A perceptive look, from a psychoanalyst, at the downside of being Mrs. Sigmund Freud.
Martha Freud—the stalwart footnote to the life of her husband Sigmund—finally takes center stage.
Seven years after Sigmund Freud dies, his 85-year-old widow receives a letter from Mary Huntington-Smith, an American psychoanalyst requesting permission to interview her for a biography. Martha declines. But the interest Mary expresses in Martha’s life (she assumes, it turns out correctly, that it cannot have been easy to be Mrs. Freud), plus her admission that she doesn’t like Anna Freud, the controlling youngest daughter who assumed the mantle of heir to her father’s great legacy—secretly delights Martha. A correspondence ensues. Initially, Martha, living in England in what has already been designated the Freud Museum, follows the party line—her “Sigi” was a great man to whom she was blessed to have been married for 53 years. He wrote her 940 letters during their three-year engagement! But soon, darker disclosures emerge: Sigmund was pathologically jealous, forbidding Martha from even calling her cousin by his first name. A strict atheist, he slapped her hand the first Sabbath of their married life as she lit candles. His sex drive resulted in too many pregnancies too quickly, exhausting his wife. When she asked him to consider taking “some precaution,” Freud decided marital celibacy was the appropriate response, and so, as a 34-year-old woman, Martha became relegated to the background as manager of the household. The story comprises a year’s worth of letters Martha writes to Mary, interspersed with entries in a journal Martha begins to keep. As she becomes better known to herself—and to the reader—Martha experiences, in lifelike psychoanalytic fashion, associative remembering intermittently and significantly interrupted by incongruous responses that reveal suppressed emotion. These feelings are deepest regarding the circumstances that brought Martha, Sigmund and Anna to safety in England from Vienna in 1938—the one decision Martha can never forgive her husband for.
A perceptive look, from a psychoanalyst, at the downside of being Mrs. Sigmund Freud.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2005
ISBN: 1-55970-783-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
