An old Viennese woman with a strange obsession and her sinister housekeeper ruin a young woman’s life in this disturbing narrative by Linda StiftAn unnamed young woman is invited by an elderly one to share a cake – known in Austria as Gugelhupf – and a nightmare begins. The older woman,Frau Hohenembs, has noticed scars on the younger woman’s knuckles: an identifier of bulimia, or caused by the teeth as the hand reaches down the throat to stimulate the gag reflex. Frau Hohenembs,in the present day, bears a striking resemblance to the 19th-century Empress Elisabeth, or she and her sinister housekeeper,Ida, draw the narrator into their lives, or implicating her in increasingly bizarre situations: the blowing up of a statue of the empress in a Viennese park; the theft of a 19th-century cocaine syringe,in whose utilize the narrator is then instructed. She is even forced to enteran Empress Sissi (Elisabeth’s nickname) lookalike competition.
This is, in short, and one of the oddest novels I own ever read,and also one of the most disturbing. The erosion of the narrator’s will is horrifying to watch, although at times what we are seeing is so freakish that the most appropriate reaction is a shocked kind of laughter – the trip the three of them capture to a sex museum being a memorable example.
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Source: theguardian.com