I kept coming across glowing reviews of this book, winner of
the European Union Prize for Literature, and so looked forward to reading it. I
was very disappointed. The first two chapters promise an enjoyable read, but
then the drudgery begins. The author stated his intention - to “rescue in
fiction one of the many lives forgotten by history” - but what he wrote is more
of a philosophical treatise than a fictional biography.
According to Smilevski, Adolfina, Freud’s “sweetest and
best” sister, did not have an easy life: as a child she was sickly; as a young
girl she was emotionally abused; as a young woman she had an ill-fated love
affair; as an adult she institutionalized herself in a mental hospital; and in
her later years she had to care for her ailing mother. At the end of her lonely
existence was death in a concentration camp.
This is not an uplifting book. It is full of abuse,
loneliness, abortions, suicides, and deaths. Adolfina’s mother keeps telling
her, “’It would have been better if I had not given birth to you’” (34) and has
only “words of contempt and ridicule about how [Adolfina] ate, how [she]
laughed, how [she] walked” (48). (Maternal abuse almost seems a motif; the
mother of one of Adolfina’s friends “tied her sons and daughters to their
chairs” (68) and “burned all the clothes and books” (69) of one of her
daughters.)
The “meaningless of existence” (137) is a topic of
conversation over and over and over again.
Virtually everyone Adolfina meets suffers from depression.
Rainer, her lover, “stared into an absence . . . His gaze fled from everything
and fastened on the emptiness” (47). Klara, a friend, is “lost to a kind of
emptiness” and “Her gaze drifted somewhere far, far beyond the wall” (96).
Adolfina compares herself to Venus de Milo: “I lacked something inside me, as
if the arms of my soul were lacking, and that absence, that lack, that feeling
of emptiness, made me helpless” (99). Her mother “looked with an absent gaze”
(232). Another friend’s gaze “was fixed on a point, as if there, where her eyes
looked, something immobile swallowed her gaze, swallowed her very self” (194).
Yet another “looked into the emptiness . . . everywhere in that absence around
her” (213). The constant repetition of “absence” and “emptiness” and fixed
gazes is tedious. It’s not surprising that Albrecht Durer’s engraving,
Melancholia, receives a two-page description.
Much is left unexplained. For example, Adolfina does not
attend school: “On the day I was to set off to school for the first time, I
begged my parents to allow me to stay at home. I stayed home the next day as
well, and the days that followed” (39). Her education comes from Sigmund: “he
took out one of his textbooks and leafed through the pages, telling me what he
thought I needed to know” (39). There is no reference to her learning to read,
but she reads Plato, Hegel and Schopenhauer (63)! There also seems to be a lot
of purposeless name-dropping. Adolfina becomes acquainted with Johann Goethe’s
grandson, Gustav Klimt’s family, Franz Kafka’s sister, and Hermann Broch’s
mother!
The portrayal of Sigmund Freud is not flattering. Everyone
kowtows to him. His mother, believing her son will be a “great man,” calls him
“’my golden Siggie’” (38). When Freud’s grandson is seriously ill, “it was
clear to us that he was not going to live long” (224), his health is largely
ignored because Sigmund had surgery : “no one asked him how he was doing . . .
every day we forgot to take his temperature . . . We were all thinking about
Sigmund” (225). When his doting mother is dying, Sigmund ignores her requests
that he visit her (233). He is a misogynist who does not let his daughter study
medicine because “Sigmund did not believe that studies were for girls” (245).
His arrogance seems to know no bounds; he says, “’And this explanation of mine,
that religious belief originates in the search for comfort, will last longer
than any religious belief’” (248). Most damning is the fact that Sigmund
acquires exit visas for himself, “his wife, their children, and their families,
. . . his wife’s sister, two housekeepers, . . . [his] personal doctor and his
family . . . [and his]little dog” (10), but not for his four sisters who
consequently die in concentration camps.
Much has been made of the lyrical language in the book. My
problem with the language is the constant repetition. For example, this
sentence appears on p. 167: “A smell of raw, disintegrating flesh, of
excrement, of sweat, and, in the middle of this stench, of bodies tossing on
the eve of death, and bodies stiffly awaiting it.” This same sentence appears
again on pages 175 and 242. And then there are the long sentences: "At
that moment, if someone had told us this was our final moment on earth, and
that later no trace of us would remain, it would not have pulled us from our
rapture, because we believed that what was between us, what made the two of us
one, was eternal, and that if our material being were taken from us we would
continue where the forces of nature and the laws of decay and transience have
no power, and where the human soul is stronger than all the heavenly bodies,
because they are condemned one day, millions of years after their creation, to
burn out, whereas the soul in which our rapture and yearning were interwoven
would last even after not a single particle of dust from all the matter in the
universe remained"(106).
There is some useful information in the book. The history of
the care of the mentally ill was certainly interesting. Some of the discussions
(the nature of mental illness, the roles of the conscious and unconscious,
religion) were less so. The discussions about religion are pedantic:
"According to my brother, the cult of Yahweh was spread
among the Egyptians by a Midianite shepherd with the same name as the Egyptian
leader, Moses. But this one, this second Moses, preached a God who was the
complete antithesis of Aton: Yahweh was venerated by the Arab tribe of
Midianites as 'an uncanny, bloodthirsty demon who walks by night and shuns the
light of day.' Although 'the Egyptian Moses never was in Qades and had never
heard the name of Yahweh whereas the Midianite Moses never set foot in Egypt
and knew nothing of Aton,' they stayed in memory as one person, because 'the
Mosaic religion we know only in its final form as it was fixed by Jewish
priests in the time after the Exile about eight hundred years later,' by which
time the two men named Moses had already fused into a single person, and Aton
and Yahweh into a single God, as different in their essences as day is to
night, precisely because He is two gods in one"(184). A summary of Freud’s
book, "Moses and Monotheism," belongs in a book purportedly about the
life of Freud’s sister?
I read a translation of the original Macedonian text.
Perhaps much was lost in translation?
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