Hausfrau

A Novel

De: Jill Alexander Essbaum

Narrado por: Mozhan Marnò

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, THE HUFFINGTON POST, AND SHELF AWARENESS • “In Hausfrau, Anna Karenina goes Fifty Shades with a side of Madame Bovary.”—Time

“A debut novel about Anna, a bored housewife who, like her Tolstoyan namesake, throws herself into a psychosexual journey of self-discovery and tragedy.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Sexy and insightful, this gorgeously written novel opens a window into one woman’s desperate soul.”—People

Anna was a good wife, mostly. For readers of The Girl on the Train and The Woman Upstairs comes a striking debut novel of marriage, fidelity, sex, and morality, featuring a fascinating heroine who struggles to live a life with meaning.

Anna Benz, an American in her late thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno—a banker—and their three young children in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zürich. Though she leads a comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable Bruno or even with her own thoughts and feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises even her.

But Anna can’t easily extract herself from these affairs. When she wants to end them, she finds it’s difficult. Tensions escalate, and her lies start to spin out of control. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back.

Intimate, intense, and written with the precision of a Swiss Army knife, Jill Alexander Essbaum’s debut novel is an unforgettable story of marriage, fidelity, sex, morality, and most especially self. Navigating the lines between lust and love, guilt and shame, excuses and reasons, Anna Benz is an electrifying heroine whose passions and choices readers will debate with recognition and fury. Her story reveals, with honesty and great beauty, how we create ourselves and how we lose ourselves and the sometimes disastrous choices we make to find ourselves.

Praise for Hausfrau

“Elegant . . . There is much to admire in Essbaum’s intricately constructed, meticulously composed novel, including its virtuosic intercutting of past and present.”—Chicago Tribune

“For a first novelist, Essbaum is extraordinary because she is a poet. Her language is meticulous and resonant and daring.”—NPR’s Weekend Edition

“We’re in literary territory as familiar as Anna’s name, but Essbaum makes it fresh with sharp prose and psychological insight.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“This marvelously quiet book is psychologically complex and deeply intimate. . . . One of the smartest novels in recent memory.”—The Dallas Morning News

“Essbaum’s poignant, shocking debut novel rivets.”—Us Weekly

“A powerful, lyrical novel . . . Hausfrau boasts taut pacing and melodrama, but also a fully realized heroine as love-hateable as Emma Bovary.”—The Huffington Post

“Imagine Tom Perrotta’s American nowheresvilles swapped out for a tidy Zürich suburb, sprinkled liberally with sharp riffs on Swiss-German grammar and European hypocrisy.”—New York

A well-narrated book which surprised me

I really enjoyed this audio and was stunned to read how many negative reviews the book has gotten on Audible.

First of all the narration is excellent, I have never heard this narrator before but I will look for other readings by her immediately.

Second, the book itself is a fascinating view of a person living in a foreign country. She faces enormous challenges integrating herself into a foreign society, which with I sympathized. Anna does not resolve these issues in time to save herself, but we get to enjoy her intelligent and pointed commentary about the Swiss language and the culture as we watch her struggle. As a person who has lived in another country prior to mastering its language I really found that aspect of the book to be quite engaging and a good reflection of the feelings I knew myself as an outsider sometimes ambivalent about my new 'home'.

Third, the character of Anna is very frustrating, but I saw the book as more of a meditation on Anna Karenina than as a character portrait of a real person. I thought it was fascinating to follow the author through the exploration of how a modern woman could end up in the same situation as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I don't think I liked the character of Anna in Hausfrau, or some of the other characters but that did not prevent enjoying the book and its examination of their dilemmas.

There were issues that bothered me in the writing, such as the continued obsession with images of fire which didn't seem to lead anywhere, and I thought the ending was a bit prolonged, but nothing I felt while reading this book can relate to the very negative reactions other listeners describe. I enjoyed this audiobook quite a lot and found it very intelligent.

I hope that readers will give the book a chance - I wasn't able to read a book for months because nothing felt right, and once I listened to a sample of Hausfrau I had to buy it right away and read it straight through in only a few days during limited commuting hours. The narrator adds quite a lot to the experience and does wonderful accents and very expressive reading. The prose is also very beautiful and clever. I think the author is very promising and I look forward to reading more of her work.

Four out of five

I really enjoyed this book, especially the sections that talked about language, and the loneliness of living in a foreign country. I think readers who have lived abroad will definitely relate!

I have heard this described as a "modern day Madame Bovary", and I think that's a good way to explain it.

I will say I was a little surprised at how much sex there was in the book, and how explicit it was! This didn't hinder my enjoyment of the book, but it lead to some awkward blushing, since I often listen to books on my headphones while working and commuting. If you have a problem with explicit sex and morally ambiguous characters, this may not be the book for you.

intriguing

Excellent book exploring the human condition. The author's use of words captured my attention from start to finish. While I am totally different than the main character, I could understand her choices because the author made me feel I understood her and could imagine myself as her.

Depressing read

This is a modern version of Flaubert's Madame Bovary with the same depressing view of the fate of a housewife who makes poor life choices. I found it very hard to believe in the American protagonist who was so passive and disenfranchised in her marriage to a Swiss banker that she didn't even have a bank account, driver's license, or job, despite living in the late 20th century. I also disliked all the Jungian psychoanalytical pronouncements of her shrink who seemed to be more interested in dream analysis than in giving the woman practical suggestions for empowering herself in a meaningful way. The story is well-written and competently narrated, but the ending gives the wrong sort of message to young wives with unsatisfying marriages. I did, however, find the interweaving of the details of German grammar with the plot development to be creative and different.

quite the story

First time author, her debut novel. Interesting author that is best known for writing erotic poems. She went to college in Texas and to an Episcopal seminary. She states her writing encompasses sex, divinity and worlplay and this book does that. In this book Hausfrau is the German for housewife. An American woman marries a Swiss guy and moves to Switzerland. She does nothing to assimilate into the local society and instead becomes bored and starts making bad decisions and doing bad things. There are consequences. The book is really well written. You wonder if the author didn't lead this life at least to a certain extent to have all the thoughts she communicates in the book. I will try this author again assuming shewrites a second one.