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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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