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Disclaimer: I received a copy via Netgalley.

It is perhaps a little known fact that Freud’s sisters died in the Holocaust while the man himself and other members of family were able to escape. That is pretty much all I know about the Freud family. Regardless, it made me interested enough to request a copy of Freud’s Sister by Goce Smilevski.

I’m not entirely what I was expecting but the book wasn’t quite it. And that’s not a bad thing. It is the books that surprise us, but that don’t disappoint us, that are gems.

Smilevski’s novel is told from the viewpoint of Adolfina and starts with the days prior to the Second World War before moving into the War and then into the past, tracing Adolfina’s life . Mr. Smilevski writes in his author’s note that “The silence around Adolfina is so loud that I could write this novel in no other way than in her voice�. I find myself thinking about that line as I think about this book and struggle to do the book justice with this review.

For while the book wasn’t quite what I thought it would be and while it is quiet in terms of action, it is a beautiful, stunning, and powerful book. What Smilevski has done is taken a quiet life and made a quiet, yet engrossing story. While she is acquainted with famous men � her brother and Klimet - Adolfina’s story is her story. It is a story of a life that does shake the universe, a life that doesn’t call down the heavens, and a life that doesn’t seem to change anyone who history declares matter. If you take the action of the book alone, and just the action, then you have a book where what is of most interest is the discussion of philosophy and psychology. That’s it � well, that and a desire to smack Freud upside the head (as if the whole women wanting a penis thing didn’t make you want to do that already).

To look at the book in terms of action and solely in terms of physical action does the book and Smilevski a huge disservice. It is the language of this novel that makes the novel, that shows that there her brother, and her lover that makes the book. The language is like a melancholy poetry that yet, somehow, contains a kernel of hope in it.

Adolfina’s view of life is different, and perhaps more real, than her brother’s, a brother who the reader seems to only know though his coming and going, a figure that seems as distance and as dream made as the trees that other residents of the Nest see.

Ah the Nest, some of the best writing in this book deals with the Nest, a madhouse that is center in two ways to Adolfina and her friend Klara, sister of the famous Klimet, who campaigns for woman’s rights as well as more encompassing view of love and family than that expressed by Freud and Klara’s own family.

In many ways, this juxtaposition of two sisters of two famous men seems to be part of the point, the theme of the novel. It is like Woolf’s Shakespeare’s sister. What could have these women done if they had been offered more support in terms of parents and siblings as well as society? Part of the tragedy is how alone some of the characters are, as they are separated in various ways from both family and the society . It is hard, impossible really, to not think of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own when reading this book. The sense of waste and undervalue simply because of the sex of the characters, because of the gender of the characters is major aspect of the novel.

While the book may not have been what I thought I wanted, it was exactly what I needed to read. The quietness of life is an aspect that gets overlooked in much fiction, undoubtedly because it is difficult to write an interesting book about it. There is a reason why stories end with the happily ever after � it’s boring to read about it. What Mr. Smilevski has done is take what many authors would only show as boring and make it magical.

Brilliant!