Book #6 Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Hausfrau 

Hausfrau will be released on 26th March 2015, my thanks to Mantle for the complimentary copy


I read Hausfrau, the debut novel from Jill Alexander Essbaum, in one night last night and I'm still thinking about it today. It's the story of Anna Benz who, after getting pregnant, married the father of her child and emigrated to Switzerland. Several years later more children have followed, but Anna has never assimilated into Swiss society and stands on the outside looking in. I was struck by the duality of my response to Anna as a character. On the one hand, I felt like I didn't understand her at all, on the other I felt as though I understood her completely.

It flummoxed me that after nine years in the country she had never made a true effort at learning the language, a thing bound to isolate. So too, that she had not learned to drive, and does not have a bank account. Is this her own failure or unwillingness to fully commit to a life chosen by accident, or something else more sinister, engendered by her husband? The question hangs in the air, neither one or the other, perhaps both.

Anna, depressed, somehow got caught in a vicious circle, a psychological rut that she does not know how to escape. Alone becomes her default, no longer just her condition, but her coping mechanism, finding Swiss society insular, she goes through a private insulation of the self, rejecting as she feels rejected and her sense of self splinters.

My favourite quote was :

It is possible to lead several lives at once. In fact, it is impossible not to. Sometimes these lives overlap and interact. It is busy work living them and it requires stamina a singular life doesn’t need. Sometimes these lives live peaceably in the house of the body. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they grouse and bicker and storm upstairs and shout from windows and don’t take out the rubbish. Some other times, these lives, these several lives, each indulge several lives of their own. And those lives, like rabbits or rodents, multiply, make children of themselves. And those child lives birth others. This is when a woman stops leading her own life. This is when the lives start leading her. 

Unsurprisingly, the stifling, controlled, isolation of her life has led to the need for an outlet. And in Anna's case the outlet becomes sex, but both this outlet and her inability to establish human connection will have dire consequences.      

I found the way that it was written really interesting, and admired it, it was reminscent of Marilynne Robinson's recent novel Lila. Anna will, for example, be at a party, in one sentence and in the very next suddenly be in bed with her lover, or at her therapy session, ( with the worlds most cold, judgemental, therapist) before being recalled back to her present. The natural habit of suddenly getting lost in a thought, an echo, a memory, and no longer feeling present in the moment or the place. By writing it in this way, it feels like we the reader are inside her head, it also further reinforces Anna's disconnect, she can never fully function because she is never in the moment.

As well as the clear contrast to Anna Karenina, Hausfrau is very much in the same tradition as Doris Lessings 'The Grass Is Singing' and Ibsen's 'A Dolls House' as a reflection on the loss of identity through marriage.

A bleak tale, certainly, yet somehow, a compelling one.

10/10

2015 Challenge : A book that takes place in another country

Book #72 The Lighthouse by Alison Moore

The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse by Alison Moore is also on the longlist for the 2012 Booker. The main protagonist of The Lighthouse is Futh, a man who in the wake of his separation from his wife has gone on a walking holiday in Germany. Futh alternates chapters with Ester, one of the proprietors, alongside her husband, of a hotel Futh stays in during his journey.

In many ways the novel is an expose of the very great psychological damage parental abandonment can do an individual. During the narrative Futh revisits and revisits the moment his mother told his father he was boring her, vanishing from both their lives.

The disappearance of his mother has defined Futh, whose career centres around recapturing her scent, carrying her lighthouse shaped perfume bottle wherever he goes. His marriage has been damaged by his obsession with her, but too, I felt his wife lacked the decency of compassion to assist Futh in overcoming these issues.

As a portrait of a man, The Lighthouse is almost a hymn to loneliness. Futh is permanently ill-fated, and it shows well that loneliness was almost inescapable for him, the boy alone in the rain on his climbing frame, the boy in the dark in his neighbours kitchen as his father stole his only friend, how lonely boy grows into isolated man. The inevitability of it, it's very well done, if slightly depressing, his anonymity compounded by his lack of first name. Moreover, the knowledge that had he made a human connection with one of two other characters he needn't be alone anymore, compounds Futh as a tragic figure, destined to the kind of fate he meets.

Separately from the plot I loved the lighthouse motif that ran through the novel, from the flashing of torches, to the bottles, to the name of the hotel, very cleverly done and my favourite bit was the description of the storm, a dual description of two separate events.

Alison Moore's debut novel has all the assurance of a veteran, a strong contender for the prize, its sense of despair will either be its making or its undoing 9/10