The Fig Eater (edition 2001)

I'm pretty sure I didn't like this book. The end was just darn strange, and I wasn't fond of how the characters evolved during the story. I still have no idea what the fig had to do with anything, why the inspector's wife was so obsessive about the case, where Wally came from, or why Dora's father was so secretive about everything. The dangling threads at the end of this story were just distracting and unnecessary. ( )

bad writing, horrible ending ( )

The style is brooding and single-minded. Each statement is as a fact. A few things struck me; the roles people took with each other were very singular. Dora made a friend of a woman who was having an affair with her own father. Franz is an apprentice to the Inspector (whose name we never learn) and is content to be in that role, complete with an awed reverence, until he feels he can go out on his own. Wally (a weird name) is the British governess who helps Erszebet with her illicit investigations is very much in awe of Erszebet and takes much time in preparing speech she will have with Erszebet. Erszebet herself has a very ritualistic relationship with her husband the Inspector.

Their life is weird. She is very superstitious and reads the tarok and examines the flesh of birds to determine the future. She goes on weird fast and prayer binges to preserve good luck. Very opposite to her precise and neurotically logical husband. Whenever he has an emotion, he questions it. He deliberates endlessly over very small actions. He considers so long that often, the “moment” is gone. What a strange pair. He casually searches her dressing table and roams the house looking for caches of secret possessions of hers. In turn, she reads his investigator’s notebook and looks through his briefcase. Neither finds the other’s actions intrusive; they instead look upon them as symptoms of love and devotion and take the possessiveness as a compliment. In this century, we’d each be outraged at that kind of behavior. I wouldn’t dream of taking the liberty of searching through anything of Ken’s & I’d freak if he did that to me.

Other weird things include a museum of anatomical sculptures that only admits men. Wally disguises herself as a male and goes in. She recognizes her own colors & textures among the exposed breasts and labia. I’m not entirely sure how she & Erszebet hooked up. At one point Wally is waiting outside a restaurant for Erszebet to arrive. She has to wait outside because unescorted women are forbidden to enter the restaurant. In the 20the century! I can hardly believe it.

There’s a photographer named Egon (really!) who has some fingers missing due to the explosive power of the flashes he used. He was distracted as an apprentice by the naked woman his master was photographing.

Dora I couldn’t warm to at all. I connected her with the Dora in David Copperfield and since I didn’t like Dickens’s Dora, I couldn’t like this Dora. Even when a gypsy (for unknown reasons) cut her thumb off her buried corpse, I couldn’t develop any sympathy for her. She seemed to not care that her father was going around giving syphilis to anyone one warm and she was sickly and self-absorbed. ( )

Here we have a murder mystery with extra meaning - - Dora, the famous subject of a paper by Sigmund Freud, is killed and we have two investigations into her homicide. One is handled by the police inspector and the other is handled by his wife. The wife, Erszebet, is a Magyar woman with connections to gypsy traditions and superstition. As her husband struggles lurchingly through his investigation, Erszebet conducts her own, and actually finds the perpetrator. This murderer claims it was all an accident - and we know, there's no way. She literally chases him through the woods, and he falls off a cliff to his death.

This novel could definitely take a detailed analysis of what Erszebet could actually tell from the evidence she secrets from her husband, but really this is a book that indicts Freud, his methods and beliefs. There is a powerful old boys' network at work, and it results in one girl's death and another's disfigurement. The network's tendencies oppress women's desires and emotions at every turn. The author takes a measure of revenge by having the police inspector's wife solve the crime (although the inspector himself is a sympathetic character). Although this book reads as dully as a police report at times, it must have provoked quite a bit of thought in me, because besides the above points, I also have notes about studying: the modern fact-finding investigation as it tries to unmoor itself from its superstitious past; the imagery of snow covering virtually everything in the second half of the narrative; the symbols inherent in how men dress vs. how women dress (the veil vs. the bowler); and the contrast between the two investigations' chief assistants: Franz and Wally.

I recommend this work. I'm glad I read it (in Sept of '07) - the images and ideas have come back to me rather clearly.

http://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2010/07/fig-eater-by-jody-shields.html ( )

I didn't finish this book because I kept getting bored with it, though I tried reading it on several different occasions. The story seemed interesting, but something about the way that it was written just didn't hold my interest very well. ( )