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    Freud's Sister: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Freud's Sister: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Freud's Sister: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    Freud's Sister: A Novel

    Written by Goce Smilevski

    Narrated by Barbara Rosenblat

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The award-winning international sensation that poses the question: Was Sigmund Freud responsible for the death of his sister in a Nazi concentration camp?

    The boy in her memories who strokes her with the apple, who whispers to her the fairy tale, who gives her the knife, is her brother Sigmund.

    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 not 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 never married. A witness to her brother's genius and to the cultural and artistic splendor of Vienna in the early twentieth century, she aspired to a life few women of her time could attain.

    From Adolfina's 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 with astonishing insight and deep feeling the life of a woman lost to the shadows of history.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 28, 2012
    ISBN9781101579688
    Unavailable
    Freud's Sister: A Novel
    Author

    Goce Smilevski

    Goce Smilevski was born in 1975 in Skopje, Macedonia. He was educated at Charles University in Prague, Central European University in Budapest, and Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, where he works at the Institute for Literature. He has won numerous prizes for his writing, in Macedonia and abroad; Freud’s Sister won the European Union Prize for Literature and is being published in more than twenty-five languages. Reviewing his work in  The Forward, Joshua Cohen wrote, “A young heir to Günter Grass and José Saramago, Smilevski might be the newest of a rare thing–a living European novelist with a message for the future of his continent.”

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    Reviews for Freud's Sister

    3/5

    34 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      beautiful translation
    • 5/5
      this is a powerful well written novel. very dark and sad. full of despair, no wonder I liked it so much. based on actually events. it is the story, told by her, of Freud's youngest sister. she died in a death camp because freud did not put her name on the list of family members that could leave vienna with him. it explores the life that so many women led in that era, vienna in the early part of the 20th century. while in many ways there was a great awaking in art and science women were treated as less then human. as objects
    • 3/5
      Sigmund Freud had several sisters; Adolfina was the one he called ‘the sweetest and best of my sisters’. She never married, was treated poorly at home, spent years in a psychiatric hospital, and ended her life in a Nazi concentration camp. This book is historical fiction, not biography- it would be difficult to write a biography of Adolfina as there is not much known about her. But it’s more than a fictional biography; it’s also a treatise on the lack of meaning of life and how horrible most lives are. Everyone seems to have mental health problems- Adolfina’s mother is emotionally abusive, her lover suffers from extreme depression, her best friend Klara Klimt (sister of artist Gustav) spends years in the asylum rooming with Adolfina, Sigmund, while brilliant, is fixated on the Oedipus syndrome and penis envy. A fair part of the novel takes place in the asylum, describing the patients there. All of the people except Sigmund Freud have hard, hard lives. The story is brutal and moving, albeit written in lovely prose (no mean feat when the story was written in Macedonian and translated to English). The question that this story hangs on is this: When Sigmund Freud got visas to leave Vienna for the safety of England, why did he take, along with his wife and children, his wife’s family, his doctor and his family, and the house servants, but not his four sisters? Did he not value them? He was dying of cancer; did the pain affect his thinking? Did his wife’s family have something to do with it? The question goes unanswered. I personally thought the story was good, but I did not enjoy it.
    • 3/5
      Sigmund Freud had several sisters; Adolfina was the one he called ‘the sweetest and best of my sisters’. She never married, was treated poorly at home, spent years in a psychiatric hospital, and ended her life in a Nazi concentration camp. This book is historical fiction, not biography- it would be difficult to write a biography of Adolfina as there is not much known about her. But it’s more than a fictional biography; it’s also a treatise on the lack of meaning of life and how horrible most lives are. Everyone seems to have mental health problems- Adolfina’s mother is emotionally abusive, her lover suffers from extreme depression, her best friend Klara Klimt (sister of artist Gustav) spends years in the asylum rooming with Adolfina, Sigmund, while brilliant, is fixated on the Oedipus syndrome and penis envy. A fair part of the novel takes place in the asylum, describing the patients there. All of the people except Sigmund Freud have hard, hard lives. The story is brutal and moving, albeit written in lovely prose (no mean feat when the story was written in Macedonian and translated to English). The question that this story hangs on is this: When Sigmund Freud got visas to leave Vienna for the safety of England, why did he take, along with his wife and children, his wife’s family, his doctor and his family, and the house servants, but not his four sisters? Did he not value them? He was dying of cancer; did the pain affect his thinking? Did his wife’s family have something to do with it? The question goes unanswered. I personally thought the story was good, but I did not enjoy it.
    • 4/5
      This is a very challenging book - I was expecting to read the story of how Freud came to escape to London in 1938 with his wife, wife's sister, his children, his doctor, his maids and his dog - but not any of his four sisters - but this is not exactly how the story pans out. We never find out why Freud left his sisters or whether he made any attempts to rescue them before his own death in London. Very little appears to be known about Freud's sisters (except that they did die in Nazi concentration camps) but this book weaves a story form the few facts known about Adolfina Freud. The book takes the little that is known and weaves a story of a life - a life of sadness and loneliness, of unfulfilled dreams, of love unreturned. And it is not just Adolfina who lives this life - so many of the people she meets throughout the course of the book live these lives - Adolfina spends many years in a pyschiatric clinic run by Goethe's grandson, she shares a room with Klimt's sister and in the concentration camp she meets Kafka's sister. So this is a story also of those who orbit greatness and the effects it has on them. I read this book because it is set in Vienna and also because it was the winner of the European Union Prize for Literature - originally written in Macedonian. I think the translator has done an excellent job but I do wish I could read the original - the language is so beautiful and the use of repetition in phrases is very powerful - I would very much like to see how the original version handled this.
    • 2/5
      Adolfina, Freud's sister, is one that many consider a spinster, and spends the majority of her life locked in an asylum. When Freud has the chance to save his family from the impending Holocaust, he chooses not to. This rather large "elephant in the room" is left unanswered by this historical fiction novel, and thus, remains unsatisfactory.
    • 1/5
      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?