Anna Benz, the American wife of a Swiss banker named Bruno, has lived in Switzerland with her husband for nearly a decade, but remains ambivalently on the outskirts of society. She has made no real friends and can barely speak a word of Schwiizerdütsch, the local tongue. Instead, she stays home and raises their three children, Victor, Charles, and Polly, with grudging help from her mother-in-law, Ursula. Unsurprisingly, Anna feels stagnant and trapped; she’s moody, depressed and difficult.
Hausfrau boasts taut pacing and melodrama, but also a fully realized heroine as love-hateable as Emma Bovary and a poet’s fascination with language. Anna constantly interrogates her own word choices -- is what she’s doing good? Can she say it’s “good” when she means mostly that it’s “allowable” or “convenient”? What is the difference between wanting something and needing something? -- and what her word choices reveal about her motivations, her desires, and the self she instinctively tries to spin into something more admirable.
No comments:
Post a Comment