Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

This book is fine for beginning writers, but I do have a couple of problems with it:

One, not everyone is a good writer. Yes, many people have inherent talent for writing, but Goldberg‘s collection of essays seems to suggest that every student in her writing classes had enormous talent that they were unaware of. I am sure lots of people who are told to “just write” will still write badly, so don’t sugar-coat it.

Two, I understand the book was first published in 1986. But when it was republished in 2005, it would have been good to update it a little. For instance, how many writers are sitting in coffee shops all day with notebooks and pens? At least put them in Panera with a laptop, for Christ’s sake. These kinds of references made the book seem horribly outdated.

In all, it is an easy book to read, although I didn’t find it earth-shattering or really learn anything I didn’t already know about writing. It’s more of a rah-rah type of book to give encouragement to those who need it.

Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

This is a book I received from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I rated this book a 3 because I struggle with what to say about it. It is a dark book, following the life of central character Anna Benz, who is a very troubled young woman. A transplant from the States who married a Swiss man, moved to Zurich and had three children in nine years, she still has no friends and cannot speak the language. Upon her husband’s encouragement, she enrolls in a Swiss German class. Anna is also in psychoanalysis, but never seems to tell her doctor anything about herself – she only asks insipid questions. In fact, Anna is an insipid woman. She does not live her life, but lets life happen to her in a passive way. If a man smiles at her, she jumps into bed with him and spends her days having sex with several different men while her mother-in-law watches her children and her husband is at work. She does fall in love with one of her affairs, but he moves back to the States and left her behind to pick up the pieces. The other men are used to fill a void that will never be filled.

I found the book hard to get into, because it jumps around incessantly from Anna’s escapades, to her analysis sessions, to her German classes, also jumping around in time from past to present and back again. It was a little disconcerting. The story was compelling enough to keep me reading until the end, but I wouldn’t say it was a page-turner. I just wanted to find out what happens. A book has to be really bad for me to put it down before finishing it.

Essbaum uses German words and their meanings from the German class as reflections of Anna’s state of mind in a clever way, and it obvious she did a lot of research for the book. The writing is good, although not my cup of tea. The sessions with Doktor Messerli became somewhat tiresome and repetitive. There is a lot of sex, which is well written and I did not find offensive in any way. I just found Anna to be like an empty doll, just rolling along wherever the tide carries her. The story is believable and could very well happen in real life; I just couldn’t identify with Anna or have sympathy for her. As expected, Anna’s dalliances come to a head and she goes into a tailspin, but no spoilers here.