Jill Alexander Essbaum

Anna Benz is an American expat living in Zurich with her Swiss husband, Bruno, and their 3 young children. By all other accounts, Anna has a great life but, to Anna, life has become a prison. Her relationship with Bruno has cooled into marital co-existence. Her parents are deceased and Anna has few friends. Years of understanding almost nothing of Schwiizerdutsch (the language of Zurich) have left her disconnected. Yet, don’t feel sorry for Anna. She is not, as the first line claims “a show more good wife, mostly.” Anna’s means of finding comfort and belonging is sex with other men, a secret she keeps from her husband, her psychoanalyst, and her friends.

As Anna reveals her thoughts and feelings, we discover what’s troubling Anna is much more complicated than boredom. She vacillates between making excuses for her affairs and longing to be a better person. The words she learns in German class and the heady concepts she discusses with her Jungian analyst twist and morph in Anna’s mind, taking on deeper meaning and sometimes distorting what is actually happening in her life. Over just a few months, Anna’s self-indulgences, rationalizations, delusions, and destructive behavior will have dire consequences.

Hausfrau is a melancholy journey through the mind of a seemingly ordinary but very troubled woman who stands in the way of her own happiness. The writing style is literary and sophisticated, tilting toward ostentatious, and readers may be challenged to sympathize with Anna at times but the story is compelling even as the possibility of a happy ending for Anna slips further and further away. show less

A downer of a book with an unlikeable yet sympathetic protagonist. I knew how it was going to end. I mean the author named her character Anna and has her mention in the first chapter the only reason Swiss trains run late. AND YET, when I got to the end of the novel I was like fuuuuuuuuuck. Anyway, a good read that left me feeling a bit icky and anxious. I'm going to go watch cartoons or something...

I took a couple days to contemplate this book further. It was much more than I expected, in every way.

It was sold as Madame Bovary meets 50 Shades of Grey, which I inferred as being a bit of fun in the midst of an examination of a woman’s sexuality.

It is not. It is no fun at all. Be prepared to dislike Anna, be frustrated by Anna, not understand Anna at all, give up on caring on why Anna is making such a mess of things, and… I’ll say it… be prepared to think Anna deserves it when she show more gets hit by her husband.

Anna Benz finds herself adrift, in a landlocked nation, among self-contained people, who make the clocks and trains run on time. There is no room or sympathy in a country like Switzerland for a woman like Anna. She doesn’t go along to get along. We meet her nine years into her time there – 9 years – and she is JUST starting to take language classes to make her life easier. Her husband is Swiss, her children are all born in Switzerland, she has no family to speak of back in the US. Yet she has done nothing to assimilate, to embrace this new life. She is the personification of passivity, and hence all that is inherently bad about letting things just happen to you.

Why can’t Anna be happy, you ask? Yeah… if you find an adequate answer to that question in this story, let me know. It is the central question of Anna’s life, and of her psychoanalysis. The reader gets the feeling that Anna is participating in both the therapy and the German classes as the bare minimum to show her husband she’s making an effort, and that she resents both. She isn’t trying in her therapy; she reveals to the reader that she knows that she will get nowhere with it because she won’t tell the therapist everything. And she uses the German classes to meet a man with whom she starts an affair.

Perhaps Anna had been using her ignorance of the language to keep the rest of the world at bay. Perhaps because she hasn’t formed a decisive vision of her life, she can’t commit to the one she finds herself in. Whatever worked for 9 years is no longer working – things have changed and it becomes appallingly apparent that her life is in free-fall. Inevitably, disaster occurs. And she simply has no coping skills for what comes then.

So, why read this, if it’s depressing, if the main character is beyond difficult to like, if we get no answers to what went wrong for her?

Read it for the prose, written by an accomplished poet. And for the sharp insights: you will find you understand Anna in those moments, if only in those moments, on a deep, humanistic level. Read it as a reminder that we never really know anyone completely, even those closest to us. Read it in preparation for the day when you let life happen to you, rather than take charge of your destiny, to know what not to do. Read it to open your heart to mine for some compassion for this wretch of a woman, a failure on so many levels.

Just don’t read it for fun. show less

Gotta feed the hole. That’s a line from Romeo is Bleeding, a 1993 film starring Gary Oldman and although the holes are different, they both need to be fed. I’m going to get all spoiler-y on you in a bit, so if you haven’t read the book and want to, stick with this paragraph. If you have hang-ups about sex, morality and the “sanctity” of motherhood, don’t read it. Seriously. The writer uses the words cock and fuck frequently and in their most literal sense and Anna is not a show more paragon of virtue. She is a woman in pain; a woman without a compass. Another review says that Anna wasted the lovely life she had. Did that person read the same book? Anna certainly didn’t think her life was lovely. She thought she ought to, but didn’t and she knew the difference. Knowing didn’t make her appreciate it or try to improve it to make it more satisfactory to her. I don’t think any life would have been no matter what she did, or rather, allowed to have happen to her. The hole was yawning and empty and demanding to be filled (and if you think that’s just metaphorical, it’s not). The sex is graphic, vigorous and yeah, Anna comes, but there’s no joy in it. It’s a reflex like swallowing and she craves it because of the power it bestows - she flexes her desicated will. There are almost no other actions or decisions left to her. She marvels that passive and passion begin with the same four letters.

Spoilers -

Anna is a person worthy of sympathy despite how her actions turn off the reader. She is truly rudderless. Nothing affects her and she knows it. I found her boring actually and I think that’s how she views herself as well. She wonders why, but not too much. She brings fabricated dreams to her therapist who doesn’t suspect they’re fake and analyzes those for her and our amusement. She tries to improve her German, not for herself, to facilitate her interaction with the world, but to placate her husband, Bruno. It’s here she meets Archie and after one brief encounter in class they start an affair that is only about sex. Anna is adamant that is all it will be and after we learn about her previous affair with Stephen we understand why she won’t conflate it with love or romance again. That affair left her with her third child, daughter Polly Jean, but it’s a hollow consolation after Stephen returns to the States.

It’s the children that anchor her to Bruno securely, but she is not wrapped up in them as other women are. She knows this, but cannot correct it or manufacture the appropriate emotional connection. It’s more of the void; the hole. She leaves the kids with her mother-in-law as often as she can get away with and admits that Charles is her favorite. Bruno believes them all to be his and probably the boys are. Eventually you know he’s going to learn the truth; both about his kids and his wife. Except it doesn’t go how we expect.

Anna is caught, but not by Bruno; by Charles. She swears him to silence with threats and coercion, but we don’t think it’s going to take. Unfortunately it does, but in the worst way possible. When Charles is killed I literally held my breath, put the book down and couldn’t continue right away. The tragedy itself was enough to do it, but thinking about how Anna would take it added depth. Even not being the best mother on earth doesn’t let you out of guilt over being with your lover when your child dies. I doubted she’d survive it and frankly, she was so empty and lacking any vital spark I didn’t think it would be much of a loss if she decided to kill herself. She was so sapped of any kind of volition or will that I didn’t know if she would have it in her. When Bruno threw her out of the house, with no money, no bank account and no ability to drive or fend for herself she was at the mercy of the universe and it would grind her to nothing. The way we’re left with in the end was at least quick. show less