“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...
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Creators
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Awards
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Release date
March 17, 2015 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780812997545
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780812997545
- File size: 2177 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Publisher's Weekly
Starred review from January 5, 2015
Over a century after the publication of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, poet Essbaum proves in her debut novel that there is still plenty of psychic territory to cover in the story of “a good wife, mostly.” But now, more than ever, it is clear that the conflict between the protagonist’s desires and her “tightly circumscribed” world is her own doing, and not a result of social limitations. Anna Benz is an American expatriate and mother of three, married to Bruno, a Swiss banker. In her nine years of living in a tidy suburb of Zurich, Anna (whose name is a Tolstoy nod) has never gotten a driver’s license, befriended other mothers, or learned Swiss German, the form of German spoken in Switzerland. Essbaum’s story opens as Anna attempts to break through her ennui and engage with the world. She starts a course of Jungian analysis with the inimitable Doktor Messerli and finally enrolls in language classes. Still, she’s drawn into a number of extramarital affairs that skirt the line between passion and passivity. In Essbaum’s capable hands, Anna invites the reader’s empathy rather than scorn. The realism of Anna’s dilemmas and the precise construction of the novel are marvels of the form, and Essbaum chooses her words carefully. When her teacher lectures her on verb tenses, Anna wonders, “But how often is the past simple? Is the present ever perfect?” This novel is masterly as it moves toward its own inescapable ending, and Anna is likely to provoke strong feelings in readers well after the final page. -
Kirkus
February 1, 2015
Between caring for three children, visiting a Jungian analyst and taking a German class, Anna wouldn't seem to have much time for extramarital liaisons, but like her namesake, Madame Karenina, she manages. Anna, who's American, has lived near Zurich with her Swiss banker husband, Bruno, for nine years yet still can't speak the language. She gets by in elementary German but is barely competent at Schwiizerdutsch, the local variant that "leaps from the back of the throat like an infected tonsil trying to escape." She doesn't have a job or a bank account; her parents are dead; and she has only one friend, another expatriate she doesn't even like very well. Her husband is cold and distant, her mother-in-law "was usually never blatantly unkind." That double negative is vintage Anna, who parses her feelings into ever finer distinctions. A few years ago, she drifted into an affair with another American, who went home without knowing he'd fathered her third child. Now she's studying German, which her analyst suggested as a way to become more connected to the world, though Doktor Messerli surely didn't mean she should jump into bed with a Scotsman she met in class. "Anna loved and didn't love sex. Anna needed and didn't need it. Her relationship with sex was a convoluted partnership that rose from both her passivity and an unassailable desire to be distracted. And wanted." As Anna floats through her life and this novel, taking endless train rides and insomniac walks, the story is interrupted by philosophical conversations with her shrink: "What's the difference between passivity and neutrality?" is a typical gambit. There's plenty of tension-will Anna get caught?-but it's hard to be invested in the life of a woman who doesn't care much about it herself. A smart book that entertains page by page but doesn't add up to anything larger.COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Booklist
February 15, 2015
As an American expat in Switzerland, Anna Benz feels lost. Her husband, a successful Swiss banker, is supportive but distant, and her grasp of the language is such that she has few friends beyond her three children and her helpful mother-in-law. Bored and lonely, Anna slips into a string of affairs, first falling in love with a professor visiting from the States, then dulling the pain of his abrupt departure with successive liaisons. German-language class, new friendships, and a Jungian analyst do little to help. Caught in a struggle to find herself and her place before the truth of her dalliances comes to light, Anna is already spiraling out of control when tragedy pushes her over the edge, where she will face the very base reality of the sum of her decisions. Isolated and tormented, Anna shares more than her name with that classic adulteress, Anna Karenina, but Essbaum has given a deft, modern facelift to the timeless story of a troubled marriage and tragic love in this seductive first novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.) -
Library Journal
October 1, 2014
An American in her thirties, Anna Benz has a picture-perfect life, with glowing children, a gorgeous house, and a Swiss banker husband. Of course, what looks that good on the outside is often rotten on the inside, and Anna launches a series of affairs. This debut by a recipient of the Bakeless Poetry Prize and two NEA literature fellowships is an in-house favorite.
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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