Goce Smilevski - Freud's Sister

Vienna, 1938: With the Nazis closing in, Sigmund Freud is granted an exit visa and allowed to list the names of people to take with him. He lists his doctor and maids, his dog and his wife’s sister, but he doesn’t list any of his own sisters. The four Freud sisters are shuttled to the Terezín concentration camp, while their brother lives out his last days in London.
Based on a true story, this searing novel gives haunting voice to Freud’s sister Adolfina—“the sweetest and best of my sisters”—a gifted, sensitive woman who was spurned by her mother and who never married. From her closeness with her brother in childhood, to her love for a fellow student, to her time with Gustav Klimt’s sister in a Vienna psychiatric hospital, to her dream of one day living in Venice and having a family, Freud’s Sister imagines the life of a woman lost to the shadows of history with astonishing insight and deep feeling.

Comment: The last book I borrowed at the library was this one. I had never heard of the author not the book but my local library has a special highlights shelf at the entrance where they put some books their book club has read and the books chosen were the ones most members have liked.

This one got me curious because it would feature world war II, a theme I usually like reading about, and Freud somehow, and I also like psychology/psychiatry elements.

In this book, winner of a literary prize in 2010, the author tells the story of one of Freud's sisters who was rumored to have died at a concentration camp. Using true registers and notes, the author has created a fictional story based on real life events where we can learn a little bit about Freud's younger life and especially how his sister Adolfina, the only one who didn't marry, saw their family life and the events that led to Austria's annexation by the Nazis. 

The book is filled with straight affirmations but also a lot of philosophy and remarks about how people have seen their surroundings and how his brother's views on the world have influenced others as well.

This is a complicated book to define or to explain.

I thought it would be more centered on the fictional content, which I assumed would have been what the author imagined could have been Adolfina's thoughts and steps through life until the most known detail: how she and her sisters died in a concentration camp but their brother had left Austria with visas that had not included his sisters because he thought things wouldn't be so dire.

The reality is that although we have a lot of what could have happened to her (I imagine the author investigated and used true documents to base his story in) but also a lot of ideas regarding subjects not always directly connected to Adolfina.

Yes, this is a bout Freud's sister so we also have a lot of his character but... I don't know, I thought this would be focused on Adolfina's experience of going to a concentration camp (the first chapter was) but it turned out to be the story of her life and how recurrent it was to see the depiction on how people are depressed and sad and not just because of war or its consequences.

In terms of emotional content, I think the author has achieved his goal. There are many situations that made me think and made me imagine how much suffering those people went through, because of war and also because of how it affected their families.

There are also sections dedicated to the narrator's experience in a psychiatric clinic, where she enrolls freely and where the has contact with other patients. This served to show how vulnerable many people often are, especially those who suffer maladies or have mental issues that weren't easily diagnosed back them nor treated accordingly.

In a way, this was almost a study on people's behavior, seen through the eyes of Adolfina. She talks about her family, the closest friends and people they would interact with, and this would be used at each stage of her life equally. I just think the often analytical issues, the constant depressing narrative about people who suffered from depression or others issues was just too negative altogether. 

I don't mean to say the story should be about happy things instead but the writing style, which has some repetitions (I assume on purpose but the effect felt annoying) and so many descriptions and explanations about philosophy, psychology and other more clinical situations made it impersonal at times.

Thinking on Adolfina, she is an intriguing character but I wasn't always that much interested in her actions. Her thoughts were interesting but she did face many repetitive situations through her youth and adult years and that made for a little boring read at times too.

I still liked it when it comes to how emotions were portrayed, in how certain situations were described and how they impacted what came after. In general, things were captivating enough to make me easily read and turn the pages. I just think it could have felt way more personal than what it was.

Grade: 7/10