Anna Benz, Jill Alexander Essbaum’s hausfrau, is one of the most fascinating and frustrating characters I’ve been introduced to in a long time. I didn’t understand her nor did I really like her, but by the end of the book I was able to feel some sympathy for her. She appears to be a woman with no sense of self who engages in sex as a means of connection. In one of their numerous sessions her psychoanalyst Doktor Messerli states, “A bored woman is a dangerous woman.” Anna is definitely of danger to herself. Reading the book is like the old cliché, “watching a train wreck.”
Hausfrau offers a reader a lot to think about and cannot be read casually (or at least, this reader). The language classes and the psychoanalysis (very Swiss, not the American version of therapy), the questions about language and its use in general are worth particular note. Anna thinks about the meanings of words a lot. What’s the difference between this word and that word? What does this word mean? Anna has a lot going on in her head. She asks good questions. None of it stops her from doing what she’s doing.
Also of interest (of more interest than the men Anna chooses to have sex with – I can’t think of them as her lovers, that’s too caring a word) are her women friends (I use the term loosely). Mary in particular, is a fascinating character. I kept expecting Anna to see through her, but unfortunately, she never did. It’s not that kind of book. The husband, Bruno, I found less interesting and developed. It wasn’t until one of the concluding chapters rather surprising and explosively violent scenes that he seemed to wake up to his wife’s transgressions and disintegration.
Hausfrau is about an American-born housewife and mother married to a Swiss husband and living in a small Swiss city. Anna Benz was a sad young woman before she married and moved to her new home in a new country, but her status as a “hausfrau,” her unfamiliarity with and total disinclination towards its character led to her unraveling.
Review copy provided courtesy of Net Gallery.
