LOVED Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

[tripfiction]

Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary and now Anna Benz... an imaginative story of one woman who is broken and is really struggling. To my mind the writing is fabulously creative and sure to be a hit in 2015! (set in Switzerland BTW). Who else has read it?

its getting great reviews but the amount of sex in the book puts me off. I know I can probably skip it but I find sex so boring (in books I should add here).

I'm about a third of the way through. it's well-written but I am having difficulty in finding any way to sympathise with Anna. She seems such a drip.
But I'll report back when I'm through.

Finished it a few days ago. Here's my review from amazon:
Anna Benz is the 21st century reincarnation of any one of those 19th century European heroines - Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Effi Briest - who try to escape boredom and lack of fulfilment with extra-marital affairs. Reading Anna's story is also rather akin to reading about someone like Diana, Princess of Wales - you have a foreboding that all is going to go desperately wrong in the end. Anna is not a character that it is easy to like, or even understand. She's passive, lacking in self-confidence and self-determination, yet manipulative. But the author has captured Anna's feeling of futility, alienation and ultimately despair so well that one feels compelled to read on - the story has the fascination of watching a car crash in slow motion.

I felt that the portrayal of middle-class life in the German part of Switzerland was excellent. The customs, the everyday life that Anna finds excluded from and the relentless and almost foreboding rhythm of the trains and infrastructure were brilliantly described. The author makes good use of word-play and puns, with some inspired and well-chosen turns of phrase: "she lay in bed the whole night, the day's events tumbling in her head like clothes in a dryer." Or, "they're (lovers) like salty snacks. You can't stop at one."

Occasionally, I felt that the writing was a little contrived - the continual analogy of the structure of German grammar and Anna's situation wore a little thin for me. I'm also not too sure how interesting those sections of the book would be to someone with no idea of the German language. However, on the whole, this was a powerful and well-written tale with an unusual setting which I'd recommend to anyone who enjoys a novel with psychological depth.