“Shame is psychic extortion. Shame lies. Shame a woman and she will believe she is fundamentally wrong, organically delinquent. The only confidence she will have will be in her failures. You will never convince her otherwise.” says Doctor Messerli, the Swiss shrink Anna, the protagonist of Jill Alexander Essbaum’s brilliant, coruscating, debut novel, HAUSFRAU.
A modern day Madam Bovary or perhaps more akin to Anna Karenina, implicitly and tellingly sharing the same first name, Anna Benz, stands bluff to unsatisfied spouse through the birth of two sons to sink into adulterous activity.
A young wife alien to her husband’s country of Switzerland, Anna is an American, whose settled married look sits as well as her unsettled resettlement to the picture perfect Zurich suburb of Dietlikon.
Affluence and comfort cannot assuage the alienation she feels and so she flings herself into a series of flings, loneliness assuaged by lust.
‘I am nothing but a series of poor choices executed poorly.” Anna laments, totally self-aware of her actions and of the consequences that may ensue.
Now thirty seven, Anna remains a passenger in life, passive, she is picked up far too easily. Anna rarely feels at ease in her own skin and so takes others into her skin to feel, to alleviate boredom and ennui. She will say yes to a casual copulation as easily to a Casula cup of coffee.
“Take one lover you may as well take twenty. They are like salty snacks. You can’t stop at one.” Anna declares, citing the banal, quotidian rutting she engaged in , “the sexual equivalent of a shrugged shoulder”
HAUSFRAU explores the difference between secrecy and privacy, need and want, love and intimacy. The book is illicit without being explicit, an eroticism clandestine, the excitement of the extramarital likened to being a spy, furtive fucks, dangerous dalliances, the delicious threat of discovery during covert couplings.
Deleterious to her domestic harmony it may be, but Anna just cannot deny her desires.
Whether you struggle to understand her actions or find her attitude scandalous without a scrap of morality, there’s a deft, delightful and delicious felicity with language that seduces the reader into an assignation to turn each exquisitely drafted page.
Jill Alexander Essbaum is primarily a poet, and her libretto of this libertine, difficult, self-destructive, narcissist is replete with vernacular venerations, vocabulary variations and conjugational acrobatics.
Anna’s enrolment in a Schwiizerdutsch class is a master stroke to free range rummage in words and grammar, the puns, the onomatopoeia, the phonic and phonetic, the lost in translation conjugations that make non-native tongue speakers inconsonant and suffer from irritable, gaping, rangy vowel syndrome.
Between the conjugal and the conjugations, there is much to enjoy, in this etymologically charged novel, which unfolds like a carnal crossword, a reward for the literate and the empathetic.
HAUSFRAU by Jill Alexander Essbaum is published by Mantle 29.99.