Hausfrau

Anna is an American living in Switzerland with her Swiss husband, Bruno, and their children. She's clearly depressed and lonely, still feeling isolated by a language barrier after all these years. She has no girlfriends and her husband is emotionally unavailable. So Anna starts having affairs. It starts with one, but she quickly loses control and can't keep up with her own lies. Things just spiral. (It was only a kiss, how did it end up like this? It was only a kiss, it was only a kiss!)

So ngl, I picked up this book because the cover is beautiful. I didn't really care what it was about; it was a novel, and the cover was gorgeous. Having no expectations, I can't say I was disappointed. But I didn't love it. Anna's depression and total apathy to anyone but her own self is palpable and difficult to read at times. She's not an easily likable protagonist even if she's somewhat understandable at times. Trying to sort through her deception and lies and affairs is frustrating. She's going to therapy but lying to her therapist. She refuses to try to make friends. It's just frustrating.

One thing I was really impressed by was how the timeline could change in almost every paragraph and, without any explanation, we knew exactly what was going on. From a therapy appointment, to what Anna was currently doing, to a few years prior. The timeline skipped around A LOT, but it was never confusing. And that's not easy to do. So props to the author for that. All in all, though, I wouldn't read it again and it was pretty forgettable, hence the three star review.

Would I recommend?
I'd say pass on this one, unless you have a very specific set of things you want in a book and this fits it perfectly.

The descriptions of life in Switzerland were amazingly accurate (having lived there for a year) and brought back for me...many good memories. The book was well written but was dark and depressing. Although I enjoyed listening to it and finished it in less than 24 hours, I have mixed feelings about recommending it as I found it, in retrospect to be very depressing.

It's an uncomfortable feeling to read a good book with a main character you don't like. Hausfrau is one such good book. The first sentence sets the mood for the book: “Anna was a good wife, mostly.” And she is. Anna sees to her children, tidies up the house, prepares meals, cares for her husband. And yet she isn't. Anna is wildly unfaithful. The activities of housewifery are deeply unfulfilling to her. She lies to her husband, her therapist, her lovers, her friend. From page one, the reader knows this is not going to end well.

Yes, it's an uncomfortable read, but it's a satisfying read, too. Anna is genuinely both self-destructive and miserable, and, though she knows she is ultimately doomed, she cannot find a way to move from the path she is on, stuck between living a life that is unhappy for both herself and everyone who cares about her and suicide . There is a certain sort of paradoxical satisfaction in reading a story that reads so true, yet is so tragic.

For the first half of the book I worried about what I had gotten myself into here. It just seemed disjointed and bleak, jumping from Anna's therapy sessions to her daytime trysts then back to her language classes.

But I started to get the hang of it, a larger image began to resolve itself as I got further into the book. I began to see a spiral pattern where rules of grammar offer up questions of “is the present ever perfect?” - the wordplay suited for the author who comes from a poetic background. Anna's first affair with a pyrologist brings with it questions of a consuming flame. It sounds unbearable but I swear she's far better at it than I am managing here.

The third act hits hard, leaves you a little breathless and ultimately wanting to talk it out with someone, pushing this 3 into a 4 for me.

Just read Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary. This elementary, insipid writing is getting compared to those and I have to wonder if the people making the comparisons just read the cliff's notes for those. This is hamhanded and ineffective. The psychotherapist is laughably bad, the main character is clearly DEPRESSED AS HECK and in need of help that no one is getting her, and the people around her are alternatingly clever and stupid depending on if the protag needs to get away with something.

It's also getting compared to 50 Shades. THAT comparison at least might be apt, in terms of the quality of the writing. But I'm pretty sure people are making the comparison because the first 2/3 of this book is full of sex. They are not as repetitive as the protagonist's constant, ridiculous inner monologue, but you could argue a lot of them don't actually add anything to the book. Overall this is just a mess. I feel like it could've been whittled down to a novella pretty easily.