill Alexander Essbaum's debut novel is an unforgettable story of marriage, fidelity, sex, morality, and most especially self. Navigating the lines between lust and love, guilt and shame, excuses and reasons, Anna Benz is an electrifying heroine whose passions and choices readers will debate with recognition and fury. Her story reveals, with honesty and great beauty, how we create ourselves and how we lose ourselves and the sometimes disastrous choices we make to find ourselves.
324 pages, Hardcover
First published March 17, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,686 reviews
March 5, 2016
A well-written novel about a depressive, narcissistic American expat in Zurich which I can't say I really enjoyed. It has been compared to Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, presumably because the central character (also an Anna) feels trapped in an unfulfilling marriage and because it is obviously building to a grand tragic climax. But to me the voice is positioned in a much more consciously American tradition; actually Anna reminds me of no one so much as Esther Greenwood from The Bell Jar, which, like Hausfrau, is also a poet's first novel.
In a weird way, Hausfrau made me quite keen to read Essbaum's poetry. A lot of what is wrong with the book comes from little conceits that might make for a clever couplet but that are drawn out far beyond what their symbolic power can sustain here. In German lessons, Anna learns about the simple past tense and the present perfect, and Essbaum leadenly has Anna ask herself: But how often is the past simple? Is the present ever perfect?
Not only has this been seen a hundred times before, it is repeated with variations until any residual subtlety is long since exhausted � just twenty pages later, we are told that Anna's Scottish lover spoke
the kind of German that men who had affairs with sad women spoke. He was terrible with possessives. [� Anna] was sloppy in her conjugations, reckless in her positioning. She confused tense with mood and relied too often on the passive voice.
Yeah yeah, we get it.
Anna is a difficult central character to deal with. She is defined primarily by her passivity, which is ‘the hub from which the greater part of her psychology radiated�; she's ‘a swinging door, a body gone limp in the arms of another body carrying it�. Most readers will find themselves agreeing with her therapist:
Did Anna not worry that she perpetuated the stereotype of the fragile, subjugated woman? That excepting her manner of dress and the language she used and the Handy in her purse there was little to distinguish her from a woman who lived fifty, seventy, one hundred years earlier? They didn't drive cars or have bank accounts either. Didn't she understand that she could be anything she wanted to be? Didn't she think she had a responsibility to be something?
That Essbaum wrote and included this passage shows that she understood the problem. But it's not one she solves satisfactorily; Anna is much less sympathetic than her Tolstoyan or Flaubertian forebears, because she has so much more control over her life than they did.
I did think the sex was interesting � joyless, desperate sex for the most part, but showing a type of self-destructive libido that isn't often well described in a female character. Essbaum writes these scenes well, without any cliché and with lots of fresh imagery: at the end of one encounter with a family friend in the woods, Anna ‘pulsed around him, then let him slip from her like a soaped finger sliding through a tight ring�.
So much the worse, then, that the novel punishes her for these indiscretions in what seems awfully like the moralistic plots of a more paternalistic age. I see from elsewhere that Essbaum considers herself ‘devoted to Jesus Christ� � is that what's going on here? Some kind of crypto-religious ethical parable, dressed up to look like psychological inevitability?
I don't know; and perhaps I am being unnecessarily prickly because the book is set more or less where I live, and consequently I kept getting distracted by all the things I thought should be said about the subjects she brings up. Maybe that's why I couldn't get on with her � anyone who writes favourably about the sodding bell-ringing here is never going to have my sympathy.
February 9, 2015
“Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.� � Joan Crawford
The last sentence of this book is still ringing in my head. I cannot tell you what a delight and challenge it was to read. It’s no surprise that Essbaum is first a poet, second a novelist. This book was gripping, extremely sensual, raw and biting, and incredibly sad. That being said, it’s probably one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
Outwardly, Anna seems like a perfect American expat wife in Switzerland. She loves her husband, three children, and being a homemaker, or hausfrau. Inwardly, Anna has many, many secrets. Essbaum ingeniously weaves Anna’s psychoanalysis sessions with her psychiatrist, her German language classes, and her daily excursions, to enter Anna’s mind and inner world. Both her mental clarity and lack of conscience are enough to make you shutter, but still want to reach out to her and save her. I love this woman; in admitting as much, are there parts of her that all women can relate to? I think so. Note how she relates the feelings associated with the ending of a relationship:
“Fire is beautifully cruel. That fusion occurs only at a specific heat. That blood, in fact can boil. That the dissolution of an affair is an entropic reaction, and the disorder it tends toward is flammable. That a heart will burn. And burn and burn and burn. That an ordinary flame’s hottest point cannot always be seen.�
Here’s another of Anna’s contemplations that is so simple and yet profound:
“Anna loved and didn’t love sex. Anna needed and didn’t need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted. And wanted. She wanted to be wanted.�
As a film buff, a lot of the elements presented in this book reminded me of revamped versions of a couple of my favorite classic films (both French): Belle de Jour and Diary of a Chambermaid. In the end, you learn so much about the protagonist through their actions, but know so little about who they truly are. They hold the audience and reader at a careful distance, and we’re left to our own haunting conclusions by the end.
The last sentence of this book is still ringing in my head. I cannot tell you what a delight and challenge it was to read. It’s no surprise that Essbaum is first a poet, second a novelist. This book was gripping, extremely sensual, raw and biting, and incredibly sad. That being said, it’s probably one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
Outwardly, Anna seems like a perfect American expat wife in Switzerland. She loves her husband, three children, and being a homemaker, or hausfrau. Inwardly, Anna has many, many secrets. Essbaum ingeniously weaves Anna’s psychoanalysis sessions with her psychiatrist, her German language classes, and her daily excursions, to enter Anna’s mind and inner world. Both her mental clarity and lack of conscience are enough to make you shutter, but still want to reach out to her and save her. I love this woman; in admitting as much, are there parts of her that all women can relate to? I think so. Note how she relates the feelings associated with the ending of a relationship:
“Fire is beautifully cruel. That fusion occurs only at a specific heat. That blood, in fact can boil. That the dissolution of an affair is an entropic reaction, and the disorder it tends toward is flammable. That a heart will burn. And burn and burn and burn. That an ordinary flame’s hottest point cannot always be seen.�
Here’s another of Anna’s contemplations that is so simple and yet profound:
“Anna loved and didn’t love sex. Anna needed and didn’t need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted. And wanted. She wanted to be wanted.�
As a film buff, a lot of the elements presented in this book reminded me of revamped versions of a couple of my favorite classic films (both French): Belle de Jour and Diary of a Chambermaid. In the end, you learn so much about the protagonist through their actions, but know so little about who they truly are. They hold the audience and reader at a careful distance, and we’re left to our own haunting conclusions by the end.
January 31, 2016
The book had me at the first line: “Anna was a good wife, mostly.� Anna, a complicated woman with a secret life, is in a constant state of longing, shame, and self-loathing. She is unfaithful to her husband but faithful to her soul-searching. But who wants to keep reading a book about an unfaithful wife who feels shitty? I wanted to keep reading because of how well-drawn Anna is, because of the art that Essbaum uses to develop her, because of the way Essbaum beckoned me to enter Anna’s head and help her sort it all out. Search for the elusive hope.
My only, and I do mean only, complaint is that there are too many map details. After all, I’m not a taxi driver in search of a GPS. The book is set in Switzerland, which is cool, but I could have done without all the street names. Besides, they are long and unpronounceable, as is often the case with German. But big deal, right? I don’t have to pronounce them out loud, so I don’t know why it bothers me to not be able to pronounce them in my head.
In this book, action is in short supply and humor is completely missing, so if you’re wanting something fast or funny, forget it. But if you’re looking for a book that makes you think, one that is full of psychological and philosophical insights, and whose language is impeccable and clever, go no further. And even though there’s not a lot of action, there is a well-developed plot.
A warning: In the first half of the book, there is some crude sex, which doesn’t seem to fit with the tone of the book. Honestly, I just wasn’t expecting the word blowjob to appear in a book that doesn’t have a conversational tone. (Yikes, am I saying blowjob is conversational? I can’t remember the last time I used blowjob in a conversation!) Anyway, the sex stuff didn’t offend me, it just surprised me.
Oh, so many cool things about this book. There’s a psychiatrist (with a Jungian bent) who spouts wisdom. She appears right in the middle of scenes, but she isn’t in the least intrusive. I gobbled up her words, and highlighted until the cows came home.
Another cool thing: I got to be in the past and the present on the same page, without ever losing my place. I didn’t once say, “Huh? Where am I?� Essbaum picks me up and sets me down in another place in time, and then picks me up and sets me right back down in the place where I started, and I never stumble. It’s seamless—and it’s magical.
And I’m always a sucker when a writer does clever stuff with the language. Anna is taking a class in German grammar. So throughout the book, German language structure is applied to life. Here are two gems:
“She was sloppy in her conjugations, reckless in her positioning. She confused tense with mood and relied too often on the passive voice.�
And:
“Weak verbs are regular verbs that follow typical rules. Strong verbs are irregular. They don’t follow patterns. You deal with strong verbs on their own terms. Like people, Anna thought. The strong ones stand out. The weak ones are all the same.�
I’m not surprised that Essbaum was a poet first; the language is gorgeous. What is surprising is that this is her debut novel—she seems like such a seasoned pro.
Hausfrau is deep, thought-provoking, and perfect in style and tone. And it’s a luscious character study. I hope that Essbaum has a bunch more Hausfraus sitting around in her head, and that she’ll turn them into books. I will ferociously gulp them down.
My only, and I do mean only, complaint is that there are too many map details. After all, I’m not a taxi driver in search of a GPS. The book is set in Switzerland, which is cool, but I could have done without all the street names. Besides, they are long and unpronounceable, as is often the case with German. But big deal, right? I don’t have to pronounce them out loud, so I don’t know why it bothers me to not be able to pronounce them in my head.
In this book, action is in short supply and humor is completely missing, so if you’re wanting something fast or funny, forget it. But if you’re looking for a book that makes you think, one that is full of psychological and philosophical insights, and whose language is impeccable and clever, go no further. And even though there’s not a lot of action, there is a well-developed plot.
A warning: In the first half of the book, there is some crude sex, which doesn’t seem to fit with the tone of the book. Honestly, I just wasn’t expecting the word blowjob to appear in a book that doesn’t have a conversational tone. (Yikes, am I saying blowjob is conversational? I can’t remember the last time I used blowjob in a conversation!) Anyway, the sex stuff didn’t offend me, it just surprised me.
Oh, so many cool things about this book. There’s a psychiatrist (with a Jungian bent) who spouts wisdom. She appears right in the middle of scenes, but she isn’t in the least intrusive. I gobbled up her words, and highlighted until the cows came home.
Another cool thing: I got to be in the past and the present on the same page, without ever losing my place. I didn’t once say, “Huh? Where am I?� Essbaum picks me up and sets me down in another place in time, and then picks me up and sets me right back down in the place where I started, and I never stumble. It’s seamless—and it’s magical.
And I’m always a sucker when a writer does clever stuff with the language. Anna is taking a class in German grammar. So throughout the book, German language structure is applied to life. Here are two gems:
“She was sloppy in her conjugations, reckless in her positioning. She confused tense with mood and relied too often on the passive voice.�
And:
“Weak verbs are regular verbs that follow typical rules. Strong verbs are irregular. They don’t follow patterns. You deal with strong verbs on their own terms. Like people, Anna thought. The strong ones stand out. The weak ones are all the same.�
I’m not surprised that Essbaum was a poet first; the language is gorgeous. What is surprising is that this is her debut novel—she seems like such a seasoned pro.
Hausfrau is deep, thought-provoking, and perfect in style and tone. And it’s a luscious character study. I hope that Essbaum has a bunch more Hausfraus sitting around in her head, and that she’ll turn them into books. I will ferociously gulp them down.
October 15, 2015
"It's thrilling, isn't it?"
Yes, Anna thought. Adultery's a blast.
It wasn't until page 292 of this 320 page book that I realized that this was Well done, Essbaum.
That's one of the few compliments I can give this book.
In general, it was a horrible book - depressing and a waste of time.
Anna is an expat. An American who married a Swiss and now lives in Switzerland with her husband and three children. She has a series of extramarital affairs with men whom she apparently is choosing at random.
Why is Anna always having extramarital affairs?
Well, that's the big question, isn't it. And the answer is... I have no flippin' clue. Essbaum doesn't either. Anna's husband - the asshole Bruno - insists Anna goes to a psychiatrist.
It was Bruno who'd insisted she see a psychotherapist: I've had enough of your fucking misery, Anna. Go fix yourself, is what he'd said to her.
You can see how charming and loving he is. /s
ANYWAY. Anna's psychiatrist, Doktor Messerli is one of THE WORST psychotherapists I've ever seen in fiction. And I've seen some really bad ones. She is TERRIBLE. 99% of what comes out of her mouth is utter garbage. I have no idea if Essbaum has ever been in analysis or has any psychology background, but let me tell you that it is SHIT. If that's the way Essbaum thinks that psychotherapy is conducted, then anyone could be a psychotherapist without even any training or education. The sessions basically consist of Anna asking the Doktor inane questions and the Doktor huffily answering her. It was total bullcrap.
"Do you believe in ghosts?" Anna asked Doktor Messerli.
"It doesn't matter whether you believe in ghosts. The ghosts believe in you."
My brain was ready to explode in complete frustration and rage each time Anna was in one of these completely bogus psychotherapy sessions. That Doktor should be sued for malpractice.
"Grief that finds no relief in tears makes other organs weep," Doktor Messerli said.
Another thing that bothered me about the sessions was the Essbaum was very heavy-handed in using them to frame Anna's life. Anna will be thinking something or doing something and then the next thing you know Essbaum plunges you into the middle of one of Anna's sessions and she'll be asking her Doktor about it. It's trite, stupid, and very hackneyed.
Let me tell you another completely hackneyed thing about the book: Anna's German lessons. It's "amazing" how every single German lesson Anna takes has sentences and verbs that have to do with what is going on in her life right now. For instance, when Anna is considering having an affair, that day in class they "miraculously" talk about prepositions like "under, against, on top of, from behind." I find this trite beyond belief. I really didn't appreciate this. It happens in every single lesson.
My overall opinion of the book is that Essbaum was trying way too hard.
Please be prepared for disgusting sex in this novel. Now, I think that Essbaum purposefully worked hard to make the sex scenes ickily described - at least I hope she did o.O - but regardless of WHY she did it, they are unpleasant to read.
Anna squeezed him, then pulsed around him then let him slip from her like a soaped finger sliding through a tight ring.
She also describes sex as being vandalized, as in "He vandalized me." WTF? Again, this was probably the author's intent.
...as Anna gave in to the ruddy, florid bud of his erection.
Some of it was really making me ill:
Whores, Anna once read, make the very best wives. They are accustomed to the varying moods of men, they keep their broken hearts to themselves, and easy women always ease through grief.
This thought occurred to Anna unbidden when... she slipped a two-franc piece into a coin slot... It was a thought called forward by the simple action of shoving a thing into the hole it's meant for.
This is just so disgusting on so many levels.
And again, I have NO IDEA why Anna is cheating with various men throughout the novel. No idea. Essbaum talks over (and over and over and over) about how "passive" Anna is and her "passivity" etc. etc. and I think that is completely wrong. Having affairs with multiple men is not "being passive." I just can't even with this shit. And I have no idea if Essbaum actually believes this, or only the character Anna believes this and Anna is wrong about herself? It's really never fully explained.
Anna's tendency to be ignorant - she doesn't have a bank account, a source of income, any family (outside of her asshole husband and small children), any real friends, she doesn't know how to drive, and she doesn't even know what her husband does at his job - is less "passivity" to me and more "total and complete apathy." Anna comes off as a completely apathetic and almost emotionless person. If you asked me why she was having affairs, I'd say it was because she was desperately trying to feel something. She definitely wasn't a nymphomaniac. And although she is married to a complete asshole, that's not why she's cheating. And it isn't boredom. They keep blaming her being bored in the book, but I don't think that's it (although I think a paying job would have been wonderful for her and helped her immensely). I really think she's just struggling to feel anything. She's apathetic about her marriage. She's apathetic about her kids. She's apathetic about her affairs. She just doesn't care about anything.
They also discuss the fact that Anna's affairs might be motivated by boredom. But she CHOOSES to be bored. Honestly, she never does anything.
I don't know how to deal with a character like this. It's hard to get emotionally invested in a character that says "Meh." in reaction to almost everything. What am I supposed to do with this? It was hard for me to be concerned, worried or even interested in what was going on in her life. I found her very hard to relate to. Not because of the cheating! But because she was SO uninterested in her own life. She had no motivations and no drive of any kind. She just fucks around.
You mean with men.
No, I mean she doesn't work outside the home (and the care of her children is mainly in the hands of her MIL, so I can't really say she was spending a great deal of time raising the kids), she doesn't bother to learn how to drive, she doesn't bother to learn how to speak German even though she's lived in Switzerland for 10 or 11 years (!!!!!), she doesn't bother to ask her husband what he bleeping does for a living, she doesn't make any real friends (in 11 years!?!?!?!?)... I just... I can't.... I don't...
I would have said clinical depression, if you'd asked me for a diagnosis.
Anna's husband is a huge asshole. I had NO FLIPPING IDEA why Anna married him and despite Essbaum's feeble attempts to explain why it remained a complete mystery. I don't think having an asshole husband is an excuse for cheating, but he's certainly not doing himself any favors by being a cold, merciless bastard to her. Of course she'd never dream of leaving him or getting a divorce. She's so apathetic I'm surprised that she gets out of bed in the morning, much less does something as ambitious as demanding a divorce, or, I don't know, asking her husband to treat her with a bit of kindness and respect.
The book is also filled with the kind of meaningless pontificating like:
"For even infants understand the rotten, instinctive truth: that no pain ever takes full leave of its person. That pain is greedy and doesn't give ground. That a body remembers what hurt it and how. Old pains get swallowed by new pains. But newer pains always follow suit.
Which leads DIRECTLY into Anna asking her psychiatrist
"What is the purpose of pain?"
You can see why I wanted to throw this book into the wall. o.O
The German language, like a woman, has moods. WTF?
But consider: Every year you have a death day as well [as a birthday], only you don't know which one it is. What kind of bullshit is this?
And one of her lovers is a scientist who studies fire, so then there are ENDLESS PAGES AND PAGES of fire metaphors and fire explanations for every single emotion and thought Anna has. It's highly annoying and stupid.
That fire is beautifully cruel. That fusion occurs only at a specific heat. That blood, in fact, can boil. That the dissolution of an affair is an entropic reaction, and the disorder it tends toward is flammable. That a heart will burn. And burn and burn and burn. That an ordinary flame's hottest point cannot always be seen.
There's literally PAGES of this stuff in the book. Ugh.
There's also a completely bullshit theory on page 217 about how you can psychoanalyze someone by how they speak their second language. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME. It includes stuff like "he had problems with possessives, therefore he believes in free love and affairs" and such nonsense. TOTAL CRAP.
Although I didn't predict the final ending of the book until page 292, another "twist" that I think the author was trying to shock me with I figured out on page 14. This just solidified the "hackneyed" label I ended up giving the book in my mind.
Tl;dr - Well, I can't give this one star because although it was highly annoying and I would never read it again out of my own free will, it wasn't completely worthless. When I realized I was gobsmacked. That was actually done well. Although,
So. I can't say I recommend this book, but it wasn't completely worthless. Hackneyed, trite, cliched - my overall feelings during this book was that Essbaum was just trying way too hard. You can FEEL how hard she's trying. That's not good, it's grating on the reader.
I really don't understand why this is getting so much praise.
BOOKS THIS REMINDED ME OF:
by Zane.
That horrid little story by Alice Munro: To Reach Japan. You can find it in her book .
P.S. Oh, and Essbaum describes a black person this way ...and an impossibly handsome Nigerian whose skin was as smooth and dark as Sprungli chocolate. You KNOW how much that pisses me off. NO FOOD / SKIN COMPARISONS. UGH. Only black person in the book and she has to compare his skin to chocolate. ARGHHHHHHH!!!!!
P.P.S. I just realized (based on research I literally did two seconds ago, that this is I exhibit mild relief upon hearing this, although the book did strongly
Yes, Anna thought. Adultery's a blast.
It wasn't until page 292 of this 320 page book that I realized that this was Well done, Essbaum.
That's one of the few compliments I can give this book.
In general, it was a horrible book - depressing and a waste of time.
Anna is an expat. An American who married a Swiss and now lives in Switzerland with her husband and three children. She has a series of extramarital affairs with men whom she apparently is choosing at random.
Why is Anna always having extramarital affairs?
Well, that's the big question, isn't it. And the answer is... I have no flippin' clue. Essbaum doesn't either. Anna's husband - the asshole Bruno - insists Anna goes to a psychiatrist.
It was Bruno who'd insisted she see a psychotherapist: I've had enough of your fucking misery, Anna. Go fix yourself, is what he'd said to her.
You can see how charming and loving he is. /s
ANYWAY. Anna's psychiatrist, Doktor Messerli is one of THE WORST psychotherapists I've ever seen in fiction. And I've seen some really bad ones. She is TERRIBLE. 99% of what comes out of her mouth is utter garbage. I have no idea if Essbaum has ever been in analysis or has any psychology background, but let me tell you that it is SHIT. If that's the way Essbaum thinks that psychotherapy is conducted, then anyone could be a psychotherapist without even any training or education. The sessions basically consist of Anna asking the Doktor inane questions and the Doktor huffily answering her. It was total bullcrap.
"Do you believe in ghosts?" Anna asked Doktor Messerli.
"It doesn't matter whether you believe in ghosts. The ghosts believe in you."
My brain was ready to explode in complete frustration and rage each time Anna was in one of these completely bogus psychotherapy sessions. That Doktor should be sued for malpractice.
"Grief that finds no relief in tears makes other organs weep," Doktor Messerli said.
Another thing that bothered me about the sessions was the Essbaum was very heavy-handed in using them to frame Anna's life. Anna will be thinking something or doing something and then the next thing you know Essbaum plunges you into the middle of one of Anna's sessions and she'll be asking her Doktor about it. It's trite, stupid, and very hackneyed.
Let me tell you another completely hackneyed thing about the book: Anna's German lessons. It's "amazing" how every single German lesson Anna takes has sentences and verbs that have to do with what is going on in her life right now. For instance, when Anna is considering having an affair, that day in class they "miraculously" talk about prepositions like "under, against, on top of, from behind." I find this trite beyond belief. I really didn't appreciate this. It happens in every single lesson.
My overall opinion of the book is that Essbaum was trying way too hard.
Please be prepared for disgusting sex in this novel. Now, I think that Essbaum purposefully worked hard to make the sex scenes ickily described - at least I hope she did o.O - but regardless of WHY she did it, they are unpleasant to read.
Anna squeezed him, then pulsed around him then let him slip from her like a soaped finger sliding through a tight ring.
She also describes sex as being vandalized, as in "He vandalized me." WTF? Again, this was probably the author's intent.
...as Anna gave in to the ruddy, florid bud of his erection.
Some of it was really making me ill:
Whores, Anna once read, make the very best wives. They are accustomed to the varying moods of men, they keep their broken hearts to themselves, and easy women always ease through grief.
This thought occurred to Anna unbidden when... she slipped a two-franc piece into a coin slot... It was a thought called forward by the simple action of shoving a thing into the hole it's meant for.
This is just so disgusting on so many levels.
And again, I have NO IDEA why Anna is cheating with various men throughout the novel. No idea. Essbaum talks over (and over and over and over) about how "passive" Anna is and her "passivity" etc. etc. and I think that is completely wrong. Having affairs with multiple men is not "being passive." I just can't even with this shit. And I have no idea if Essbaum actually believes this, or only the character Anna believes this and Anna is wrong about herself? It's really never fully explained.
Anna's tendency to be ignorant - she doesn't have a bank account, a source of income, any family (outside of her asshole husband and small children), any real friends, she doesn't know how to drive, and she doesn't even know what her husband does at his job - is less "passivity" to me and more "total and complete apathy." Anna comes off as a completely apathetic and almost emotionless person. If you asked me why she was having affairs, I'd say it was because she was desperately trying to feel something. She definitely wasn't a nymphomaniac. And although she is married to a complete asshole, that's not why she's cheating. And it isn't boredom. They keep blaming her being bored in the book, but I don't think that's it (although I think a paying job would have been wonderful for her and helped her immensely). I really think she's just struggling to feel anything. She's apathetic about her marriage. She's apathetic about her kids. She's apathetic about her affairs. She just doesn't care about anything.
They also discuss the fact that Anna's affairs might be motivated by boredom. But she CHOOSES to be bored. Honestly, she never does anything.
I don't know how to deal with a character like this. It's hard to get emotionally invested in a character that says "Meh." in reaction to almost everything. What am I supposed to do with this? It was hard for me to be concerned, worried or even interested in what was going on in her life. I found her very hard to relate to. Not because of the cheating! But because she was SO uninterested in her own life. She had no motivations and no drive of any kind. She just fucks around.
You mean with men.
No, I mean she doesn't work outside the home (and the care of her children is mainly in the hands of her MIL, so I can't really say she was spending a great deal of time raising the kids), she doesn't bother to learn how to drive, she doesn't bother to learn how to speak German even though she's lived in Switzerland for 10 or 11 years (!!!!!), she doesn't bother to ask her husband what he bleeping does for a living, she doesn't make any real friends (in 11 years!?!?!?!?)... I just... I can't.... I don't...
I would have said clinical depression, if you'd asked me for a diagnosis.
Anna's husband is a huge asshole. I had NO FLIPPING IDEA why Anna married him and despite Essbaum's feeble attempts to explain why it remained a complete mystery. I don't think having an asshole husband is an excuse for cheating, but he's certainly not doing himself any favors by being a cold, merciless bastard to her. Of course she'd never dream of leaving him or getting a divorce. She's so apathetic I'm surprised that she gets out of bed in the morning, much less does something as ambitious as demanding a divorce, or, I don't know, asking her husband to treat her with a bit of kindness and respect.
The book is also filled with the kind of meaningless pontificating like:
"For even infants understand the rotten, instinctive truth: that no pain ever takes full leave of its person. That pain is greedy and doesn't give ground. That a body remembers what hurt it and how. Old pains get swallowed by new pains. But newer pains always follow suit.
Which leads DIRECTLY into Anna asking her psychiatrist
"What is the purpose of pain?"
You can see why I wanted to throw this book into the wall. o.O
The German language, like a woman, has moods. WTF?
But consider: Every year you have a death day as well [as a birthday], only you don't know which one it is. What kind of bullshit is this?
And one of her lovers is a scientist who studies fire, so then there are ENDLESS PAGES AND PAGES of fire metaphors and fire explanations for every single emotion and thought Anna has. It's highly annoying and stupid.
That fire is beautifully cruel. That fusion occurs only at a specific heat. That blood, in fact, can boil. That the dissolution of an affair is an entropic reaction, and the disorder it tends toward is flammable. That a heart will burn. And burn and burn and burn. That an ordinary flame's hottest point cannot always be seen.
There's literally PAGES of this stuff in the book. Ugh.
There's also a completely bullshit theory on page 217 about how you can psychoanalyze someone by how they speak their second language. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME. It includes stuff like "he had problems with possessives, therefore he believes in free love and affairs" and such nonsense. TOTAL CRAP.
Although I didn't predict the final ending of the book until page 292, another "twist" that I think the author was trying to shock me with I figured out on page 14. This just solidified the "hackneyed" label I ended up giving the book in my mind.
Tl;dr - Well, I can't give this one star because although it was highly annoying and I would never read it again out of my own free will, it wasn't completely worthless. When I realized I was gobsmacked. That was actually done well. Although,
So. I can't say I recommend this book, but it wasn't completely worthless. Hackneyed, trite, cliched - my overall feelings during this book was that Essbaum was just trying way too hard. You can FEEL how hard she's trying. That's not good, it's grating on the reader.
I really don't understand why this is getting so much praise.
BOOKS THIS REMINDED ME OF:
by Zane.
That horrid little story by Alice Munro: To Reach Japan. You can find it in her book .
P.S. Oh, and Essbaum describes a black person this way ...and an impossibly handsome Nigerian whose skin was as smooth and dark as Sprungli chocolate. You KNOW how much that pisses me off. NO FOOD / SKIN COMPARISONS. UGH. Only black person in the book and she has to compare his skin to chocolate. ARGHHHHHHH!!!!!
P.P.S. I just realized (based on research I literally did two seconds ago, that this is I exhibit mild relief upon hearing this, although the book did strongly
October 29, 2018
Sex. Adulterous sex. Adulterous sex in Europe. Adulterous sex in Europe by an unlikable expat, playing the role of mother and wife at home.
Doesn't it sound grand? I mean, maybe not grand, but interesting, at least. I confess I have a fascination with books that deal with relationships and monogamy and all the complexities therein. That's why I read John Updike, who had what one might call an unhealthy obsession with adultery, its trappings and its failings. That's why I picked up this book, too.
So Hausfrau did not offend my sensibilities when the main character Anna ventured outside her marriage over and over. With a stranger who she didn’t care for. With a man she fell in love with on first sight. With a friend of her husband’s. It’s not her behaviour that put me off this book. I’m a big girl, I can handle a decent amount of smut without getting all Victorian. Plus, I love to love unlikable characters. No, it was something else.
This is Essbaum’s debut, and there’s no doubt that she can write. There were a few lines worth underlining, as well crafted as a stanza in a short poem that can afford no dithering around.
But.
There’s such a lifeless quality to this book. Not even lofty comparisons with heavyweights Anna Karenin or Madame Bovary can resuscitate this cement block. It's the literary equivalent of a limp dick. I don't know how, but Essbaum managed to drown an intriguing subject, holding it under water until it became slack, bloodless, a chore to read. The reader is suffocated with Anna's constant self-analysis. We never get a break from it. She’s either fucking someone else, or thinking about fucking someone else, or feeling VERY sorry for herself that she’s fucking someone else, lamenting it but doing it anyways. And in between these naval gazing scenes, we're peppered with obnoxiously pithy vignettes with her therapist, Dr Messerli, who says ridiculous, "deep" things like:
"It doesn't matter whether you believe in ghosts. The ghosts believe in you."
"Grief that finds no relief in tears makes other organs weep."
HUH?
Then, we get to hear Anna feel nauseatingly sorry for herself, in sentences like these:
She was lonely and remote. Anna was lonely and remote everywhere she went.
Love's a sentence, Anna thought. A death sentence.
No one talks like this. No one waxes this poetical with their shrink, or constantly discusses the idea of love as a metaphor for fire with their lover. It's all an artifice. I'm pretty sure even the flowers on the cover of the book are fake. Lovely silk flowers that smell like... nothing.
Over and over the author bashes us on the head: POOR, POOR ANNA. Poor Anna. Except I didn't feel sorry or even interested in her. I didn't 'get' her, like I did Rabbit Angstrom, a philandering pig Updike created who is human and real. Anna, by contrast, is a construct. She is a creation on which to pile beautiful sentences and a few hot sex scenes. I felt the author's hand everywhere I went. I was never involved in the story. I was simply a witness to a show-off. Look at this line! And that! Isn't this meaningful?
The depressive narrative goes nowhere until 3/4 in, when it becomes even MORE depressing and instead of caring, I just started counting the pages til I could write this review and move along with my life.
And now, I think I will. Next!
Doesn't it sound grand? I mean, maybe not grand, but interesting, at least. I confess I have a fascination with books that deal with relationships and monogamy and all the complexities therein. That's why I read John Updike, who had what one might call an unhealthy obsession with adultery, its trappings and its failings. That's why I picked up this book, too.
So Hausfrau did not offend my sensibilities when the main character Anna ventured outside her marriage over and over. With a stranger who she didn’t care for. With a man she fell in love with on first sight. With a friend of her husband’s. It’s not her behaviour that put me off this book. I’m a big girl, I can handle a decent amount of smut without getting all Victorian. Plus, I love to love unlikable characters. No, it was something else.
This is Essbaum’s debut, and there’s no doubt that she can write. There were a few lines worth underlining, as well crafted as a stanza in a short poem that can afford no dithering around.
But.
There’s such a lifeless quality to this book. Not even lofty comparisons with heavyweights Anna Karenin or Madame Bovary can resuscitate this cement block. It's the literary equivalent of a limp dick. I don't know how, but Essbaum managed to drown an intriguing subject, holding it under water until it became slack, bloodless, a chore to read. The reader is suffocated with Anna's constant self-analysis. We never get a break from it. She’s either fucking someone else, or thinking about fucking someone else, or feeling VERY sorry for herself that she’s fucking someone else, lamenting it but doing it anyways. And in between these naval gazing scenes, we're peppered with obnoxiously pithy vignettes with her therapist, Dr Messerli, who says ridiculous, "deep" things like:
"It doesn't matter whether you believe in ghosts. The ghosts believe in you."
"Grief that finds no relief in tears makes other organs weep."
HUH?
Then, we get to hear Anna feel nauseatingly sorry for herself, in sentences like these:
She was lonely and remote. Anna was lonely and remote everywhere she went.
Love's a sentence, Anna thought. A death sentence.
No one talks like this. No one waxes this poetical with their shrink, or constantly discusses the idea of love as a metaphor for fire with their lover. It's all an artifice. I'm pretty sure even the flowers on the cover of the book are fake. Lovely silk flowers that smell like... nothing.
Over and over the author bashes us on the head: POOR, POOR ANNA. Poor Anna. Except I didn't feel sorry or even interested in her. I didn't 'get' her, like I did Rabbit Angstrom, a philandering pig Updike created who is human and real. Anna, by contrast, is a construct. She is a creation on which to pile beautiful sentences and a few hot sex scenes. I felt the author's hand everywhere I went. I was never involved in the story. I was simply a witness to a show-off. Look at this line! And that! Isn't this meaningful?
The depressive narrative goes nowhere until 3/4 in, when it becomes even MORE depressing and instead of caring, I just started counting the pages til I could write this review and move along with my life.
And now, I think I will. Next!
January 2, 2021
I spent most of yesterday reading this book (I just couldn't stop), but I waited until this morning to mark it as completed because I couldn't decide for the life of me if I wanted to rate this 4 or 5 stars. For now, I'm putting it at a 5. This is one of those books that gets me irritated...but at myself. Let me tell you why.
I received this book on NetGalley back in 2015. I had just joined and requested a bunch of titles thinking that I wouldn't get approved for anything, but surprise, surprise, I received most of them and was immediately overwhelmed. That's how this book ended up languishing away on my NetGalley shelf for nearly 6 years. But it was a goal of mine to clear out some of this backlog in 2021, so I binged through this on New Year's Day.
The whole time I was reading this, I was thinking: you mean to tell me I had this good of a book collecting virtual dust bunnies on NetGalley when I was busy reading dud after dud in 2020?
I'm not surprised this has a low average rating here on ŷ (although I tend not to take those that seriously and I talk about why here: ). This book is highly sexual and it's a little on the pretentious side. But I'll allow it that because this book is so, so smart. It's essentially a modern take on Anna Karenina focusing on an expat American housewife living in Switzerland with her Swiss banker husband. She's bored and unhappy, regularly cheating on her husband, attending German classes, and seeing a highly Fruedian psychologist.
That summary sounds pretty blasé, but what Alexander Essbaum does with this book is extraordinary. She uses the language around language learning and dreams to communicate Anna's inner turmoil, fears, and desires. Though Anna as a character is reserved and submissive, her inner world is combusting.
If you're not into artsy fartsy literary fiction, I wouldn't recommend it. But if you've been on a Sylvia Plath kick like I have been since devouring , I can't recommend it enough.
I received this book on NetGalley back in 2015. I had just joined and requested a bunch of titles thinking that I wouldn't get approved for anything, but surprise, surprise, I received most of them and was immediately overwhelmed. That's how this book ended up languishing away on my NetGalley shelf for nearly 6 years. But it was a goal of mine to clear out some of this backlog in 2021, so I binged through this on New Year's Day.
The whole time I was reading this, I was thinking: you mean to tell me I had this good of a book collecting virtual dust bunnies on NetGalley when I was busy reading dud after dud in 2020?
I'm not surprised this has a low average rating here on ŷ (although I tend not to take those that seriously and I talk about why here: ). This book is highly sexual and it's a little on the pretentious side. But I'll allow it that because this book is so, so smart. It's essentially a modern take on Anna Karenina focusing on an expat American housewife living in Switzerland with her Swiss banker husband. She's bored and unhappy, regularly cheating on her husband, attending German classes, and seeing a highly Fruedian psychologist.
That summary sounds pretty blasé, but what Alexander Essbaum does with this book is extraordinary. She uses the language around language learning and dreams to communicate Anna's inner turmoil, fears, and desires. Though Anna as a character is reserved and submissive, her inner world is combusting.
If you're not into artsy fartsy literary fiction, I wouldn't recommend it. But if you've been on a Sylvia Plath kick like I have been since devouring , I can't recommend it enough.
May 8, 2015
Oh dear lord, it's time to review Hausfrau. Hmmm. Well? Okay, I'm off. I always appreciate good writing, and it was superb here. Also, I love being inside a characters head, and thoughts, also, great here. Just a few problems. While the main character, Anna, has moved away from the states to Switzerland to get married? I don't hear too much about love, although maybe a little in her flashbacks to the beginning. After that I felt all the interruptions and talk of Switzerland, a bit clunky. They felt dropped into the story to show how much she hated life here, to explain more of why she is so unhappy. And, oh man, is she unhappy. We get passages from her psychiatrist throughout, and I actually felt those flowed and progressed the story along quite nicely. I guess the whole thing just didn't ring true for me. Really? This woman sleeps with one man after another to...? I'm sure this is supposed to be "deep," to promote her unhappiness, to show how far off the deep edge she has gone. But seriously, sex of this sort comes from deep childhood scars.
You may disagree, but I just don't think woman go for this kind of fucking (sorry, but that's what it is), because they're miserable. Maybe if I had felt some sort of connection to Anna, some sense of empathy. But nothing drew me in. Still, it is one heck of a character study, and so finely written. I am a little torn, but I think the sexual descriptions were borderline porn. Too bad, as I think the story would actually have been strengthened without it. Sometimes, less is more.
You may disagree, but I just don't think woman go for this kind of fucking (sorry, but that's what it is), because they're miserable. Maybe if I had felt some sort of connection to Anna, some sense of empathy. But nothing drew me in. Still, it is one heck of a character study, and so finely written. I am a little torn, but I think the sexual descriptions were borderline porn. Too bad, as I think the story would actually have been strengthened without it. Sometimes, less is more.
March 19, 2015
I enjoyed this a lot. On the surface it appears to be a simple tale of a bored housewife seeking the excitement and attentions of extramarital affairs and eventually reaping the consequences. But there is much more here that engaged my mind and emotions. Her sexual escapades are thrilling and incredibly erotic. But as the character deconstructs in looking for love in all the wrong places, we struggle mightily to construct her, and we are never sure whether we want to hug her or shake her.
Anna Benz is a 37-year old American housewife living outside Zurich with her Swiss banker husband Bruno and three children. Bruno recognizes her unhappiness and encourages her to seek help with an therapist. Her therapist recognizes her cultural disconnection and encourages her to take a German language class. The juxtaposition of Anna’s ambivalent reveries with the structured lessons from these sources is wonderfully done. This art no doubt derives from the author’s skills as a poet, giving us crisp, concise prose of Anna’s concrete experiences alternating with the contrast of abstract windows on the forms of the science of psyche and language.
Anna comes to analysis pretty conflicted in her self-esteem. In the first line of the book, we get the pregnant line: “Anna was a good wife, mostly�. Later, we get her reflection, “Anna and Bruno were, more or less, in love�. Her therapist talks about analysis as a hard, painful process, analogous to rebreaking old fractures that have healed improperly. Anna renders up dreams for interpretation, but otherwise she is resistant to the process and keeps her deepest worries and facts of her affairs secret. She brings some of her questions to the table, but expertly deflects answers she doesn’t like:
“What’s the difference between love and lust?�
“You tell me,� Doktor Messerli said to Anna.
“Lust’s incurable. Love isn’t.�
“Desire isn’t a disease, Anna.�
“Isn’t it?�
The paradox of Anna’s passivity is a paramount subject that readers like me will be challenged to wrap one’s head around. Anna raises the subject, and gets this assessment:
“Passivity isn’t a malady. It’s the symptom. Complicity is but one of your many well-honed skills. When it pleases you, you are quite practiced at defiance. …Were did this come from? What might have caused this?� Anna said that she was afraid she didn’t know.
“That’s exactly right. You are afraid.� The Doktor said, and then she said no more.
The doctor starts to get closer to key topics through Jungian concepts of the role of the unconscious in personal development, but only gets so far:
“The psychosexual union is a symbol of coming to consciousness.�
Anna offered her a quizzical look. “What’s this got to do with me?�
We get a similar window on the defensive strengths of Anna’s mind at play during her language class, where she is so creative in translating messages from one form to ones that sustain her mode of being:
“There are two basic groups of German verbs,� Roland said, “strong and weak. Weak verbs are regular verbs that follow regular rules. Strong verbs are irregular. They don’t follow patterns. You deal with strong verbs on their own terms.�
Like people, Anna thought. The strong ones stand out. The weak ones are all the same.
Her antipathy toward rules is apparently quite broad, including the constraints of time itself:
“This is basic, class. Present tense. That which happens now. Future tense. What will occur. Simple past: what was done. Present perfect? What has been done.�
But how often is the past simple? Is the present ever perfect? Anna stopped listening. These were rules she didn’t trust.
What a cipher Anna is. Nothing of her past before marriage, her family or place of origin, rises to consciousness. She has no ambitions for a career, no hobbies, no real friends, no one she can really talk with. A fellow student in the German class who also struggles with cultural alienation in the staid and orderly Swiss society tries but fails to forge a sustaining friendship with Anna. An aristocratic woman confesses to having affairs, but Anna resists sharing in return. Anna truly only feels alive in her affairs and her mastery of their secrecy. She is frozen in her ambivalency:
Anna loved and didn’t love sex. Anna needed and didn’t need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted. And wanted. She wanted to be wanted.
Her dangerous path all started years back with her affair with a visiting American scientist, Stephen. She truly loved him and was devastated when he broke it off to return home. She dwells on many analogies brought up by his subject of study, the science of fire—the consuming yet purifying aspects of surrender to the flame. Her sense of loss is huge. I began to admire her a bit for some bravery in toughing it out and empathize with her approach to nurtured memories:
How different it all would have been had I just gone home. Other days, it was such an ache that tethered her to joy. It was despair alone she owned outright. An indefensible comfort nonetheless. The only thing she rarely felt was guilt. Love trumped guilt like rock won out over scissors.
But how many readers can be sympathetic with her steps that bring her to the current mess?:
I’m cheating on the man I’m cheating on my husband with, Anna thought. I grow less decent every passing day.
She has significant insight. She sees how trying to lead multiple lives leads to these lives leading her. Yet she still is incapable of productive action and instead digs into her foxhole:
The sex begat clarity. I may not be as passive as I think I am. The bus is mine, Goddamit, I’ll drive it. And so the worse she became, the better she became. She was still sad. She was still skittish. She was still herself, and in full danger of being trapped beneath the rubble of her poor choices when her makeshift shelter caved in. But from this terrible awareness Anna drew strength.
The challenges of love and marriage and the drift into adultery is one of the most common topics in literature and in our personal lives. What new can be said without becoming either banal or a soap opera? In this debut novel we are lucky to get a talented writer who subsumes these issues into the context of personal and cultural alienation laid out like stanzas of poetry. Anna’s passage beyond the reach of so many avenues of help is tragic. Both she and we can see the inevitable reckoning, and the form it takes is tragic. My major caveat is that so much interpretation about Anna’s situation and progression is spelled out. Still, we are left to judge for ourselves if her fate comes about because she does not have a sufficient moral compass (such as faith in God as acknowledged by her husband) or because she lacks a belief in free will (as espoused by a kind priest she encounters).
I liked this much better than a recent read of a somewhat similar novel of a disintegrating marriage, Richard Yates� “Revolutionary Road�. Interestingly, in an interview for Electric Literature (by Heather Scott Partington: ), Essbaum imagines Kate Winslet as the ideal to play Anna if a movie is ever made of her book, the actress who played the lead for the movie based on the Yates book. I think it might make a pretty compelling movie.
This book was provided by the publisher through the Netgalley program.
Photo of author by Megan Sembera Peters posted on Electric Lit
Anna Benz is a 37-year old American housewife living outside Zurich with her Swiss banker husband Bruno and three children. Bruno recognizes her unhappiness and encourages her to seek help with an therapist. Her therapist recognizes her cultural disconnection and encourages her to take a German language class. The juxtaposition of Anna’s ambivalent reveries with the structured lessons from these sources is wonderfully done. This art no doubt derives from the author’s skills as a poet, giving us crisp, concise prose of Anna’s concrete experiences alternating with the contrast of abstract windows on the forms of the science of psyche and language.
Anna comes to analysis pretty conflicted in her self-esteem. In the first line of the book, we get the pregnant line: “Anna was a good wife, mostly�. Later, we get her reflection, “Anna and Bruno were, more or less, in love�. Her therapist talks about analysis as a hard, painful process, analogous to rebreaking old fractures that have healed improperly. Anna renders up dreams for interpretation, but otherwise she is resistant to the process and keeps her deepest worries and facts of her affairs secret. She brings some of her questions to the table, but expertly deflects answers she doesn’t like:
“What’s the difference between love and lust?�
“You tell me,� Doktor Messerli said to Anna.
“Lust’s incurable. Love isn’t.�
“Desire isn’t a disease, Anna.�
“Isn’t it?�
The paradox of Anna’s passivity is a paramount subject that readers like me will be challenged to wrap one’s head around. Anna raises the subject, and gets this assessment:
“Passivity isn’t a malady. It’s the symptom. Complicity is but one of your many well-honed skills. When it pleases you, you are quite practiced at defiance. …Were did this come from? What might have caused this?� Anna said that she was afraid she didn’t know.
“That’s exactly right. You are afraid.� The Doktor said, and then she said no more.
The doctor starts to get closer to key topics through Jungian concepts of the role of the unconscious in personal development, but only gets so far:
“The psychosexual union is a symbol of coming to consciousness.�
Anna offered her a quizzical look. “What’s this got to do with me?�
We get a similar window on the defensive strengths of Anna’s mind at play during her language class, where she is so creative in translating messages from one form to ones that sustain her mode of being:
“There are two basic groups of German verbs,� Roland said, “strong and weak. Weak verbs are regular verbs that follow regular rules. Strong verbs are irregular. They don’t follow patterns. You deal with strong verbs on their own terms.�
Like people, Anna thought. The strong ones stand out. The weak ones are all the same.
Her antipathy toward rules is apparently quite broad, including the constraints of time itself:
“This is basic, class. Present tense. That which happens now. Future tense. What will occur. Simple past: what was done. Present perfect? What has been done.�
But how often is the past simple? Is the present ever perfect? Anna stopped listening. These were rules she didn’t trust.
What a cipher Anna is. Nothing of her past before marriage, her family or place of origin, rises to consciousness. She has no ambitions for a career, no hobbies, no real friends, no one she can really talk with. A fellow student in the German class who also struggles with cultural alienation in the staid and orderly Swiss society tries but fails to forge a sustaining friendship with Anna. An aristocratic woman confesses to having affairs, but Anna resists sharing in return. Anna truly only feels alive in her affairs and her mastery of their secrecy. She is frozen in her ambivalency:
Anna loved and didn’t love sex. Anna needed and didn’t need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted. And wanted. She wanted to be wanted.
Her dangerous path all started years back with her affair with a visiting American scientist, Stephen. She truly loved him and was devastated when he broke it off to return home. She dwells on many analogies brought up by his subject of study, the science of fire—the consuming yet purifying aspects of surrender to the flame. Her sense of loss is huge. I began to admire her a bit for some bravery in toughing it out and empathize with her approach to nurtured memories:
How different it all would have been had I just gone home. Other days, it was such an ache that tethered her to joy. It was despair alone she owned outright. An indefensible comfort nonetheless. The only thing she rarely felt was guilt. Love trumped guilt like rock won out over scissors.
But how many readers can be sympathetic with her steps that bring her to the current mess?:
I’m cheating on the man I’m cheating on my husband with, Anna thought. I grow less decent every passing day.
She has significant insight. She sees how trying to lead multiple lives leads to these lives leading her. Yet she still is incapable of productive action and instead digs into her foxhole:
The sex begat clarity. I may not be as passive as I think I am. The bus is mine, Goddamit, I’ll drive it. And so the worse she became, the better she became. She was still sad. She was still skittish. She was still herself, and in full danger of being trapped beneath the rubble of her poor choices when her makeshift shelter caved in. But from this terrible awareness Anna drew strength.
The challenges of love and marriage and the drift into adultery is one of the most common topics in literature and in our personal lives. What new can be said without becoming either banal or a soap opera? In this debut novel we are lucky to get a talented writer who subsumes these issues into the context of personal and cultural alienation laid out like stanzas of poetry. Anna’s passage beyond the reach of so many avenues of help is tragic. Both she and we can see the inevitable reckoning, and the form it takes is tragic. My major caveat is that so much interpretation about Anna’s situation and progression is spelled out. Still, we are left to judge for ourselves if her fate comes about because she does not have a sufficient moral compass (such as faith in God as acknowledged by her husband) or because she lacks a belief in free will (as espoused by a kind priest she encounters).
I liked this much better than a recent read of a somewhat similar novel of a disintegrating marriage, Richard Yates� “Revolutionary Road�. Interestingly, in an interview for Electric Literature (by Heather Scott Partington: ), Essbaum imagines Kate Winslet as the ideal to play Anna if a movie is ever made of her book, the actress who played the lead for the movie based on the Yates book. I think it might make a pretty compelling movie.
This book was provided by the publisher through the Netgalley program.
Photo of author by Megan Sembera Peters posted on Electric Lit
March 22, 2015
I’m pretty sure that I didn’t like this. I’m giving it a note of uncertainty mostly because it is possible that maybe I also did. It depends on whether it's about what I think it's about. I hope I'm wrong- so many people liked this. Let’s find out, shall we?
So, if I’m right, this is the story of Anna the housewife. She lives in Zurich with her banker husband and three children. She is natively American, but followed her husband when he returned home, after he told her, “I think I want to marry you. You seem like you would make a good wife to me.� She’s been there seven years, and is only now beginning to speak the language, on her husband’s insistence.
And you know, what happens next, from a plot perspective, is pretty much what you’d expect from the tale of a bored housewife. Particularly when she is in Europe and you can assign the word “ennui� or “existential� to how she feels. It’s a slightly more exaggerated version of it, sure, but the life or death importance that it assigns to marriage, and especially the heteronormative, male-breadwinner, white-and-privileged kind felt very traditional. There’s really nothing new that’s said about it here- it even comes off as slightly dated. The tone, the stakes, the flickering lights and especially the ending reminded me of nothing so much as The Awakening (written in 1899). Except that book was beautifully simple and sincere and this book said all the same things, but with a Freudian presentation on top that Kate Chopin wouldn’t have known about.
But it can’t possibly be about this, right guys? I decided pretty early that that couldn’t possibly be what this book was about. We couldn’t be being asked to consider the same tired plot as if it were new, with the same sort of stakes it would have had a century ago, simply because it was in a different place and different time.
Perhaps then it was about using this familiar plot to explore a different sort of psyche in this situation? The book starts off in a fairly linear fashion, but very quickly delves into the sort of elided time-fuckery for which Virginia Woolf is famous, a stream of consciousness where memories dance with present time, which dances with more distant memories, which in turn push you back into the present. And you know what, I really did like this aspect of it. I appreciated the way that memory bounced off of memory, taking you back a few days, then a few years, then back to the present, then into an imagined future, then painfully back into the present again. I liked how the author arranged the memories so that we got psychological and plot reveals pretty much all throughout the second part of the book. I think, that with a caveat that I will get to in a minute, this was the strongest aspect of a book. There were definitely some moments I felt like I was really living the anxieties and depressions and sad little memories of this sad little woman.
But of course, as I’ve already mentioned, Virginia Woolf has done this so much better (oh my goodness read Mrs. Dalloway now if you don’t know what I mean) and at a time when it made sense to reckon with this particular category of woman. And, of course, this wasn’t done nearly so well. The constant interruptions of the therapist to tell us her interpretation of the deeper meaning of the story symbolically, in profound therapist talk and analogy, got really unbearable really quickly. It was like having a really pretentious, humorless peanut gallery. World’s worst MST3K, with one the main character jumping off the screen to participate. The woman literally brings her dreams to dissect. It was so tired.
So maybe the point was for us to see a different kind of housewife. I stuck with this theory for a pretty long time, and I think maybe I’m right about it. The woman we meet is no strong-willed woman who is just looking for the slightest crack in her cage to escape. This is no frustrated woman who feels guilted or cornered (for the most part) into her choices, even if she wants other things. She isn’t even a battered woman who is threatened.
Instead, Anna finds herself to be “passive� (which is used throughout the book to describe her). She is the sort of person who takes someone else’s lead, gladly, and lets her objections melt away, if she even remembers she had any to begin with. This woman sleeps with every man she’s ever dated on the first date, at the slightest suggestion that she do so. When Bruno tells her that she would “make a good wife for him,� she agrees that she is the kind of person who would make a good wife for him. She tells us that her favorite aspect of her husband is how big he is, what a dominating presence he is. He filed all her residency permit paperwork, he deals with officials. She does not have her own bank account and it takes her seven years to even find this inconvenient. Other “modern� women rage at her, condescend to her and don’t understand her, in turns ( “Don’t you think you have a responsibility to be something?� Anna’s response never varied. I can see your point. You may be right). Her therapist seems to pull her hair out when Anna will not admit to wanting to take up a single fulfilling hobby for herself and even her traditional husband expects her to have the ability to be independent, even if she doesn’t regularly exercise it (when they first arrive in Zurich, he takes her on a brief tour and then gives her a map and tells her to “go explore!� She tries once and then gives up, terrified and never tries again).
It was sort of interesting in the sense that it was mirroring the book itself- we’re being asked to encounter a woman whose philosophy of life and personality really seems to have no real reason to exist in this time or place. Except, of course, that this is the way that she has chosen to be, or we are dealing with someone who simply has this sort of personality and is has the misfortune to be aware she is supposed to be ashamed of it and to care about that. I think the most interesting aspect of this for me was considering her actions in this book . I kind of like the idea of exploring a woman who has kind of floated into being this way, and only at a late age grabbed on to a narrative that seems to make sense to her situation, as outdated as it is.
But if this is the point, and I think it might be, then I’ve got some problems, because this is just not very well executed. First of all, we’re given absolutely no reason for Anna to be the way she is. Do characters have to justify their personalities? Well no, but unless you’re Don Jon in Much Ado, and just there to get Beatrice and Benedick together, it’s much more satisfying to the audience if you do. People develop personalities, they are very rarely born with them at birth. And Anna repeatedly tells us that she had loving parents who tried to teach her things, sent her to doctors, who weren’t negative to her in any way. They but the book explicitly tells us that she was like this before. Her parents didn’t seem to have had a necessarily traditional marriage, or the book doesn’t tell us about it, if so, so there’s no reason for her to have thought that that was the only option open to her. Her parents encouraged her to do things- she only ever took up one habit, sewing, and ended up giving it up. I’m sure there are plenty of places for her to have gotten the idea that this is the way that women behave, that men only want women for one thing, that she should be okay with having no bank account and three children, but the book doesn’t tell me about it. She just simply is this way. The book tries to push expat isolation as a reason, but that doesn’t hold water. Again, she tells us she was always like this- the expat thing only cut off some ways that she might have eventually found some modest way to grow out of it. She is motivationlessly like a woman from the early part of the last century while living in the 21st century, she is motivationlessly sad, motivationlessly willing to follow Bruno and accept a substandard relationship with no control. And I really wanted to know where some of this stuff came from, because some of it was pretty disturbing. First and foremost her relationship with sex.
And you know what, Anna goes beyond passivity to speak� well, like a child. In the way that you might expect someone of 7 or 8 to speak. She actually utters questions, seriously, like “What do you think is on the other side of the sky?� or “Where does fire go when it burns out?".
Really? I just have trouble buying that a woman with a late 20th century education, whose syntax and grammar were learned through pop culture, is asking stuff like this in that way.. unless the author really is trying to tell me something about her stunted growth, and I’m nearly positive she isn’t. I think I was supposed to find that touchingly naïve. Which I would have�.in an eight year old.
Also, and this was a bigger problem for me: the language. At first, she had some turns of phrase and ideas that I thought spoke to her having a finely attuned ear, trying not to choose the obvious word, to make just the right impression. ( “It was the lilt of Bruno’s nonnative English that she let slide its thumb, its tongue, into the waistband of her panties on the very first date�.� “the inept silence� “the silence she spat back� “haphazardly moral") .
But there was so much groan-worthy stuff that outweighed it. For instance, her absolute insistence on exploring every possible aspect of a goddamn fire metaphor throughout the entire fucking book, as, (of course) a symbol of her great love affair. Every time I thought she was done, she pulled out another round of fire similes. And it wasn’t just that- not only the fire, but every other thing she finds becomes a symbol for something going on in her life, something that she must address at length when she sees it.
�. You know. Like people do. Like at your German lesson, each of the verb tenses that you learn is really a secret inner symbol for your infidelities and secret desires, and how you spend an hour thinking of various ways to turn that metaphor. For, as you know, “the German language, like a woman, has moods. On occasion, they are conditional, imperative, indicative, subjunctive�.�
And how when you’re at a party, you button your cardigan “as if to shut yourself away from a joy that cannot be yours.�
(Oh my god.)
She goes through language as a symbol, trains as symbol, fire as symbol, water, dresses, forests� when she finally gets to the moon, she comments, “I have nothing to say about moon, she said to herself, and in saying she had nothing to say, somehow said something�. The one time she can’t turn something into an overconsidered symbol, she needs to comment on that too- and you’d think, with a book about a woman going through marriage, affairs and pregnancies, the moon would be the one thing she could- never mind.
But suffice it to say I broke out laughing when I saw that- it was like she felt she needed to give us an excuse for not giving us a tortured metaphor about it.
By the time she gets to the part where she reads some old letters of hers and criticizes them as “maudlin and overcomposed,� it was hard not to hope for some possible self awareness in her words, because otherwise it was a pretty sad irony.
It made the book more and more laughable to me, which obviously made it less and less likely that I could get into this strange woman’s head, which was, after all, the only possible point of all this.
I guess, in the end, I’d call it a subject that I don’t understand why we’re revisiting, with stakes that have no need to exist, with a main character whose personality isn’t understandable, all told in an overwrought voice that takes literary techniques about five steps too far and over the line into parody.
***
So yeah. I guess I was right. I didn’t like it. I wish I wasn't. But looking back at it, I probably owe the book at least three stars, not the 2.5 I initially gave it. At least I thought about it- I didn’t dismiss it. I felt that I owed it consideration because it was giving the subject it treated due serious consideration (even if I don’t feel that it particularly needed it).
So, if I’m right, this is the story of Anna the housewife. She lives in Zurich with her banker husband and three children. She is natively American, but followed her husband when he returned home, after he told her, “I think I want to marry you. You seem like you would make a good wife to me.� She’s been there seven years, and is only now beginning to speak the language, on her husband’s insistence.
And you know, what happens next, from a plot perspective, is pretty much what you’d expect from the tale of a bored housewife. Particularly when she is in Europe and you can assign the word “ennui� or “existential� to how she feels. It’s a slightly more exaggerated version of it, sure, but the life or death importance that it assigns to marriage, and especially the heteronormative, male-breadwinner, white-and-privileged kind felt very traditional. There’s really nothing new that’s said about it here- it even comes off as slightly dated. The tone, the stakes, the flickering lights and especially the ending reminded me of nothing so much as The Awakening (written in 1899). Except that book was beautifully simple and sincere and this book said all the same things, but with a Freudian presentation on top that Kate Chopin wouldn’t have known about.
But it can’t possibly be about this, right guys? I decided pretty early that that couldn’t possibly be what this book was about. We couldn’t be being asked to consider the same tired plot as if it were new, with the same sort of stakes it would have had a century ago, simply because it was in a different place and different time.
Perhaps then it was about using this familiar plot to explore a different sort of psyche in this situation? The book starts off in a fairly linear fashion, but very quickly delves into the sort of elided time-fuckery for which Virginia Woolf is famous, a stream of consciousness where memories dance with present time, which dances with more distant memories, which in turn push you back into the present. And you know what, I really did like this aspect of it. I appreciated the way that memory bounced off of memory, taking you back a few days, then a few years, then back to the present, then into an imagined future, then painfully back into the present again. I liked how the author arranged the memories so that we got psychological and plot reveals pretty much all throughout the second part of the book. I think, that with a caveat that I will get to in a minute, this was the strongest aspect of a book. There were definitely some moments I felt like I was really living the anxieties and depressions and sad little memories of this sad little woman.
But of course, as I’ve already mentioned, Virginia Woolf has done this so much better (oh my goodness read Mrs. Dalloway now if you don’t know what I mean) and at a time when it made sense to reckon with this particular category of woman. And, of course, this wasn’t done nearly so well. The constant interruptions of the therapist to tell us her interpretation of the deeper meaning of the story symbolically, in profound therapist talk and analogy, got really unbearable really quickly. It was like having a really pretentious, humorless peanut gallery. World’s worst MST3K, with one the main character jumping off the screen to participate. The woman literally brings her dreams to dissect. It was so tired.
So maybe the point was for us to see a different kind of housewife. I stuck with this theory for a pretty long time, and I think maybe I’m right about it. The woman we meet is no strong-willed woman who is just looking for the slightest crack in her cage to escape. This is no frustrated woman who feels guilted or cornered (for the most part) into her choices, even if she wants other things. She isn’t even a battered woman who is threatened.
Instead, Anna finds herself to be “passive� (which is used throughout the book to describe her). She is the sort of person who takes someone else’s lead, gladly, and lets her objections melt away, if she even remembers she had any to begin with. This woman sleeps with every man she’s ever dated on the first date, at the slightest suggestion that she do so. When Bruno tells her that she would “make a good wife for him,� she agrees that she is the kind of person who would make a good wife for him. She tells us that her favorite aspect of her husband is how big he is, what a dominating presence he is. He filed all her residency permit paperwork, he deals with officials. She does not have her own bank account and it takes her seven years to even find this inconvenient. Other “modern� women rage at her, condescend to her and don’t understand her, in turns ( “Don’t you think you have a responsibility to be something?� Anna’s response never varied. I can see your point. You may be right). Her therapist seems to pull her hair out when Anna will not admit to wanting to take up a single fulfilling hobby for herself and even her traditional husband expects her to have the ability to be independent, even if she doesn’t regularly exercise it (when they first arrive in Zurich, he takes her on a brief tour and then gives her a map and tells her to “go explore!� She tries once and then gives up, terrified and never tries again).
It was sort of interesting in the sense that it was mirroring the book itself- we’re being asked to encounter a woman whose philosophy of life and personality really seems to have no real reason to exist in this time or place. Except, of course, that this is the way that she has chosen to be, or we are dealing with someone who simply has this sort of personality and is has the misfortune to be aware she is supposed to be ashamed of it and to care about that. I think the most interesting aspect of this for me was considering her actions in this book . I kind of like the idea of exploring a woman who has kind of floated into being this way, and only at a late age grabbed on to a narrative that seems to make sense to her situation, as outdated as it is.
But if this is the point, and I think it might be, then I’ve got some problems, because this is just not very well executed. First of all, we’re given absolutely no reason for Anna to be the way she is. Do characters have to justify their personalities? Well no, but unless you’re Don Jon in Much Ado, and just there to get Beatrice and Benedick together, it’s much more satisfying to the audience if you do. People develop personalities, they are very rarely born with them at birth. And Anna repeatedly tells us that she had loving parents who tried to teach her things, sent her to doctors, who weren’t negative to her in any way. They but the book explicitly tells us that she was like this before. Her parents didn’t seem to have had a necessarily traditional marriage, or the book doesn’t tell us about it, if so, so there’s no reason for her to have thought that that was the only option open to her. Her parents encouraged her to do things- she only ever took up one habit, sewing, and ended up giving it up. I’m sure there are plenty of places for her to have gotten the idea that this is the way that women behave, that men only want women for one thing, that she should be okay with having no bank account and three children, but the book doesn’t tell me about it. She just simply is this way. The book tries to push expat isolation as a reason, but that doesn’t hold water. Again, she tells us she was always like this- the expat thing only cut off some ways that she might have eventually found some modest way to grow out of it. She is motivationlessly like a woman from the early part of the last century while living in the 21st century, she is motivationlessly sad, motivationlessly willing to follow Bruno and accept a substandard relationship with no control. And I really wanted to know where some of this stuff came from, because some of it was pretty disturbing. First and foremost her relationship with sex.
And you know what, Anna goes beyond passivity to speak� well, like a child. In the way that you might expect someone of 7 or 8 to speak. She actually utters questions, seriously, like “What do you think is on the other side of the sky?� or “Where does fire go when it burns out?".
Really? I just have trouble buying that a woman with a late 20th century education, whose syntax and grammar were learned through pop culture, is asking stuff like this in that way.. unless the author really is trying to tell me something about her stunted growth, and I’m nearly positive she isn’t. I think I was supposed to find that touchingly naïve. Which I would have�.in an eight year old.
Also, and this was a bigger problem for me: the language. At first, she had some turns of phrase and ideas that I thought spoke to her having a finely attuned ear, trying not to choose the obvious word, to make just the right impression. ( “It was the lilt of Bruno’s nonnative English that she let slide its thumb, its tongue, into the waistband of her panties on the very first date�.� “the inept silence� “the silence she spat back� “haphazardly moral") .
But there was so much groan-worthy stuff that outweighed it. For instance, her absolute insistence on exploring every possible aspect of a goddamn fire metaphor throughout the entire fucking book, as, (of course) a symbol of her great love affair. Every time I thought she was done, she pulled out another round of fire similes. And it wasn’t just that- not only the fire, but every other thing she finds becomes a symbol for something going on in her life, something that she must address at length when she sees it.
�. You know. Like people do. Like at your German lesson, each of the verb tenses that you learn is really a secret inner symbol for your infidelities and secret desires, and how you spend an hour thinking of various ways to turn that metaphor. For, as you know, “the German language, like a woman, has moods. On occasion, they are conditional, imperative, indicative, subjunctive�.�
And how when you’re at a party, you button your cardigan “as if to shut yourself away from a joy that cannot be yours.�
(Oh my god.)
She goes through language as a symbol, trains as symbol, fire as symbol, water, dresses, forests� when she finally gets to the moon, she comments, “I have nothing to say about moon, she said to herself, and in saying she had nothing to say, somehow said something�. The one time she can’t turn something into an overconsidered symbol, she needs to comment on that too- and you’d think, with a book about a woman going through marriage, affairs and pregnancies, the moon would be the one thing she could- never mind.
But suffice it to say I broke out laughing when I saw that- it was like she felt she needed to give us an excuse for not giving us a tortured metaphor about it.
By the time she gets to the part where she reads some old letters of hers and criticizes them as “maudlin and overcomposed,� it was hard not to hope for some possible self awareness in her words, because otherwise it was a pretty sad irony.
It made the book more and more laughable to me, which obviously made it less and less likely that I could get into this strange woman’s head, which was, after all, the only possible point of all this.
I guess, in the end, I’d call it a subject that I don’t understand why we’re revisiting, with stakes that have no need to exist, with a main character whose personality isn’t understandable, all told in an overwrought voice that takes literary techniques about five steps too far and over the line into parody.
***
So yeah. I guess I was right. I didn’t like it. I wish I wasn't. But looking back at it, I probably owe the book at least three stars, not the 2.5 I initially gave it. At least I thought about it- I didn’t dismiss it. I felt that I owed it consideration because it was giving the subject it treated due serious consideration (even if I don’t feel that it particularly needed it).
February 1, 2022
***NO SPOILERS***
No doubt about it, Jill Alexander Essbaum took a risk with Hausfrau. The protagonist is a 37-year-old woman who engages in a series of affairs. As unlikable main characters go, the titular hausfrau (housewife), Anna, is up there. Some initial buzz dubbed Hausfrau something along the lines of Madame Bovary meets Fifty Shades of Grey, but unfortunately, readers looking for a true cross between these will need to keep searching. What’s here is depressing at the same time it’s hyper-sexual, poorly characterized at the same time it’s overburdened with long blocks of moody exposition and direct telling. As for the main character, whether she can be sympathized with is very debatable.
Although Essbaum’s actual writing is skillful, sometimes lyrical, and even impressive at times (save for overuse of proper names), her plot is scattered. The narrative is poorly organized, with expository flashbacks interrupting present-day occurrences throughout. I questioned the necessity of these flashbacks and often found them confusing.
Hausfrau takes place in Switzerland, a setting choice that nicely underscores American Anna’s feelings of general disconnectedness, but what’s strange is how the setting fits into the story. Essbaum shoehorned in facts about the country at random points. These factual asides feel a bit like they break the fourth wall, not just disrupting the story’s flow but damming it. One such example, planted between description of Anna’s new German-language class and a therapist session:
It's clear enough that Essbaum was aiming for a powerful character-driven story. Hausfrau is populated by a few core characters, each of whom is connected to Anna, some more significantly than others. Unfortunately, the characterization is cardboard and so it's hard to connect with anyone. The husband is standoffish and undemonstrative. The best friend is one of those over-the-top, annoyingly cheerful types. The mother-in-law is disapproving and judgmental. Another friend is insipid and self-absorbed. Each lover is pretty much just a lover, save for a few superficial defining qualities. Even Anna herself is really little more than a woman unraveled, and this is really where the story is significantly flawed. Hausfrau plunges head first into her anguish. It starts with her already mostly unraveled; it’s not about her unraveling. Essbaum never showed how she reached this point of such desperation. All that’s known is that Anna's marriage is unfulfilling; she and her mother-in-law dislike each other; and she feels lonely as an expatriate in Switzerland. A fleshed-out backstory, a history, specifically of her marriage, was needed to better inform the present occurrences and lend them the gravity they deserve.
Essbaum did try to delve deeply into the psychology of her hausfrau. It's just that she did this by relying too strongly on a psychiatrist character. That may sound intriguing--a psychiatrist to plumb the hidden depths of Anna’s psyche and shed light on her tragic behavior, but it’s just not. Descriptions of these visits--which, like the flashbacks, are sprinkled throughout--consist of chunks of esoteric Jungian-speak. The doctor speaks in broad, theoretical generalities that too often sound like gobbledygook. Frankly, she says a lot without saying very much of anything. Add to that inscrutable entries from Anna’s dream journal, and these parts show only an attempt to add literary heft, not genuine insight into a disturbed psyche.
I have yet to read a book that contains dream sequences that actually enhance the story, and I have yet to read any that aren't incredibly boring. They are simply unnecessary--filler that always feels like it's there only to make the work seem deep and intellectual--and in the case of Hausfrau, these sections more than any other are the most disruptive to the narrative. Not surprisingly, when these sections take more of a back seat in the story’s final third, Hausfrau is more gripping--though that’s not the only reason; here Essbaum captured the hollowness and agony of grief with great intensity. I also noted her inclusion of female friendship. Not enough stories portray relationships between women, and Hausfrau depicts both a functional and dysfunctional female friendship.
My review would be incomplete without mentioning that despite the conservativeness implied by the title, Hausfrau is a very sexually charged story. The sex scenes are excessive, and they’re not fade-to-black. Essbaum's book will never be nominated for a , but the descriptions are gratuitious and crude to the point of cringe-worthy at times. As I feel with any book that has this many overly detailed sex scenes, it feels like the author included them just to include them. It's as if Essbaum thought that these would ensure the book is stamped with an "adult readers only" label in the minds of readers, who will then regard the work as sophisticated and serious.
In sum, Hausfrau is about a woman on the brink who’s on a self-destructive path. It’s short on dialogue and action and long on exposition--and it’s a hopeless story. There’s no mirth, no light to be found in its pages, not even a glimmer.
No doubt about it, Jill Alexander Essbaum took a risk with Hausfrau. The protagonist is a 37-year-old woman who engages in a series of affairs. As unlikable main characters go, the titular hausfrau (housewife), Anna, is up there. Some initial buzz dubbed Hausfrau something along the lines of Madame Bovary meets Fifty Shades of Grey, but unfortunately, readers looking for a true cross between these will need to keep searching. What’s here is depressing at the same time it’s hyper-sexual, poorly characterized at the same time it’s overburdened with long blocks of moody exposition and direct telling. As for the main character, whether she can be sympathized with is very debatable.
Although Essbaum’s actual writing is skillful, sometimes lyrical, and even impressive at times (save for overuse of proper names), her plot is scattered. The narrative is poorly organized, with expository flashbacks interrupting present-day occurrences throughout. I questioned the necessity of these flashbacks and often found them confusing.
Hausfrau takes place in Switzerland, a setting choice that nicely underscores American Anna’s feelings of general disconnectedness, but what’s strange is how the setting fits into the story. Essbaum shoehorned in facts about the country at random points. These factual asides feel a bit like they break the fourth wall, not just disrupting the story’s flow but damming it. One such example, planted between description of Anna’s new German-language class and a therapist session:
Migros is the name of the largest chain of supermarkets in Switzerland and Switzerland’s biggest employer. More people work for Migros than any Swiss bank worldwide. But Migros is bigger than supermarkets alone. There are Migros-owned bookshops, Migros-owned gas stations, Migros-owned electronics outlets, sports stores, furniture dealers, menswear shops, public golf courses, and currency exchanges. Migros also governs a franchise of adult education centers. There isn’t a Swiss city of significant population where at least one Migros Klubschule doesn’t exist. And it’s not just language classes they offer. You can study most anything at the Migros Klubschule: cooking, sewing, knitting, drawing, singing.Maybe Essbaum’s goal was scene-setting and fully immersing the reader, but she succeeded only in sounding like a travel guide. The flaw isn’t major--the information is oftentimes interesting--but I was annoyed to be pulled away from the main character and her life to receive a school lesson.
It's clear enough that Essbaum was aiming for a powerful character-driven story. Hausfrau is populated by a few core characters, each of whom is connected to Anna, some more significantly than others. Unfortunately, the characterization is cardboard and so it's hard to connect with anyone. The husband is standoffish and undemonstrative. The best friend is one of those over-the-top, annoyingly cheerful types. The mother-in-law is disapproving and judgmental. Another friend is insipid and self-absorbed. Each lover is pretty much just a lover, save for a few superficial defining qualities. Even Anna herself is really little more than a woman unraveled, and this is really where the story is significantly flawed. Hausfrau plunges head first into her anguish. It starts with her already mostly unraveled; it’s not about her unraveling. Essbaum never showed how she reached this point of such desperation. All that’s known is that Anna's marriage is unfulfilling; she and her mother-in-law dislike each other; and she feels lonely as an expatriate in Switzerland. A fleshed-out backstory, a history, specifically of her marriage, was needed to better inform the present occurrences and lend them the gravity they deserve.
Essbaum did try to delve deeply into the psychology of her hausfrau. It's just that she did this by relying too strongly on a psychiatrist character. That may sound intriguing--a psychiatrist to plumb the hidden depths of Anna’s psyche and shed light on her tragic behavior, but it’s just not. Descriptions of these visits--which, like the flashbacks, are sprinkled throughout--consist of chunks of esoteric Jungian-speak. The doctor speaks in broad, theoretical generalities that too often sound like gobbledygook. Frankly, she says a lot without saying very much of anything. Add to that inscrutable entries from Anna’s dream journal, and these parts show only an attempt to add literary heft, not genuine insight into a disturbed psyche.
I have yet to read a book that contains dream sequences that actually enhance the story, and I have yet to read any that aren't incredibly boring. They are simply unnecessary--filler that always feels like it's there only to make the work seem deep and intellectual--and in the case of Hausfrau, these sections more than any other are the most disruptive to the narrative. Not surprisingly, when these sections take more of a back seat in the story’s final third, Hausfrau is more gripping--though that’s not the only reason; here Essbaum captured the hollowness and agony of grief with great intensity. I also noted her inclusion of female friendship. Not enough stories portray relationships between women, and Hausfrau depicts both a functional and dysfunctional female friendship.
My review would be incomplete without mentioning that despite the conservativeness implied by the title, Hausfrau is a very sexually charged story. The sex scenes are excessive, and they’re not fade-to-black. Essbaum's book will never be nominated for a , but the descriptions are gratuitious and crude to the point of cringe-worthy at times. As I feel with any book that has this many overly detailed sex scenes, it feels like the author included them just to include them. It's as if Essbaum thought that these would ensure the book is stamped with an "adult readers only" label in the minds of readers, who will then regard the work as sophisticated and serious.
In sum, Hausfrau is about a woman on the brink who’s on a self-destructive path. It’s short on dialogue and action and long on exposition--and it’s a hopeless story. There’s no mirth, no light to be found in its pages, not even a glimmer.
May 9, 2015
I have a dirty little confession - I am drawn to flawed and "unlikeable" protagonists, especially women. They absolutely fascinate me.
Anna Benz is one of those women. From the deceptively simple and innocuous book title and cover comes a complicated tale of a deeply unhappy woman who is a curious mix of apathy and passion, passivity and impulsiveness, self destructiveness and self preservation. She alternates between startling insightful observations about herself and her situation and an incredible denseness. To some degree, we are all a mass of contradictions but Anna takes it to extremes.
Anna has been unhappy and feeling unsettled in her own skin since she was a child, but we have no idea why. She marries and comes to live in Switzerland, which she alternately loathes and admires. She feels isolated and throws herself into a series of affairs in a desperate attempt to feel something, anything - but her pathology is so acute, she is constantly disappointed and adrift. And so it goes, her life circling the drain slowly - lazily at first, then swirling quicker and quicker, moving towards what you fear may be an inevitable conclusion.
Anna's story is enhanced by the details of her sessions with her Swiss therapist and her German language lessons. This clever device serves to emphasize Anna's growing isolation, the rigid structure and unforgiving cages that she finds herself in. Very clever - in fact, this is one of the "smartest" books I have read in a long time. The writer is a poet and that sensibility is very apparent in her writing.
This book also has the best first and last lines of any book in recent memory. The last line - an arrow to the heart. Unforgettable.
A 4.5 for me.
Anna Benz is one of those women. From the deceptively simple and innocuous book title and cover comes a complicated tale of a deeply unhappy woman who is a curious mix of apathy and passion, passivity and impulsiveness, self destructiveness and self preservation. She alternates between startling insightful observations about herself and her situation and an incredible denseness. To some degree, we are all a mass of contradictions but Anna takes it to extremes.
Anna has been unhappy and feeling unsettled in her own skin since she was a child, but we have no idea why. She marries and comes to live in Switzerland, which she alternately loathes and admires. She feels isolated and throws herself into a series of affairs in a desperate attempt to feel something, anything - but her pathology is so acute, she is constantly disappointed and adrift. And so it goes, her life circling the drain slowly - lazily at first, then swirling quicker and quicker, moving towards what you fear may be an inevitable conclusion.
Anna's story is enhanced by the details of her sessions with her Swiss therapist and her German language lessons. This clever device serves to emphasize Anna's growing isolation, the rigid structure and unforgiving cages that she finds herself in. Very clever - in fact, this is one of the "smartest" books I have read in a long time. The writer is a poet and that sensibility is very apparent in her writing.
This book also has the best first and last lines of any book in recent memory. The last line - an arrow to the heart. Unforgettable.
A 4.5 for me.
November 18, 2015
This novel is saturated with passages that read thusly: 'Anna had loved Stephen, or thought she had. Anna thought she still loved Stephen, though she wasn’t sure. But Anna did love Polly Jean, and in a way that was like loving Stephen.�
It seems that the author wanted to write this, her first novel, though she wasn’t sure. But then she did write it, but did not love her characters, but in a way, because she wrote it, she wanted us to love it, and that was like her loving them enough to write it.
Confused? Perhaps sessions between Anna and her analyst/therapist, who must take some responsibility for how disturbed she is, might enlighten us? �'You see?� Doctor Messerli cheerfully pointed out. “What you’ve needed all along was simply a way of facilitating an ease of speech, of feeling more comfortable with your own vice.� I think not.
The graphic sex with just about any man who comes along lands like a vulture to further devour Anna’s body and soul until there is nothing left of her that I could care about. For me, the subject matter was not the problem, but how it was written and presented.
I have read some reviews that suggest the end of the story might justify the reading it takes to get there. I can not tell you if I agree. I made it half-way through. I cannot even justify how I got that far. There are many references to trains in the story and I kept feeling like the whole thing was a train wreck that had already happened. I had the sensation you experience when driving by an accident with traffic slowed to a snail’s pace while drivers pass by trying to see what’s happened and there is nothing to be seen but law enforcement trying unsuccessfully to get things moving again. I don’t know how Hausfrau ends, but I can say with absolute certainty that I don’t care. And I’m sure about that.
It seems that the author wanted to write this, her first novel, though she wasn’t sure. But then she did write it, but did not love her characters, but in a way, because she wrote it, she wanted us to love it, and that was like her loving them enough to write it.
Confused? Perhaps sessions between Anna and her analyst/therapist, who must take some responsibility for how disturbed she is, might enlighten us? �'You see?� Doctor Messerli cheerfully pointed out. “What you’ve needed all along was simply a way of facilitating an ease of speech, of feeling more comfortable with your own vice.� I think not.
The graphic sex with just about any man who comes along lands like a vulture to further devour Anna’s body and soul until there is nothing left of her that I could care about. For me, the subject matter was not the problem, but how it was written and presented.
I have read some reviews that suggest the end of the story might justify the reading it takes to get there. I can not tell you if I agree. I made it half-way through. I cannot even justify how I got that far. There are many references to trains in the story and I kept feeling like the whole thing was a train wreck that had already happened. I had the sensation you experience when driving by an accident with traffic slowed to a snail’s pace while drivers pass by trying to see what’s happened and there is nothing to be seen but law enforcement trying unsuccessfully to get things moving again. I don’t know how Hausfrau ends, but I can say with absolute certainty that I don’t care. And I’m sure about that.
March 12, 2015
"A bored woman is a dangerous woman." Anyone who has ever read Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina knows that this saying is true. Emma Bovary is a bored married woman who seeks to escape life’s banality through affairs. And Anna Karenina, arguably the more interesting woman, seeks solace from her cold, emotionless husband through her affair with the far more dashing Vronsky.
Why do I begin this review with a look at Emma and Anna? Largely because Anna Benz, a displaced American woman living in a Zurich suburb � married to a gorgeous Swiss banker named Bruno � is their legacy. Readers who are familiar with these two books will be richly rewarded with nods to these classics.
This is a mesmerizing book, one of the more psychologically astute books I’ve read. This Anna, on the surface, appears to have it all: the successful husband, three children, a beautiful home, the trappings of wealth. Yet she is curiously disconnected from life, a stranger in a strange land (she barely speaks the Swiss-German dialect that is required of her to fully participate in life). Snippets of sessions with her analyst, Doktor Messerli, tease out some of the underlying layers of this seemingly impenetrable woman.
Anna has affairs � lots of them � to fill up the empty hole inside her, skirting with discovery. Yet these affairs are devoid of the passion and emotional investment that one might expect from a novel that focuses on affairs � sometimes jarringly so.
Hausfrau veers into territory that its classic predecessors do not � the precision of words. Throughout the book, Anna queries Dr. Messerli on word meanings (Delusion vs. hallucination? Maze vs. labyrinth? Indifference vs. ambivalence? Secrecy vs. privacy?) Anna reflects, “She could have simply told the Doktor that she was good at word games…But that confession would have wrung out another one: that her wittiest moments were her slyest and most often they served her in the way the ink serves the octopus. Smoke screens, she hid behind them.� Words in this novel can obscure and reveal; language can connect or can isolate. And indeed, in many key scenes, they do.
As the book veers toward its preordained conclusion, it touches upon so many issues: the nature of love and betrayal, the fine lines of morality, the continual search for self and meaning, and the lengths we go to fill the voids in our lives. This is an incredibly fine debut that portends good things for Jill Alexander Essbaum.
Why do I begin this review with a look at Emma and Anna? Largely because Anna Benz, a displaced American woman living in a Zurich suburb � married to a gorgeous Swiss banker named Bruno � is their legacy. Readers who are familiar with these two books will be richly rewarded with nods to these classics.
This is a mesmerizing book, one of the more psychologically astute books I’ve read. This Anna, on the surface, appears to have it all: the successful husband, three children, a beautiful home, the trappings of wealth. Yet she is curiously disconnected from life, a stranger in a strange land (she barely speaks the Swiss-German dialect that is required of her to fully participate in life). Snippets of sessions with her analyst, Doktor Messerli, tease out some of the underlying layers of this seemingly impenetrable woman.
Anna has affairs � lots of them � to fill up the empty hole inside her, skirting with discovery. Yet these affairs are devoid of the passion and emotional investment that one might expect from a novel that focuses on affairs � sometimes jarringly so.
Hausfrau veers into territory that its classic predecessors do not � the precision of words. Throughout the book, Anna queries Dr. Messerli on word meanings (Delusion vs. hallucination? Maze vs. labyrinth? Indifference vs. ambivalence? Secrecy vs. privacy?) Anna reflects, “She could have simply told the Doktor that she was good at word games…But that confession would have wrung out another one: that her wittiest moments were her slyest and most often they served her in the way the ink serves the octopus. Smoke screens, she hid behind them.� Words in this novel can obscure and reveal; language can connect or can isolate. And indeed, in many key scenes, they do.
As the book veers toward its preordained conclusion, it touches upon so many issues: the nature of love and betrayal, the fine lines of morality, the continual search for self and meaning, and the lengths we go to fill the voids in our lives. This is an incredibly fine debut that portends good things for Jill Alexander Essbaum.
May 25, 2015
That morning’s German lesson left Anna pensive. The German language, like a woman, has moods. On occasion they are conditional, imperative, indicative, subjunctive. Hypothetical, demanding, factual, wishful. Wistful, bossy, of blunted affect, solicitous. Longing, officious, anhedonic, pleading. Anna tried to make a list of every mood she’d ever been in but ran out of words before even half her feelings were named.
This is a curious insight into Anna Benz, because the eponymous Hausfrau seems to have very few moods indeed. She is depressed, lonely, bored, detached, aimless, hopeless, with occasional forays into guilty, apprehensive, and obsessed. All kissing cousins of misery, these moods. And Hausfrau is a novel of monochromatic misery.
The reasons why this American woman, who lives in a quaint and tidy suburb of Zurich with her banker husband, Bruno, two young sons, Victor and Charles, and an infant daughter, Polly Jean, is so unhappy are vague. Deliberately so, it would seem, for Anna withholds most of her truth even from her Jungian psychotherapist, Doktor Messerli. She was reasonably close to her parents, but they died in a car accident long ago. She hasn’t been back to the States since moving to Switzerland nine years earlier, but she has only one friend in Switzerland, not counting her husband, with whom she isn’t particularly friendly, or her mother-in-law, who merely tolerates Anna in order to spend time with her beloved grandchildren. She wants for nothing, and the only expectations placed on her are that of a mother—duties that she carries out with distracted but very real affection—and of a wife, a role she seems mildly bewildered by.
Anna is full of holes where happiness, contentment, reason, engagement, and gratitude ought to be. And she fills these holes with cocks. Too blunt for you? Then don’t read this book. The only thing Anna is blunt about, where the blurry lines of her existence sharpen into straight edges, is sex. And she has a lot of it, though rarely with her husband.
Anna loved and didn’t love sex. Anna needed and didn’t need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted.The novel swivels from Anna’s home life and the arm’s length relationships she has with everyone except, in surprisingly tender moments, her children, to the German language classroom (she has finally taken the great step of formal instruction after years of muddling around, though Swiss German still escapes her) where she meets her current affair, Scotsman Archie, and steps tentatively into female friendship with sweet, unsuspecting Canadian, Mary. The narrative takes side streets into sessions with Doktor Messerli, who is full of profound aphorisms such as, “A bored woman is a dangerous woman� and into dead-ends as Anna recalls a brief love affair with a visiting American scholar over a year earlier.
Nihilistic characters typically see me slapping a book shut and looking for something with a redemptive story. So, color me surprised that I found this novel compulsively readable. With an alchemist’s skill, Essbaum takes flat, heavy, dull metal of depression and turns it into literary gold. Being a student of foreign languages, I adored her metaphorical journeys into the German language, such as the quote I opened with. Perhaps labored at times, but they serve as a breathing counterpoint to the suffocating bleakness of Anna’s existence. Her characters are keenly crafted, her use of language precise as a Swiss watch.
I hesitate to rate this too highly, for the entire premise of the novel is based on one young woman’s (yes, although Anna is thirty-eight, from my mid-forties perspective, she is young!) belief that it is too late, her life is written and she is incapable of change. Profound depression can thwart one’s perspective to such a hopeless degree, but too often the author’s heavy hand interfered by introducing coincidence and tragedy. Anna never really stood a chance.
Yet, like any train wreck (sorry), I could not look away. Read at your own risk. I’m glad I did.
April 17, 2015
Hausfrau is a strange little book. In some ways I respected it and appreciated its strengths, but I never felt close to it. It never sucked me into its world or made my heart clench or my thoughts race. It's technically strong but also technically weak.
Anna is an American woman in Switzerland, with a somewhat aloof and at times cruel Swiss husband and three children. She's lived the Swiss life for years but still feels like an outcast - she doesn't know the language, has few friends, doesn't particularly like her mother-in-law, and can't even drive. She's started seeing a therapist, but she can't escape a feeling of despair - which she tries to counter with a series of affairs, leading her into a downward spiral.
Initially, I was incredibly drawn to Anna - she seemed complex and unlikeable (but in a fascinating way), and I was so excited to follow her journey throughout the book. Unfortunately, I felt that Essbaum kept her at a distance. She felt cold, and despite seeing everything through her perspective, I never really understood her. Her apathy towards everything quickly used up any sympathy I had for her - I didn't care because she didn't care. Even the affairs that she was supposedly addicted to had no passion. The only thing I felt she cared about was her past lover (probably not coincidentally, these were some of my favourite scenes), and maybe more towards the end, her children. I can get behind a selfish, self-destructive, or even whiny character as long as they have some kind of spark, but with Anna I just felt nothing.
Essbaum also wrote Hausfrau with a very specific and unique style - snippets of Anna's present day life are comingled with Anna's therapy sessions, grammar lessons from her German class, facts about Switzerland, and flashbacks to her past, and they cut back and forth suddenly and very frequently. Some of these are more successful than others - at first I enjoyed the conversations with her therapist as I thought they might be important to the plot, that Anna would reveal something that we didn't already know, or have a breakthrough that advanced her as a character - but that wasn't really the case. As for the descriptions of the German language and Switzerland - they gave the story some texture and drew some interesting parallels to Anna's situation, but were ultimately dry and jarred the reader out of the more interesting domestic scenes.
My lukewarm feelings about the book are even more disappointing as I was really looking forward to it - it had endless glowing reviews, a beautiful cover, an intriguing blurb...but alas, it was just not for me. I'd consider trying another book by Essbaum, as there were certainly some gems to be found in the prose (you can tell she used to be a poet!) but I can't really recommend Hausfrau as more than a mildly interesting, quick read.
Anna is an American woman in Switzerland, with a somewhat aloof and at times cruel Swiss husband and three children. She's lived the Swiss life for years but still feels like an outcast - she doesn't know the language, has few friends, doesn't particularly like her mother-in-law, and can't even drive. She's started seeing a therapist, but she can't escape a feeling of despair - which she tries to counter with a series of affairs, leading her into a downward spiral.
Initially, I was incredibly drawn to Anna - she seemed complex and unlikeable (but in a fascinating way), and I was so excited to follow her journey throughout the book. Unfortunately, I felt that Essbaum kept her at a distance. She felt cold, and despite seeing everything through her perspective, I never really understood her. Her apathy towards everything quickly used up any sympathy I had for her - I didn't care because she didn't care. Even the affairs that she was supposedly addicted to had no passion. The only thing I felt she cared about was her past lover (probably not coincidentally, these were some of my favourite scenes), and maybe more towards the end, her children. I can get behind a selfish, self-destructive, or even whiny character as long as they have some kind of spark, but with Anna I just felt nothing.
Essbaum also wrote Hausfrau with a very specific and unique style - snippets of Anna's present day life are comingled with Anna's therapy sessions, grammar lessons from her German class, facts about Switzerland, and flashbacks to her past, and they cut back and forth suddenly and very frequently. Some of these are more successful than others - at first I enjoyed the conversations with her therapist as I thought they might be important to the plot, that Anna would reveal something that we didn't already know, or have a breakthrough that advanced her as a character - but that wasn't really the case. As for the descriptions of the German language and Switzerland - they gave the story some texture and drew some interesting parallels to Anna's situation, but were ultimately dry and jarred the reader out of the more interesting domestic scenes.
My lukewarm feelings about the book are even more disappointing as I was really looking forward to it - it had endless glowing reviews, a beautiful cover, an intriguing blurb...but alas, it was just not for me. I'd consider trying another book by Essbaum, as there were certainly some gems to be found in the prose (you can tell she used to be a poet!) but I can't really recommend Hausfrau as more than a mildly interesting, quick read.
January 24, 2015
Anna Benz, main character of "Hausfrau", is a psychologically complex female character.
"Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both passivity and as unassailable desire to be distracted. And wanted. She wanted to be wanted."
Anna is lonely, bored, & unsatisfied ....living in a foreign country with her husband and three children. She does not drive, relying on public transportation or from her mother-in-law, who lives near by. Her husband Bruno is in the Banking business. Bruno is Swiss. Anna American. Bruno & Anna only moved to Switzerland because of Bruno's job transfer.
Anna is in analysis...and throughout the entire book, the reader is a 'fly-on-the-wall' listening in on the intimate 'patient/client' sessions. Doktor Messerli works with Anna to see her root problems.
During one of their early sessions, Doktor Messerli asks Anna:
"When you were a girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?"
Anna gave a plaintive answer.
"Loved. Protected. Secure.". She knew that wasn't what the doctor meant.
The Doktor tried another approach.
"What did you study at university?"
Anna flushed. She didn't want to say.
"Tell me"
"Home economics", Anna whispered.
"Hausfrau" is compulsively readable. An astutely imagine story ....the author opens a window into the mind of Anna...the sadness, the confusion, the pain, the circumstances.
Be warned...(rather, be reminded), you, the reader, are 'human'. Its normal to 'feel' erotic sensations. Reading about lustful-passionate-raw-intimate-sex between a man and a woman is bound to stimulate aspects of eros!
With luminous, fluid prose, Jill Alexander Essbaum invites us into the world of Anna Benz whose soul is battered.
Erotic moments, (because the sexual storytelling is hot), ....and a very sad story!
"Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both passivity and as unassailable desire to be distracted. And wanted. She wanted to be wanted."
Anna is lonely, bored, & unsatisfied ....living in a foreign country with her husband and three children. She does not drive, relying on public transportation or from her mother-in-law, who lives near by. Her husband Bruno is in the Banking business. Bruno is Swiss. Anna American. Bruno & Anna only moved to Switzerland because of Bruno's job transfer.
Anna is in analysis...and throughout the entire book, the reader is a 'fly-on-the-wall' listening in on the intimate 'patient/client' sessions. Doktor Messerli works with Anna to see her root problems.
During one of their early sessions, Doktor Messerli asks Anna:
"When you were a girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?"
Anna gave a plaintive answer.
"Loved. Protected. Secure.". She knew that wasn't what the doctor meant.
The Doktor tried another approach.
"What did you study at university?"
Anna flushed. She didn't want to say.
"Tell me"
"Home economics", Anna whispered.
"Hausfrau" is compulsively readable. An astutely imagine story ....the author opens a window into the mind of Anna...the sadness, the confusion, the pain, the circumstances.
Be warned...(rather, be reminded), you, the reader, are 'human'. Its normal to 'feel' erotic sensations. Reading about lustful-passionate-raw-intimate-sex between a man and a woman is bound to stimulate aspects of eros!
With luminous, fluid prose, Jill Alexander Essbaum invites us into the world of Anna Benz whose soul is battered.
Erotic moments, (because the sexual storytelling is hot), ....and a very sad story!
September 2, 2015
2.5 Stars
Well, I've certainly got Hausfrau out of my system, (for good) and have to say, I really did not care for this story of a "haphazardly moral" dysfunctional housewife who has "descriptive" sex with anyone of the male persuasion who passes her way. Anna is one sick (and sad) woman, I grant you that, and how did the author put it......."She's cheating on the man she's cheating on her husband with." Good Lord!
Anyway, I was pretty much bored with the whole shebang until about three quarters of the way in when catastrophe happens, but that was it for stimulation until the "I've read it before" anticipated ending.
Could have passed this one by.
July 9, 2016
The title could have been 'The Glass Castle'. That's how American expat Anna Benz insulated and isolated herself from her new life in Switzerland. She observed everything around her but never participated in the new life she and Bruno created for their nuclear family of five. Anna and Bruno had three children and lived a comfortable life with Bruno the banker providing for her and the children. She was a stay-at-home mom. The German efficiency and disciplined society, even the trains are exactly on time, prevented her for the past nine years to assimilate into the new culture and language. She felt totally disconnected and out of her own depth.
Her apathy (or emotional arrest) with life in general could have started when her parents were killed in an accident when she was 22 and left her bereft of any support system in her own mother country. Her life before her marriage is never discussed in her therapy sessions.
Her feelings of apathy and disconnection could also have been caused by post natal depression. Three children in a row without any emotional support system, was not a good idea, especially since she did not really wanted to have children. Like many other things in her life, it just happened. It was not considered in the therapy sessions, perhaps it would have complicated the plot :-)
She couldn't drive a car; don't really like cooking, and had no other passions to pull her into a healthier frame of mind. Her mother-in-law was an independent, emotionally distant shadow figure, moving in and out of her life on a daily basis to take care of the children in Anna's absences. She felt unneeded, unimportant, incompetent and, well useless. She was also unable to provide emotional support to her three children. Did not understand her husband who did not spend time with her but loved his children. She expected people around her to (unknowingly) nurture her feelings of loneliness and emotional desolation, instead of becoming their soft place to fall. She just couldn't do it. She was emotionally unavailable to people around her. She tried to be understood, on her own terms, but never tried to understand the people in her immediate circle. She took, but did not give. She was desperate.
Anna was in an abusive relationship with herself. Through psychotherapy and German lessons, she tried to connect with people, making (unwillingly)friends, and becoming part of the new dispensation, but chose alternative solutions instead. She was unable to be honest with her therapist and consequently with herself. She chose to become friends with other expats and indulging in almost aggressive sexual relationships with men. She chose the actions but avoided the consequences, never confronting her own choices. When she is finally confronted with her actions, the results were devastating. She devoid herself of guidelines to navigate her new life.
COMMENTS:
I found this book dull on so many levels. I do think Anna the character was well portrayed as lifeless, like a living body functioning without a soul. There was a lifelessness in the surroundings, the social parties, the train rides (which she enjoyed) and her interaction with everything around here. Sterile. Her rainbow turned grayscale.
Filling up the book with lectures in the German language structure, psychotherapy sessions with Frau Doktor Messerli and long boring descriptions of the Swiss background, left me feeling robbed of valuable time, although it all fitted into the ongoing dialogue. I do realize though that the factors can be very interesting to readers who would like to know more about Freud and Jung without studying their philosophies in sterile academical format. However, the therapist's input was sometimes pathetic and did not make any sense in many instances. But she did read Anna correctly despite the lack of information from Anna's side.
“Passivity isn’t a malady. It’s the symptom. Complicity is but one of your many well-honed skills. When it pleases you, you are quite practiced at defiance. …Where did this come from? What might have caused this?� Anna said that she was afraid she didn’t know.Perhaps the German lessons could be of value to some readers as well. First time in my life that I heard of a language with moods though! It fitted into Anna's frame of mind and added meaning to situations in her own life. It became much more than the memorizing of new words.
“That’s exactly right. You are afraid.� The Doktor said, and then she said no more."
The plot also presented the nature of depression and the consequences it can have.
The erotic extravaganza became stale and bland. Sometimes vulgar. Alternatively, it could have established the desperation with which Anna tried to connect with people and created a feeling of revulsion in the reader for effect. It worked very well. I often felt like : "Oh my word, here she goes again ...!" If that was the intention of the plot, it worked splendidly!
It is not the best book I have ever read, did not have me excited about anything in it, did not get me emotionally involved, and basically did not speak to me. Structurally it was very well planned and executed. But it was too formatically correct. Too technically perfect. It did not rock my world. Nothing new was added to my knowledge or understanding of depression. However, the prose was beautiful.
Well, other readers might differ from me, but I constantly had the feeling that this character was a ME ME ME persona who lost the plot and meaning of life completely. The best advise my mother ever gave me was when I got married and moved thousands of kilometers away from home and my own people. She said I was moving into a totally different social environment, with totally different rules. The people won't change to fit into my view of the world, I will have to change to fit in with them. For more than three hundred years they happily survived without me, they can happily do so for the next three hundred years as well. It changed my life and attitude with the speed of lightning. The ME in me took a hike for the good of mankind and neighbors. I was excited to try. My mother told me to be my own best friend for those moments when loneliness stepped in. Anna made herself her worst enemy instead.
Reading the book I thought about this advise and how it might have changed Anna's destiny. She lost her compass. She lost her soul through her own choices. There was nobody to guide her into adulthood. It happens to so many people. The results for her was just heartbreaking. She built herself a round glass castle with no corners in which she could hide from herself.
PS. I wrote this comment below on Carmen's review, and thought I should actually add it to my review. I added some thoughts to it.
I thought Anna was passive aggressive - controlling her environment by being needy on purpose. she is in her late thirties and never learnt to drive?! She had to be driven around; her husband took care of their budget, her visas and permits and all other administration of the household; she was constantly late, inconsiderate and disrespectful of the people who were waiting for her; messed things up by lack of planning or discipline skills; her MIL took care of her children; her friends organized her parties, and even her childrens' birthday parties. If they did not do it, her children would have lost out on good memories. She simply forced the people around her to take care of her. She was this emotionally arrested little girl in a grown up's body. She was never a victim. She instigated everything. All the situations had only one common element, and that was her. She controlled it. So no, I did not think she was innocent. She was a naughty teenager who could not face the responsibilities of the adult world.
"So Anna’s passivity had merit. It was useful. It made for relative peace at the house on Rosenweg. Allowing Bruno to make decisions on her behalf absolved her of responsibility. She didn’t need to think. She followed along. She rode a bus that someone else drove. And Bruno liked driving it. Order upon order. Rule upon rule. Where the wind blew, she went. This was Anna’s natural inclination. And like playing tennis or dancing a foxtrot, or speaking a foreign language, it grew even easier with practice. If Anna suspected there was more to her pathology, then that was a secret she kept very close."When tragedy struck the family she rolled herself in a ball and ignored the needs of her husband and children who were also suffering badly. Everybody had to take care of her instead. So no, Anna did not convince me of victimhood at all. I rather thought she was selfish and way too egocentric. Even her final decision threw the ball back in the courts of her friends, family and husband. They should be blamed. She was sick, yes, and had no other coping skills. That was tragic.
I have no sympathy. Perhaps I should feel bad. But no, I won't take responsibility for her choices.
Sophomoric? Yes, a perfect audience for this plot.
There's a lot of hype around the book. You might want to try it. To be honest, it just made me impatient since I probably come from a totally different angle than the author was hoping for, who knows. The prose was magic! The concluding sentence was one of the most powerful ones I have read in a very long time. Absolutely brilliant!
March 4, 2021
“A LONELY WOMAN IS a dangerous woman.� Doktor Messerli spoke with grave sincerity. “A lonely woman is a bored woman. Bored women act on impulse.�
Anna an American, is married to a gruff man whom she once loved, in Anna’s peculiar way. In a country so different to that of her birth, she does not fit. She is bored, restless and ill at ease in every aspect of her life. An American woman in Switzerland. Much of this prose is centred around the German classes she attends, and the formal structure and grammar that is applied to the language. I didn’t always pick up on these nuances, I would say some of this was lost on me. Linguists would love this aspect. The author was very skilled in telling Anna’s story, but for the faint hearted it is not. This is a disconcerting read.
The place is cold, she is cold. She doesn’t mean to be; she is simply adrift or more accurately, she is floundering. Anna is searching for something that to me is akin to a surfer searching for that elusive high; the wave they cannot find but will continue to push and push for without regard of the devastation left behind. The danger and the complete disregard to everyone and everything around her was of little or no regard to Anna. The marriage on the outside seemed fine, but she was not connected to anything in her life. She did not feel validated, no feeling of oneness, she was not grounded or had any sense of rootedness. She was a nothing, a shell ready to crack even if touched by a whisper.
The funny part is that the catch phrase for this book seems to be this one: ‘Anna was a good wife, mostly�. She is not. She is appalling but she spirals recklessly and seeming to be carrying out her extramarital affairs by rote. Part of the despair here is she is a mother, of not just one but unfortunately three lovely little cherubs. She did not want to be one, she was lucky her children were very mild-mannered.
There are great bit parts here, the serious mother-in-law that assists greatly in the care of the children. The lovely friend Anna meets in German class; she has never had a friend. Anna’s adhoc approach to parenting and the support from her husband’s mother meant she could continue her path of recklessness. She was always justifying, always hiding and covering her continual mess by relentlessly careening with the same messy behaviours. It was depressing but equally as compelling. Unfortunately, the character of the husband came across as a bit part also, we were not privy to the real him; this made it hard to gauge his reasoning and what he was willing to put up with from his wife, or not.
We hear much of Anna’s story through her sessions of Jungian psychoanalysis and would like to think Anna can learn from this clever woman, we are constantly waiting to see how Anna will use this for the greater good. I was grasping and wanting this to be the case for I was invested. So many philosophical questions asked by Anna, but she would not change, she just seemed to question more as time went by.
Many readers will despise Anna, I thought she was troubled, flawed and had oh so very many defects of character. On reflection, watching her clutch at old friendships and wondering if it was too late to reach out to these people in her hour of need, such as her high school librarian, an old cousin not seen in 10 years. Could she even reach her Doktor after beating down her door in desperation? Others always seemed to be out of reach was her level of disconnectedness.
She found solace on the train system, loved watching the trains go by. A good part of the storyline was interwoven into this intricate train system from the opening paragraph to the last.
This is hard reading; it is not for those who will baulk on the topic of sexual gratification and questionable behaviours. Anna was utterly troubled but not a character I despised, beside her actions being almost exactly that, despicable, for the entirety of the story. Very well written, this was a book that flowed in and out of my consciousness as I drove along in a very smooth, if not confronting manner. I recommend this book as a hefty troubling tome, but one will need to be prepared to face the brevity and candour of the abhorrent tone.
Anna an American, is married to a gruff man whom she once loved, in Anna’s peculiar way. In a country so different to that of her birth, she does not fit. She is bored, restless and ill at ease in every aspect of her life. An American woman in Switzerland. Much of this prose is centred around the German classes she attends, and the formal structure and grammar that is applied to the language. I didn’t always pick up on these nuances, I would say some of this was lost on me. Linguists would love this aspect. The author was very skilled in telling Anna’s story, but for the faint hearted it is not. This is a disconcerting read.
The place is cold, she is cold. She doesn’t mean to be; she is simply adrift or more accurately, she is floundering. Anna is searching for something that to me is akin to a surfer searching for that elusive high; the wave they cannot find but will continue to push and push for without regard of the devastation left behind. The danger and the complete disregard to everyone and everything around her was of little or no regard to Anna. The marriage on the outside seemed fine, but she was not connected to anything in her life. She did not feel validated, no feeling of oneness, she was not grounded or had any sense of rootedness. She was a nothing, a shell ready to crack even if touched by a whisper.
The funny part is that the catch phrase for this book seems to be this one: ‘Anna was a good wife, mostly�. She is not. She is appalling but she spirals recklessly and seeming to be carrying out her extramarital affairs by rote. Part of the despair here is she is a mother, of not just one but unfortunately three lovely little cherubs. She did not want to be one, she was lucky her children were very mild-mannered.
There are great bit parts here, the serious mother-in-law that assists greatly in the care of the children. The lovely friend Anna meets in German class; she has never had a friend. Anna’s adhoc approach to parenting and the support from her husband’s mother meant she could continue her path of recklessness. She was always justifying, always hiding and covering her continual mess by relentlessly careening with the same messy behaviours. It was depressing but equally as compelling. Unfortunately, the character of the husband came across as a bit part also, we were not privy to the real him; this made it hard to gauge his reasoning and what he was willing to put up with from his wife, or not.
We hear much of Anna’s story through her sessions of Jungian psychoanalysis and would like to think Anna can learn from this clever woman, we are constantly waiting to see how Anna will use this for the greater good. I was grasping and wanting this to be the case for I was invested. So many philosophical questions asked by Anna, but she would not change, she just seemed to question more as time went by.
Many readers will despise Anna, I thought she was troubled, flawed and had oh so very many defects of character. On reflection, watching her clutch at old friendships and wondering if it was too late to reach out to these people in her hour of need, such as her high school librarian, an old cousin not seen in 10 years. Could she even reach her Doktor after beating down her door in desperation? Others always seemed to be out of reach was her level of disconnectedness.
She found solace on the train system, loved watching the trains go by. A good part of the storyline was interwoven into this intricate train system from the opening paragraph to the last.
This is hard reading; it is not for those who will baulk on the topic of sexual gratification and questionable behaviours. Anna was utterly troubled but not a character I despised, beside her actions being almost exactly that, despicable, for the entirety of the story. Very well written, this was a book that flowed in and out of my consciousness as I drove along in a very smooth, if not confronting manner. I recommend this book as a hefty troubling tome, but one will need to be prepared to face the brevity and candour of the abhorrent tone.
January 5, 2016
Here's the One Positive Thing I have to say about this book: At about the 70% mark, Something Actually Happens. What's more, it's the first genuinely surprising and somewhat affecting Thing That Happens up to that point. The book then deteriorates back to its previous suckiness level. However, a good editor would have been able to take this 70%-point benchmark, then incorporate a few other decent moments from the last 30% of the book, patch these around the nucleus of the 70% bit, excise the entire first 69% of the book, and produce a decent short story. But since that didn't happen, we're left with an unnecessary book-length book that seems to exist primarily as an excuse to have An Ending. The kind of overconfident ending that presupposes its audience will be overly smitten with it.
At the root of the problem, and driving all the critiques that follow, is the fact that the book and the protagonist, Anna, both take themselves Sooooo Darrrrrrnnn Seeeeeeeriously, thereby sucking dry Alllll the fun and artistry and edge. At the very outset, I thought it might be a black comedy. This had some potential. Alas, it did not happen.
There's no better way to begin than to provide an example of just how heavy-handed the book is. One of Anna's inept and bumbling lovers, each of which is a total goofy-accented SNL skit caricature (only not funny), habitually uses at least one kind of technically-synonymous-but-wrong-in-context word in every English (as a second language) sentence he speaks. This happens about six times in the book, and EACH TIME -- no joke -- the author/Anna then supplies the correct word that should replace the malapropism -- you know, in case we missed the day in third grade when we learned about Context Clues and therefore couldn't guess it ourselves. It reads like this (my own examples, but completely in line with the book):
"Hallo, An-na. How are you touching today?" He meant feeling.
"Ya, An-na, I would like to burn a cigarette with you." He meant smoke.
"An-na, I am spinning the pages of this horrible book." He meant turning.
"An-na, you have an abyss in your stocking." He meant hole.
Worse than this -- Anna's only native-English-speaking lover is a fire scientist or something, and therefore, Every. Single. Time. he is mentioned, the fire metaphors and similes abound. Oh, the heavy-handedness.
And when Anna herself talks -- things are no better. Especially when talking to any man, and pretty much apropos of nothing, Anna seems only capable of stringing together a series of pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-philosophical "existential questions." They go something along the lines of (my examples, but completely akin to actual Anna dialogue):
"Why is fire blue? Is fire neutral? Is blue neutral? Is neutral the same as passive? Is blue fire passive, or neutral? Is death real? Is fire death? What color is death?"
And yes, this is actual dialogue, things she is purportedly saying aloud to other people. I am really not even exaggerating that much. And no, she is not seven years old.
And then, UGH - that brings us to the terrible, terrible character of Anna's Jungian analyst, Doktor Somethingorother, I blocked it out. Every few pages throughout the novel, there is a excerpt from a supposed session with this horrible woman, whom I believe should probably be sued for malpractice. Now, I have never had Jungian analysis, and I'm totally cool with the man Carl himself. But my god, now I will never, ever dare to subject myself to this kind of analysis in the event that it happens to be anything like the process described in this book. Doktor whatever drones on interminably in the following vein -- here's a made-up but accurate example:
"A bored woman is a dangerous woman. An unhappy woman is a bored woman. An unhappy woman is a dangerous woman. A dangerous woman is a dangerous woman. Appearances deceive, Anna. Appearances are dangerous, Anna. You are not what you appear, Anna. The soul is made of gold and darkness, Anna. You must look inside, Anna. I worry for you, Anna. When will you tell me everything, Anna?"
...And Anna's non-responses to all this are also provided in detail, lest we have somehow failed to grasp the idea that she does not participate actively in the business of her existence, which seems to be an erstwhile theme of the book. Her responses are along these lines:
"Oh," said Anna.
Anna nodded.
Anna nodded uncertainly.
Anna wasn't sure.
Anna wasn't really listening.
Anna had stopped listening.
Anna said "I know." But Anna did not know.
Scintillating, ay?
But actually - reading detailed accounts of Anna's lack of participation in therapy is less annoying than reading the accounts of times she actually engages actively in her therapy -- specifically, when Anna reads from her dream journal. Unfortunately for the reader, Anna takes to dream journaling with great vigor. (This is pretty much her only hobby or interest, aside from sex, taking walks around her cul-de-sac at night, and sitting on her favorite park bench.) The problem is that just as her lovers are portrayed as SNL skit stereotypes, Anna's dreams come off as parodies of what Very Somber and Serious Dream Analysis Dreams are like. Just like this book as a whole and the character of Anna herself, the dreams have none of the lively and delightful goofiness of real life. Here's my made-up example of a typical Anna Dream:
"I wake up in my childhood bedroom. But I realize it is not my bedroom. It is my German classroom. And actually, I did not just wake up. I realize I have already been awake, but I have punched through the wall of the room and the cold air is just making me feel more awake. It is a blue wall that I punched. The other red wall remains solid. And now I am flying a kite. The kite is made of fire. Then suddenly everything becomes fire. Blue fire. I pick up the fire and am afraid it will burn my hands but it does not burn my hands. I place the blue fire in a blue goblet and drink it. It goes right through me and falls out of my body onto the ground and becomes a serpent. My German teacher catches the serpent and puts it in a cage. I am naked. The teacher turns toward me. In a grave tone he informs me I must study my reflexive verbs." (Dun dun DUN!)
I hope I am conveying that a lot of this book is hot air, chaff, or whatever "full of sound and fury but signifying nothingness" metaphor you want to employ.
And, in addition to all the aforementioned ineffective components, the book also contains a great deal of uninteresting Hating on Switzerland. Jezus H, does this protagonist ever freaking hate Switzerland. If you cut out all the parts where Anna is fretting about her terrible fate of having married a banker dude and moved to horrendous, torturous Switzerland, the book would become a novella in short order. A slim novella. Unfortunately, excessively hating Switzerland as Anna describes hating it simply does not make for a compelling or believable story or character. I totally "get" that we can feel like outsiders when we are outside our home countries, but from the level of alienation Anna purports to experience, you would think she was living in a twig shack on a largely deserted steppe populated only by roving hordes of cannibals. Oh woe is me, Anna repeatedly despairs, Switzerland is so awful, what with its timely-running trains and general punctuality, its many languages spoken, its manners and its clocks and its occasional Alpine views when clouds permit! She concedes she at least likes the chocolate. And the church bells. And the luxurious shopping centers that are largely like American ones.
I should mention that perhaps Anna would feel more comfortable in Switzerland, and would find its citizens less frigid (as she repeatedly tells us they are), if she had learned to speak any of the country's many languages of currency AFTER LIVING THERE FOR SOMETHING LIKE SEVEN YEARS. Or maybe its's nine. Anyway - a long time. In this book, she has just finally enrolled in like, Conversational German 101. And that's only at the suggestion/coercion of the horrible Jungian analyst. We are also informed ad nauseam that Anna has neither a BANK ACCOUNT (get it, in Switzerland, oh the irony) nor a driver's license, even after seven years. I believe one intention here was to render Anna impotent and marginalized in an effort to hitch ANNA BENZ'S cart to the stars of fellow dissatisfied wives ANNA Karenina and EMMA BOVARY (obviously not accidental). Yeah, it doesn't work. Not the same. That ship has sailed. I mean, I bet there are awesome ways to tell those stories in a modernized fashion, but this isn't it.
Anyway - in the end, all this lack of a bank account and driver license stuff merely turns out to be nothing more than a kind of ruse, a mere setup just to make possible the novel's very final scenes. Now, if you think the novel's ending was so fabulous that it was worth the long haul to get there, then I'm envious, because you enjoyed/appreciated the book more than I did -- and let me tell you, I outright stalked the library to procure this book in the first place. Unfortunately, I'm sticking to my assessment that the project would have fared better as a potentially stellar short story rather than as an often irritating and largely forgettable novel.
At the root of the problem, and driving all the critiques that follow, is the fact that the book and the protagonist, Anna, both take themselves Sooooo Darrrrrrnnn Seeeeeeeriously, thereby sucking dry Alllll the fun and artistry and edge. At the very outset, I thought it might be a black comedy. This had some potential. Alas, it did not happen.
There's no better way to begin than to provide an example of just how heavy-handed the book is. One of Anna's inept and bumbling lovers, each of which is a total goofy-accented SNL skit caricature (only not funny), habitually uses at least one kind of technically-synonymous-but-wrong-in-context word in every English (as a second language) sentence he speaks. This happens about six times in the book, and EACH TIME -- no joke -- the author/Anna then supplies the correct word that should replace the malapropism -- you know, in case we missed the day in third grade when we learned about Context Clues and therefore couldn't guess it ourselves. It reads like this (my own examples, but completely in line with the book):
"Hallo, An-na. How are you touching today?" He meant feeling.
"Ya, An-na, I would like to burn a cigarette with you." He meant smoke.
"An-na, I am spinning the pages of this horrible book." He meant turning.
"An-na, you have an abyss in your stocking." He meant hole.
Worse than this -- Anna's only native-English-speaking lover is a fire scientist or something, and therefore, Every. Single. Time. he is mentioned, the fire metaphors and similes abound. Oh, the heavy-handedness.
And when Anna herself talks -- things are no better. Especially when talking to any man, and pretty much apropos of nothing, Anna seems only capable of stringing together a series of pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-philosophical "existential questions." They go something along the lines of (my examples, but completely akin to actual Anna dialogue):
"Why is fire blue? Is fire neutral? Is blue neutral? Is neutral the same as passive? Is blue fire passive, or neutral? Is death real? Is fire death? What color is death?"
And yes, this is actual dialogue, things she is purportedly saying aloud to other people. I am really not even exaggerating that much. And no, she is not seven years old.
And then, UGH - that brings us to the terrible, terrible character of Anna's Jungian analyst, Doktor Somethingorother, I blocked it out. Every few pages throughout the novel, there is a excerpt from a supposed session with this horrible woman, whom I believe should probably be sued for malpractice. Now, I have never had Jungian analysis, and I'm totally cool with the man Carl himself. But my god, now I will never, ever dare to subject myself to this kind of analysis in the event that it happens to be anything like the process described in this book. Doktor whatever drones on interminably in the following vein -- here's a made-up but accurate example:
"A bored woman is a dangerous woman. An unhappy woman is a bored woman. An unhappy woman is a dangerous woman. A dangerous woman is a dangerous woman. Appearances deceive, Anna. Appearances are dangerous, Anna. You are not what you appear, Anna. The soul is made of gold and darkness, Anna. You must look inside, Anna. I worry for you, Anna. When will you tell me everything, Anna?"
...And Anna's non-responses to all this are also provided in detail, lest we have somehow failed to grasp the idea that she does not participate actively in the business of her existence, which seems to be an erstwhile theme of the book. Her responses are along these lines:
"Oh," said Anna.
Anna nodded.
Anna nodded uncertainly.
Anna wasn't sure.
Anna wasn't really listening.
Anna had stopped listening.
Anna said "I know." But Anna did not know.
Scintillating, ay?
But actually - reading detailed accounts of Anna's lack of participation in therapy is less annoying than reading the accounts of times she actually engages actively in her therapy -- specifically, when Anna reads from her dream journal. Unfortunately for the reader, Anna takes to dream journaling with great vigor. (This is pretty much her only hobby or interest, aside from sex, taking walks around her cul-de-sac at night, and sitting on her favorite park bench.) The problem is that just as her lovers are portrayed as SNL skit stereotypes, Anna's dreams come off as parodies of what Very Somber and Serious Dream Analysis Dreams are like. Just like this book as a whole and the character of Anna herself, the dreams have none of the lively and delightful goofiness of real life. Here's my made-up example of a typical Anna Dream:
"I wake up in my childhood bedroom. But I realize it is not my bedroom. It is my German classroom. And actually, I did not just wake up. I realize I have already been awake, but I have punched through the wall of the room and the cold air is just making me feel more awake. It is a blue wall that I punched. The other red wall remains solid. And now I am flying a kite. The kite is made of fire. Then suddenly everything becomes fire. Blue fire. I pick up the fire and am afraid it will burn my hands but it does not burn my hands. I place the blue fire in a blue goblet and drink it. It goes right through me and falls out of my body onto the ground and becomes a serpent. My German teacher catches the serpent and puts it in a cage. I am naked. The teacher turns toward me. In a grave tone he informs me I must study my reflexive verbs." (Dun dun DUN!)
I hope I am conveying that a lot of this book is hot air, chaff, or whatever "full of sound and fury but signifying nothingness" metaphor you want to employ.
And, in addition to all the aforementioned ineffective components, the book also contains a great deal of uninteresting Hating on Switzerland. Jezus H, does this protagonist ever freaking hate Switzerland. If you cut out all the parts where Anna is fretting about her terrible fate of having married a banker dude and moved to horrendous, torturous Switzerland, the book would become a novella in short order. A slim novella. Unfortunately, excessively hating Switzerland as Anna describes hating it simply does not make for a compelling or believable story or character. I totally "get" that we can feel like outsiders when we are outside our home countries, but from the level of alienation Anna purports to experience, you would think she was living in a twig shack on a largely deserted steppe populated only by roving hordes of cannibals. Oh woe is me, Anna repeatedly despairs, Switzerland is so awful, what with its timely-running trains and general punctuality, its many languages spoken, its manners and its clocks and its occasional Alpine views when clouds permit! She concedes she at least likes the chocolate. And the church bells. And the luxurious shopping centers that are largely like American ones.
I should mention that perhaps Anna would feel more comfortable in Switzerland, and would find its citizens less frigid (as she repeatedly tells us they are), if she had learned to speak any of the country's many languages of currency AFTER LIVING THERE FOR SOMETHING LIKE SEVEN YEARS. Or maybe its's nine. Anyway - a long time. In this book, she has just finally enrolled in like, Conversational German 101. And that's only at the suggestion/coercion of the horrible Jungian analyst. We are also informed ad nauseam that Anna has neither a BANK ACCOUNT (get it, in Switzerland, oh the irony) nor a driver's license, even after seven years. I believe one intention here was to render Anna impotent and marginalized in an effort to hitch ANNA BENZ'S cart to the stars of fellow dissatisfied wives ANNA Karenina and EMMA BOVARY (obviously not accidental). Yeah, it doesn't work. Not the same. That ship has sailed. I mean, I bet there are awesome ways to tell those stories in a modernized fashion, but this isn't it.
Anyway - in the end, all this lack of a bank account and driver license stuff merely turns out to be nothing more than a kind of ruse, a mere setup just to make possible the novel's very final scenes. Now, if you think the novel's ending was so fabulous that it was worth the long haul to get there, then I'm envious, because you enjoyed/appreciated the book more than I did -- and let me tell you, I outright stalked the library to procure this book in the first place. Unfortunately, I'm sticking to my assessment that the project would have fared better as a potentially stellar short story rather than as an often irritating and largely forgettable novel.
October 22, 2015
4.5
The Hook - Hausfrau promised an unlikable character and it delivered.
The Line � ”Anna was a good wife, mostly�
immediately I wanted to know what that meant.
The Sinker � Hausfrau is one of those books that causes passionate differences in opinion, you either love it or you hate it. It wasn’t clear to me where I stood until I had read over half the book. There are many that will not agree with me but no apologies here. I really liked Essbaum’s debut in the end.
Anna Benz, the mostly good wife, seemingly has it all, money, a good husband, and beautiful children. An American, she finds herself out of her element when she and her husband, Bruno, a Swiss banker, transfer to Zurich. What possesses Anna to forsake the sanctity of her marriage by indulging in affairs? These encounters are many, and more sexual in nature than any meeting of minds or thoughts of love. They are hard for us to fathom and most readers will find Anna very unlikable. The sex is raw and naked and will turn some away.
We are on the outside looking in on this exploration of a marriage and its shortcomings. It takes two to make a marriage yet it is easy to put the blame on Anna. Why does anyone have an affair? Is it revenge, boredom, low self-esteem, lack of a partner’s attention, loneliness? What role does Bruno play in Anna’s cheating? Though I do not like what Anna does, there is only one thing I cannot forgive her and it is not the affairs. I wanted this “sin� to be fleshed out more and it is the sole reason for 4.5 instead of 5 stars.
Using sessions of psychoanalysis and German language classes, Hausfrau builds tension in its acceleration to Anna’s self-destruction.
Hausfrau is a perfect vehicle for book discussion. The moral dilemma it presents will leave its readers divided. Which side will you be on?
Take the time to listen to this brief clip from NPR . In a bit over four minutes it explains a great deal.
The Hook - Hausfrau promised an unlikable character and it delivered.
The Line � ”Anna was a good wife, mostly�
immediately I wanted to know what that meant.
The Sinker � Hausfrau is one of those books that causes passionate differences in opinion, you either love it or you hate it. It wasn’t clear to me where I stood until I had read over half the book. There are many that will not agree with me but no apologies here. I really liked Essbaum’s debut in the end.
Anna Benz, the mostly good wife, seemingly has it all, money, a good husband, and beautiful children. An American, she finds herself out of her element when she and her husband, Bruno, a Swiss banker, transfer to Zurich. What possesses Anna to forsake the sanctity of her marriage by indulging in affairs? These encounters are many, and more sexual in nature than any meeting of minds or thoughts of love. They are hard for us to fathom and most readers will find Anna very unlikable. The sex is raw and naked and will turn some away.
We are on the outside looking in on this exploration of a marriage and its shortcomings. It takes two to make a marriage yet it is easy to put the blame on Anna. Why does anyone have an affair? Is it revenge, boredom, low self-esteem, lack of a partner’s attention, loneliness? What role does Bruno play in Anna’s cheating? Though I do not like what Anna does, there is only one thing I cannot forgive her and it is not the affairs. I wanted this “sin� to be fleshed out more and it is the sole reason for 4.5 instead of 5 stars.
Using sessions of psychoanalysis and German language classes, Hausfrau builds tension in its acceleration to Anna’s self-destruction.
Hausfrau is a perfect vehicle for book discussion. The moral dilemma it presents will leave its readers divided. Which side will you be on?
Take the time to listen to this brief clip from NPR . In a bit over four minutes it explains a great deal.
July 10, 2017
I first heard about this book from Publishers Weekly in January 2015, then found a brand new hardcover at a book sale for $3 later that year. But it languished in a pile of books I didn't have space for, so I rediscovered this book in my collection last weekend.
The story is very unputdownable. The first line, "Anna was a good wife, mostly," hooked me in and I wanted to know more about her. Anna married a Swiss man and is living an isolated life in Switzerland. She is depressed and isolated, partly because of Swiss standoffishness, partly because her entire life is her children and her inlaws, and she starts seeing an analyst who suggests language classes. (There is a long thread about how Swiss German is different than regular German, which I found interesting.)
She starts to have an affair with a man from her language class, but along the way you discover that this is not the first time. I was pretty into the novel through these events. It gets a bit steamy. I was okay with the questionable choices and even the feeling that she was not improving her situation, just complicating it.
But then
So I liked most of it, hated the ending, not sure I'm cool with the overall impression I was left with. Unlike many readers I do not dislike Anna. I felt great empathy for her and wish other characters had too.
The story is very unputdownable. The first line, "Anna was a good wife, mostly," hooked me in and I wanted to know more about her. Anna married a Swiss man and is living an isolated life in Switzerland. She is depressed and isolated, partly because of Swiss standoffishness, partly because her entire life is her children and her inlaws, and she starts seeing an analyst who suggests language classes. (There is a long thread about how Swiss German is different than regular German, which I found interesting.)
She starts to have an affair with a man from her language class, but along the way you discover that this is not the first time. I was pretty into the novel through these events. It gets a bit steamy. I was okay with the questionable choices and even the feeling that she was not improving her situation, just complicating it.
But then
So I liked most of it, hated the ending, not sure I'm cool with the overall impression I was left with. Unlike many readers I do not dislike Anna. I felt great empathy for her and wish other characters had too.
March 12, 2015
2.5 This is Anna's story, married mother of three, came from the US to Switzerland from the USA, she feels she will never really fit in. This is Anna's story and therein is the rub, the reader must feel something for Anna, identify with her or her circumstances in some way, and I never did. She and how she handled or did not handle things, irritated me. I did feel sympathy for her at times, but it was for all the terrible things that happened to her, not her internal struggles. But that was another issue for me, how many terrible, things could happen to one person. There is so little hope in this book and I found that depressing. It was hard for me to care for am person who had so little care for herself. As for the ending, can we say
December 19, 2015
Wow. This will be a hard one to review. I typically read books about very strong women, those who overcome society's roadblocks and restrictions, who make their own way in the world. But this character of Anna is not that. She is an American living in her husband's native Switzerland. A lonely and bored mother and housewife to whom the Swiss still haven't given any sense of belonging, she is undergoing psychoanalysis and attending German classes. Her analyst says that Anna is a passive personality, and it is sadly true. Women like her are usually very hard for me to tolerate, but instead I couldn't stop reading this and thought of nothing else for the last two days.
pas·sive - adjective 1. accepting or allowing what happens or what others do, without active response or resistance. "the women were portrayed as passive victims"
synonyms: submissive, acquiescent, unresisting, unassertive, compliant, pliant, obedient, docile, tractable, malleable, pliable "passive victims"
Mostly, this "allowing what happens" to her comes in the form of affairs with various men she meets along the way. Between the sex scenes, we are privy to her German lessons and her analysis sessions. The narrative is from the start very introspective, which allows the reader access to Anna's every thought. Those unspeakable thoughts which she won't even confess to her Doktor are known only to us, and it goes very deep and personal.
Another thing, I don't typically read books with loads of sex, and Anna has loads and loads. While her personality and her actions really bothered me, I think I was able to not hate her because she seemed to be making an effort to change herself. Her psychological makeup sort of got under my skin. Whether she succeeds at changing or not is essentially what kept me reading.
ARC from NetGalley.
pas·sive - adjective 1. accepting or allowing what happens or what others do, without active response or resistance. "the women were portrayed as passive victims"
synonyms: submissive, acquiescent, unresisting, unassertive, compliant, pliant, obedient, docile, tractable, malleable, pliable "passive victims"
Mostly, this "allowing what happens" to her comes in the form of affairs with various men she meets along the way. Between the sex scenes, we are privy to her German lessons and her analysis sessions. The narrative is from the start very introspective, which allows the reader access to Anna's every thought. Those unspeakable thoughts which she won't even confess to her Doktor are known only to us, and it goes very deep and personal.
Another thing, I don't typically read books with loads of sex, and Anna has loads and loads. While her personality and her actions really bothered me, I think I was able to not hate her because she seemed to be making an effort to change herself. Her psychological makeup sort of got under my skin. Whether she succeeds at changing or not is essentially what kept me reading.
ARC from NetGalley.
October 26, 2015
4.5/5 STARS
Oh my goodness I soooo thoroughly enjoyed this book and couldn’t wait to get back to it each time I got pulled away by life’s silly demands like mealtime, work, and sleep! Told through the voice of Anna Benz, sometimes during her sessions with her psychiatrist Dr. Messerli, the story moves back and forth between past to present, at times with confusing fluidity, but so cleverly crafted and addictively irresistible that I felt I was residing inside Anna’s head, an extension of her thoughts and actions. My engagement with her was strong from the get go!
This is a sobering, melancholy, and at times philosophical tale of thirty-seven year old Anna Benz, now a Swiss housewife who emigrated from the United Sates to the suburbs of Zurich, Switzerland with her Swiss husband Bruno, a banker at Credit Suisse. Pregnant at the time of their move, Anna has been miserable since her arrival and suffered from unrelenting insomnia for the past year.
Anna has been passive, withdrawn and full of sadness her entire life. At an early age her parents hired a psychologist to determine if she was depressed. Switzerland offered no relief to her despondency, loneliness and isolation. She had no girlfriends, no driver’s license, no bank account. She doesn’t even know the language. Bruno controls the household and Anna is along for the ride. She is more or less in love with Bruno, more or less wanted to get married, more or less agreed to get pregnant. Life for Anna just happens. At one point she considered taking her own life but the pregnancy with her third child gave her the will to keep going. Anna seems to live her life in a shifting fog of despair and isolation. I could feel her pain and confusion, her anger and frustrations, with the cold Swiss efficiency and precision of her husband who had become very distant and inattentive. All Anna ever wanted in life was to be loved, protected and secure.
While some turn to alcohol, drugs, cutting, shopping or even extreme sports to relieve their emotional suffering, Anna has turned to sex to distract herself from the sadness of her life. Her urge for sex is decades old. Sex is her self-medication! Sex begat clarity! She has never entered into any romantic relationship without sexual engagement on the first day she met a man and her Swiss encounters are no different. Stephen Nicodemus, whom she randomly met on the street during a Christmas shopping foray in Zurich two years ago, was her first infidelity. Next was Archie from her German class, then Karl Trotzmuller, a family acquaintance.
The sexual acts in the book are graphically and luridly depicted, very explicit in nature, prompting many readers to wonder if the inclusion of what amounts to pornography was really necessary. No violence, pain or perversion, just passionate, lustful, intense sex between consenting adults. I think the vivid sexuality was absolutely necessary to fully convey Anna’s desperation and emotional pain. The sex is all about her physical satisfaction and release from the anguish in her life. The loveless fornication defined her emotional dysfunctionality. Except when she thought it was love. It gets emotionally and intellectually complicated.
She reveals her sexual encounters with no one intentionally, not even Dr. Messerli, but she desperately wrestles with the guilt and secrecy of her affairs. What is the difference between guilt and shame, need and want, passivity and neutrality, dream and trauma, secrecy and privacy, destiny and fate, love and lust, delusion and hallucination, obsession and compulsion, a reason and an excuse, she ponders during her therapy sessions. While the book is a story of sadness and desperation, resignation and destiny, it was so well written that phrase after phrase, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, the philosophical applications to living life forced me to make frequent stops and contemplate the possibilities and meaning. I used lots of flags on this one!
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When her secret is inadvertently revealed to one of her most cherished family members, Anna’s world begins to spiral out of control. The ending is swift and sudden and unexpected although it shouldn't have been I suppose. I was far more hopeful and optimistic. In the end Anna interrupted the precision of the Swiss!
In my view Anna is complex, paradoxical and severely conflicted, surely broken and wounded, driven by a lifetime of sadness and despair. Her irrational thought process became rational under the shroud of her emotional duress. I could feel her pain and suffering and just wanted to reach inside the book and hug her, comfort her and provide her safety. This would be a terrific book club read � so much to talk about!
Between the graphic sex and the gloom of perpetual sadness this might be tough read for some. But the siren song of the writing will inexplicably draw you in and hold your attention to the every end.
Enjoy!
BTW - Just as many fellow readers HATE this book as much as I loved it. My friend Cathrine has a very, very different perspective ... click through and give this a read: /review/show...
Oh my goodness I soooo thoroughly enjoyed this book and couldn’t wait to get back to it each time I got pulled away by life’s silly demands like mealtime, work, and sleep! Told through the voice of Anna Benz, sometimes during her sessions with her psychiatrist Dr. Messerli, the story moves back and forth between past to present, at times with confusing fluidity, but so cleverly crafted and addictively irresistible that I felt I was residing inside Anna’s head, an extension of her thoughts and actions. My engagement with her was strong from the get go!
This is a sobering, melancholy, and at times philosophical tale of thirty-seven year old Anna Benz, now a Swiss housewife who emigrated from the United Sates to the suburbs of Zurich, Switzerland with her Swiss husband Bruno, a banker at Credit Suisse. Pregnant at the time of their move, Anna has been miserable since her arrival and suffered from unrelenting insomnia for the past year.
Anna has been passive, withdrawn and full of sadness her entire life. At an early age her parents hired a psychologist to determine if she was depressed. Switzerland offered no relief to her despondency, loneliness and isolation. She had no girlfriends, no driver’s license, no bank account. She doesn’t even know the language. Bruno controls the household and Anna is along for the ride. She is more or less in love with Bruno, more or less wanted to get married, more or less agreed to get pregnant. Life for Anna just happens. At one point she considered taking her own life but the pregnancy with her third child gave her the will to keep going. Anna seems to live her life in a shifting fog of despair and isolation. I could feel her pain and confusion, her anger and frustrations, with the cold Swiss efficiency and precision of her husband who had become very distant and inattentive. All Anna ever wanted in life was to be loved, protected and secure.
While some turn to alcohol, drugs, cutting, shopping or even extreme sports to relieve their emotional suffering, Anna has turned to sex to distract herself from the sadness of her life. Her urge for sex is decades old. Sex is her self-medication! Sex begat clarity! She has never entered into any romantic relationship without sexual engagement on the first day she met a man and her Swiss encounters are no different. Stephen Nicodemus, whom she randomly met on the street during a Christmas shopping foray in Zurich two years ago, was her first infidelity. Next was Archie from her German class, then Karl Trotzmuller, a family acquaintance.
“Anna had never been mad about foreplay. She was not one of those women who needed to endure complicated half hours of rubbing and prodding and explosive plyometrics before her body tensed and the dam holding back her pleasure burst. Her desires were basic. Put it in, take it out. Repeat as long as possible.�
The sexual acts in the book are graphically and luridly depicted, very explicit in nature, prompting many readers to wonder if the inclusion of what amounts to pornography was really necessary. No violence, pain or perversion, just passionate, lustful, intense sex between consenting adults. I think the vivid sexuality was absolutely necessary to fully convey Anna’s desperation and emotional pain. The sex is all about her physical satisfaction and release from the anguish in her life. The loveless fornication defined her emotional dysfunctionality. Except when she thought it was love. It gets emotionally and intellectually complicated.
She reveals her sexual encounters with no one intentionally, not even Dr. Messerli, but she desperately wrestles with the guilt and secrecy of her affairs. What is the difference between guilt and shame, need and want, passivity and neutrality, dream and trauma, secrecy and privacy, destiny and fate, love and lust, delusion and hallucination, obsession and compulsion, a reason and an excuse, she ponders during her therapy sessions. While the book is a story of sadness and desperation, resignation and destiny, it was so well written that phrase after phrase, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, the philosophical applications to living life forced me to make frequent stops and contemplate the possibilities and meaning. I used lots of flags on this one!
When her secret is inadvertently revealed to one of her most cherished family members, Anna’s world begins to spiral out of control. The ending is swift and sudden and unexpected although it shouldn't have been I suppose. I was far more hopeful and optimistic. In the end Anna interrupted the precision of the Swiss!
In my view Anna is complex, paradoxical and severely conflicted, surely broken and wounded, driven by a lifetime of sadness and despair. Her irrational thought process became rational under the shroud of her emotional duress. I could feel her pain and suffering and just wanted to reach inside the book and hug her, comfort her and provide her safety. This would be a terrific book club read � so much to talk about!
Between the graphic sex and the gloom of perpetual sadness this might be tough read for some. But the siren song of the writing will inexplicably draw you in and hold your attention to the every end.
Enjoy!
BTW - Just as many fellow readers HATE this book as much as I loved it. My friend Cathrine has a very, very different perspective ... click through and give this a read: /review/show...
February 10, 2020
(Nearly 4.5) Jill Alexander Essbaum’s arresting debut novel reads like a modern retelling of Madame Bovary, with its main character a desperate housewife in Zurich. (I enjoyed this she offers of the novel’s settings.)
American expat Anna Benz has no cause to complain about life. Her banker husband Bruno provides for her needs and she has three beloved children. Still, Anna has never felt at home despite nine years in Switzerland. She is virtually friendless and can hardly communicate; only now has she signed up for her first German class. Depressed and lonely, she embarks on affairs with strangers and acquaintances. They meet in the men’s apartments, in hotel rooms, even in a forest hut. �Adultery is alarmingly easy,� Anna thinks. Yet for all this physical contact � described in explicit language � she remains utterly isolated.
The novel takes place over two momentous months but moves back and forth in time to cover the two-year span of Anna’s infidelities. Though told in the third person, it incorporates her thoughts, memories, and therapy sessions with Doktor Messerli. Anna asks life’s big questions: What is the purpose of pain? Is everything predestined? Yet she cannot stop her secrets from impinging on her family, with disastrous consequences.
Essbaum shows how grammar imposes guidelines as rigid as those of conventional morality and contrasts the stereotypical coldness of the Swiss with the flames of passion. As deplorable as Anna’s actions may be, she is an entirely sympathetic tragic heroine. Watch her trajectory with horror, but you cannot deny there is a little of Anna in you.
American expat Anna Benz has no cause to complain about life. Her banker husband Bruno provides for her needs and she has three beloved children. Still, Anna has never felt at home despite nine years in Switzerland. She is virtually friendless and can hardly communicate; only now has she signed up for her first German class. Depressed and lonely, she embarks on affairs with strangers and acquaintances. They meet in the men’s apartments, in hotel rooms, even in a forest hut. �Adultery is alarmingly easy,� Anna thinks. Yet for all this physical contact � described in explicit language � she remains utterly isolated.
The novel takes place over two momentous months but moves back and forth in time to cover the two-year span of Anna’s infidelities. Though told in the third person, it incorporates her thoughts, memories, and therapy sessions with Doktor Messerli. Anna asks life’s big questions: What is the purpose of pain? Is everything predestined? Yet she cannot stop her secrets from impinging on her family, with disastrous consequences.
Essbaum shows how grammar imposes guidelines as rigid as those of conventional morality and contrasts the stereotypical coldness of the Swiss with the flames of passion. As deplorable as Anna’s actions may be, she is an entirely sympathetic tragic heroine. Watch her trajectory with horror, but you cannot deny there is a little of Anna in you.
January 2, 2016
hausfrau
[hous-frou]
noun, plural hausfraus, hausfrauen [hous-frou-uh n]
1. a housewife.
Origin: German, from Haus house + Frau woman, wife
's gives readers a snapshot of an American woman's life, Anna, over the course of a few years while living in Zurich, Switzerland with her husband and children. Actually, it's more a snapshot of her mood and how it influences her overall behavior (FYI: there is a notable amount of sexual content and dialogue). In my opinion, there isn't a clear-cut story, no mystery to solve or clear plot, but by the end, readers will know Anna inside and out, and will feel her frustration, boredom, and melancholy. There's so much more than that though. Events occur, choices are made, consequences happen...but none of it is happy. That said, I wasn't depressed after my reading experience. I noted a philosophical tone threaded throughout this book and I enjoyed this element very much.
I gave four out of five stars. I didn't love the story, but I loved the writing. I loved feeling an emotional connection to a character who is seemingly so emotionally disconnected from her journey in life. is an extraordinary debut novel from a talented poet and now author. If this sounds like a type of book you might enjoy, then open yourself up to this novel and see where it leads you. Life can be a glorious journey and my heart goes out to all the Anna's out there who feel otherwise. Count your blessings and enjoy your day :)
My favorite quote:
"We're modern women in a modern world. Our needs are met and many of our wants...We have rights and the means to exercise them. Each of our lives is our own, and as far as I know we get one a piece and no more. We should do something with them, if we can, if we are able to. It's a travesty when a woman wastes herself, that's all."
Note: If you are interested in checking out some of Ms. Essbaum's poetry, click .
[hous-frou]
noun, plural hausfraus, hausfrauen [hous-frou-uh n]
1. a housewife.
Origin: German, from Haus house + Frau woman, wife
's gives readers a snapshot of an American woman's life, Anna, over the course of a few years while living in Zurich, Switzerland with her husband and children. Actually, it's more a snapshot of her mood and how it influences her overall behavior (FYI: there is a notable amount of sexual content and dialogue). In my opinion, there isn't a clear-cut story, no mystery to solve or clear plot, but by the end, readers will know Anna inside and out, and will feel her frustration, boredom, and melancholy. There's so much more than that though. Events occur, choices are made, consequences happen...but none of it is happy. That said, I wasn't depressed after my reading experience. I noted a philosophical tone threaded throughout this book and I enjoyed this element very much.
"Fail-safes sometimes fail, unsinkable ships land on the ocean floor, and rockets don't always survive reentry. Love is not a given. No one is promised a tomorrow. She'd been wrong about every man she'd loved or said she loved. She'd been wrong about everything. She'd entered into her life in the middle of its story. She had confused herself with the actress who portrayed her. And she thought about predestination, how the sum of her days added up to this. The plot of her life had already been published. Everything is foreordained. All is predetermined. The things I do I cannot help, everything that will happen already has."Typically, when I enjoy a book, I google the author afterwards and check out any interviews or insights they've provided regarding their work. When I looked up , I learned she is first and foremost a poet, and this did not surprise me at all. The writing in is gorgeous.
"It's an otherworldly moment when the curtains behind which a lie has been hiding are pulled apart. When the slats on the blinds are forced open, and a flash of truth explodes into the room. You can feel the crazing of the air. Light shatters every lie's glass. You have no choice but to confess."It captured me so completely that when I repeatedly asked myself what the hell is the point of this book, I just kept reading. I didn't care if the story was going anywhere or not. I was in love with the writing and it kept me engaged in a book that I may have otherwise DNF'd. I found myself growing increasingly invested in Anna's thought processes and I felt palpable emotion related to the intensity of her struggles at times. The ending does not offer much closure but it does hint at Anna's fate. The way I interpreted it left me sad but unfortunately not surprised.
I gave four out of five stars. I didn't love the story, but I loved the writing. I loved feeling an emotional connection to a character who is seemingly so emotionally disconnected from her journey in life. is an extraordinary debut novel from a talented poet and now author. If this sounds like a type of book you might enjoy, then open yourself up to this novel and see where it leads you. Life can be a glorious journey and my heart goes out to all the Anna's out there who feel otherwise. Count your blessings and enjoy your day :)
My favorite quote:
"We're modern women in a modern world. Our needs are met and many of our wants...We have rights and the means to exercise them. Each of our lives is our own, and as far as I know we get one a piece and no more. We should do something with them, if we can, if we are able to. It's a travesty when a woman wastes herself, that's all."
Note: If you are interested in checking out some of Ms. Essbaum's poetry, click .
August 28, 2017
Unfortunately, cannot finish this one. The protagonist is so relentlessly dull and unlikable I'm afraid I will have to give up. I hate to give a negative review and maybe I'm putting it aside too soon, but I just don't think this book is for me.
Find more reviews and bookish fun at
Find more reviews and bookish fun at
July 8, 2015
I've been wracking my brain for two days now trying to write a review of this that wouldn't disparage my ŷ Friends (whose opinions I value highly). Though the subject of cuckoldry appeals to me very little, I was intrigued by the disparity of the cume rating of all Goodreaders (3.38 at this writing) with the average rating of my friends who read it (3.85). Several of their eloquent reviews swayed me toward giving it a try, anyway, despite my misgivings.
About the only thing I really liked about Ms. Essbaum's debut novel Hausfrau was the cleverly ironic title: our (ahem) heroine hausfrau, Anna Benz, is anything but a happy housewife holding the family together. Rather, she's a miserable American ex-pat married to a Swiss banker Bruno (the name alone conjures up images of the stereotypical domineering husband), and mom of three kids living in a little town outside of Zurich for ten years. Friendless, woebegone Anna (under threat from Snidely Bruno to get her miserable shit together) starts seeing a Jungian psychiatrist and attending a Schweizerdeutsche (Swiss German) language class to alleviate her feelings of isolation. (And, yep, not difficult to intuit with Ms. Essbaum's heavy-handed foreshadowed symbolism: Anna's first day of class ends with her going straight to the apartment of a male classmate.)
So begins, with a cadent, staccato backbeat of negativity, a never-ending list of poor life choices that at first is limned with pretty prose (via inferences derived from her parts of speech studies in language class and her therapy sessions) but becomes wearisome and grating by book's end.
I've read several reviews comparing this to classics Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina (comparisons I can't quite comprehend) and a few daring to mention similarity to Fifty Shades of Grey (slightly more believable comparison). Hausfrau reminded me of a much less-subtly written The Awakening by Kate Chopin (another novel about marital dissatisfaction I didn't much care for). I really wish I could concur with my friends on this one, but absent any connection to the protagonist's plaints, Hausfrau could not rise above an over-familiar tale of sadness, adorned with a pretty bow.
About the only thing I really liked about Ms. Essbaum's debut novel Hausfrau was the cleverly ironic title: our (ahem) heroine hausfrau, Anna Benz, is anything but a happy housewife holding the family together. Rather, she's a miserable American ex-pat married to a Swiss banker Bruno (the name alone conjures up images of the stereotypical domineering husband), and mom of three kids living in a little town outside of Zurich for ten years. Friendless, woebegone Anna (under threat from
So begins, with a cadent, staccato backbeat of negativity, a never-ending list of poor life choices that at first is limned with pretty prose (via inferences derived from her parts of speech studies in language class and her therapy sessions) but becomes wearisome and grating by book's end.
I've read several reviews comparing this to classics Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina (comparisons I can't quite comprehend) and a few daring to mention similarity to Fifty Shades of Grey (slightly more believable comparison). Hausfrau reminded me of a much less-subtly written The Awakening by Kate Chopin (another novel about marital dissatisfaction I didn't much care for). I really wish I could concur with my friends on this one, but absent any connection to the protagonist's plaints, Hausfrau could not rise above an over-familiar tale of sadness, adorned with a pretty bow.
April 20, 2015
***CAUTION*** Some spoilers contained
Contained in the book: Death, Suicide, Adultery, Hot sex, Bored sex, Jungian Therapy, Wasted Life, Marital Dysfunction, Depression, Things about Zurich, Puns, Friendship (or the lack thereof), Existence of God, Predestination.
Every now and then, you hear of a woman (and I'm going to talk about my view of just women here more than men) who seems happy, is married to a good man, is raising good kids, going to church every week, etc., and then, all of a sudden, leaves the man and sometimes the children and "goes off the deep end." Everyone is shocked and pointing fingers wondering what kind of fool she is, what is wrong with her, a few take time to mention that perhaps, behind the scenes, the guy is a jerk. We always look for reasons to understand this kind of behavior. We want black and white answers to grey behavior. Hausfrau/Anna, is this type of girl.
Essbaum's writing is unique and I thought it was sometimes excellent. But it also seemed a bit more like a male's writing. It is logical, scientific, the description of sexual encounters and fantasies seemed far more graphic and unromantic than I would normally picture a female writing. The story is written from the Omniscient Viewpoint, the story teller knows everything, describes every little thought in the back of Anna's mind as she makes her way through her depression and the numbness of her life, a passive, pretty female who likes sex (although I don't think she is a nymphomaniac) and quickly acquiesces to proposed encounters, almost more to take the numbness away and because she doesn't really have a reason not to seek out a little adventure to hopefully help alleviate the pain of her life. Plus, she's passive and easy to talk into almost anything.
How many women who get married young, who want to be provided for, become a mother, a wife and live a "normal" life, end up on some kind of treadmill which leads to depression? How many marriages really work? And so, here's Anna, lost in a country of precise and sometimes frigid people, a natural introvert, a totally dependent little soul with no real opinions or knowledge about anything, from God, to what her husband does at work, to what is expected of her as a hausfrau.
And so, who is Essbaum talking to? What was she trying to tell us? What does the story of Anna mean? I guess there's something being said here to women (although to men as well): don't become a totally dependent person with no life outside of your own little family group. Develop your own career and independence, don't jump into a marriage too quickly, especially to a Swiss guy (LOL), and that if you don't have integrity, In the end you may lose everything. I wish we'd've gotten to know Anna better, her background and what made her what she was (or wasn't). Perhaps Essbaum was creating some kind of anonymous prototype girl here so that the events of her life could be applied to many? She did have feelings for her kids and Stephen, and yet her feelings seemed pretty superficial. Did Anna even have a personality? Did you like Anna's questions to the MIT professor about fire? Maybe one of the few comical parts. There were also a lot of fun puns about language/Anna's personality i.e. passive voice, irregular verbs, etc.
However, I thought it was a worthy, interesting read and a great character study and I was fascinated by Essbaum's version of sex. I said fascinated, not liked. I just wonder how many people are living a life with some traits of Anna, the lost little soul that she was. I feel bad for her, although she really didn't have a lot of redeeming qualities.
Contained in the book: Death, Suicide, Adultery, Hot sex, Bored sex, Jungian Therapy, Wasted Life, Marital Dysfunction, Depression, Things about Zurich, Puns, Friendship (or the lack thereof), Existence of God, Predestination.
Every now and then, you hear of a woman (and I'm going to talk about my view of just women here more than men) who seems happy, is married to a good man, is raising good kids, going to church every week, etc., and then, all of a sudden, leaves the man and sometimes the children and "goes off the deep end." Everyone is shocked and pointing fingers wondering what kind of fool she is, what is wrong with her, a few take time to mention that perhaps, behind the scenes, the guy is a jerk. We always look for reasons to understand this kind of behavior. We want black and white answers to grey behavior. Hausfrau/Anna, is this type of girl.
Essbaum's writing is unique and I thought it was sometimes excellent. But it also seemed a bit more like a male's writing. It is logical, scientific, the description of sexual encounters and fantasies seemed far more graphic and unromantic than I would normally picture a female writing. The story is written from the Omniscient Viewpoint, the story teller knows everything, describes every little thought in the back of Anna's mind as she makes her way through her depression and the numbness of her life, a passive, pretty female who likes sex (although I don't think she is a nymphomaniac) and quickly acquiesces to proposed encounters, almost more to take the numbness away and because she doesn't really have a reason not to seek out a little adventure to hopefully help alleviate the pain of her life. Plus, she's passive and easy to talk into almost anything.
How many women who get married young, who want to be provided for, become a mother, a wife and live a "normal" life, end up on some kind of treadmill which leads to depression? How many marriages really work? And so, here's Anna, lost in a country of precise and sometimes frigid people, a natural introvert, a totally dependent little soul with no real opinions or knowledge about anything, from God, to what her husband does at work, to what is expected of her as a hausfrau.
And so, who is Essbaum talking to? What was she trying to tell us? What does the story of Anna mean? I guess there's something being said here to women (although to men as well): don't become a totally dependent person with no life outside of your own little family group. Develop your own career and independence, don't jump into a marriage too quickly, especially to a Swiss guy (LOL), and that if you don't have integrity, In the end you may lose everything. I wish we'd've gotten to know Anna better, her background and what made her what she was (or wasn't). Perhaps Essbaum was creating some kind of anonymous prototype girl here so that the events of her life could be applied to many? She did have feelings for her kids and Stephen, and yet her feelings seemed pretty superficial. Did Anna even have a personality? Did you like Anna's questions to the MIT professor about fire? Maybe one of the few comical parts. There were also a lot of fun puns about language/Anna's personality i.e. passive voice, irregular verbs, etc.
However, I thought it was a worthy, interesting read and a great character study and I was fascinated by Essbaum's version of sex. I said fascinated, not liked. I just wonder how many people are living a life with some traits of Anna, the lost little soul that she was. I feel bad for her, although she really didn't have a lot of redeeming qualities.
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