COURTESY: AMAZON.COM
“Anna was a good wife, mostly.”
From the novel’s opening, readers are unsettled by the protagonist of poet-turned-author Jill Alexander Essbaum’s first full-length novel, “Hausfrau,” which debuted just last month to much noise from critics. Today at 5 p.m. Oxford will get the chance to meet the author and hear a live reading from a beautifully written novel at Off Square Books.
The novel tells the story of Anna Benz, a housewife married to a Swiss banker named Bruno with three children and a kind-enough mother-in-law. Even though she has been in Switzerland for a decade, she has hardly any life of her own. Detailing her life as an isolated American expat in a small Swiss town, this novel focuses on that “mostly,” exploring Anna’s desperate and extreme need for connection. Throughout the novel, the heroine searches for ways to cope with her situation. Anna turns to language school, Jungian analysis and even illicit sexual affairs, yearning to uncover meaning for herself.
For these reasons, Anna is a largely frustrating, although fascinating, character. The reader is constantly swarmed by the secrets and lies she must tell the few people in her life in order to keep up the charade. Her life seems so perfect from the outside, but Anna is consistently, perversely destitute, resulting in careless nihilism. The affairs she has do not seem to be fueled by love; instead she is compelled by raw, explicit lust from which she can’t seem to tear herself away, despite the possible consequences.
When asked about what she wanted readers to take from “Hausfrau,” Essbaum said she hopes people finish the novel with knowledge “that the least likable people are so often the people most in need of love.”
“Real, actual love. Not the sort of ersatz love Anna seeks in the beds of various men,” Essbaum said. “And that Switzerland is beautiful.”
Anna’s lonesome condition in “Hausfrau,” full of misery, inescapability and looming insanity, can be notably compared to “Madame Bovary” and “Anna Karenina.”
“I acknowledge the comparison,” Essbaum said. “It’s most closely related to Madame Bovary– chiefly in set-up and in delivery. Both women are married to men they might do better to have avoided. They live in communities too narrow for their spirits and constitutions; they deal with these difficulties by involving themselves in reckless affairs. I would like to think, though, that after that, ‘Hausfrau’ becomes its own novel. I hope it does.”
The novel’s prose is in some ways similar to Gustave Flaubert’s, but it is evident in Essbaum’s writing that, in addition to being an excellent writer of prose, she is also a renowned poet. As a result, “Hausfrau” is precisely and incisively written but is without any unnecessary decoration—the novel makes no attempts to gloss over Anna’s sometimes enraging decisions. Yet the book moves so quickly that one is often torn between racing forward and stopping to enjoy the prose.
When asked about her visit to Square Books this week, Essbaum expressed her excitement.
“I expect to meet a ton of lovely people,” Essbaum said. “Everyone I have mentioned this event to has veritably swooned when I mentioned the store. Much jealousy among my pals– everyone wanted to come!”
