- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Doubleday; paperback / softback edition (6 July 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0385601557
- ISBN-13: 978-0385601559
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,733,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
It is August 1910, and Vienna is still the beautiful gas-lit jewel of a grand, if fading, empire. One night in the Volksgarten, a young woman is found strangled and an unnamed police officer takes the case. The victim is the highly strung daughter of a bourgeois family, and the search for her murderer soon becomes serious. Yet painstaking forensics yield little except one curious clue: Dora ate a fresh fig--unavailable in Vienna in August--only moments before she died. The inspector shares the details with his Hungarian wife, who is well versed in Gypsy lore, not to mention the odder features of the human psyche, and she immediately begins her own private inquiry:
When Erszébet smelled the disinfectant, the scent of the girl on his hands, she suddenly wished to possess her. To understand the puzzle of how her life led to her death. To know her. When she first heard the girl had died in the park, there was something--a needle prick of menace, a cruel loneliness--that was familiar. It felt true as a memory. This recognition startled her.
Dora's life may have been outwardly proper, but it turns out to have been charged with sexuality: her best friend, Frau Zellenga, was her family's neighbour and her father's mistress. Even as the two families pretend the situation is normal and that Dora must have been killed by a stranger, the inspector and Erszébet both suspect that the girl must have known her killer. Soon, even the rational inspector turns to the supernatural world for clues.
The term atmospheric is perhaps too often applied to historical mysteries, but Jody Shields's first novel merges science and mysticism, the historical details of Viennese daily life and its repressed eroticism so gorgeously that it transcends that description. --Barrie Trinkle
Product Description
Vienna, 1910. On a warm August night the body of a young girl is discovered in the city's celebrated Volksgarten. She has been strangled. The Chief Inspector begins his investigation, and his exotic wife also goes on a search of her own for the murderer.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"The Fig Eater" opens with the discovery of the body of a young girl in a Viennese park. She is Dora (familiar to students of Freud as the subject of perhaps his most famous case study). An Inspector of police begins his investigation into her murder, using logic, forensics and all the tools of his long experience; meanwhile his wife Erzebet, an enigmatic Hungarian steeped in gypsy folklore, becomes obsessed with the girl and begins an investigation of her own, aided by a young English governess called, oddly, Wally. With such promising material (psychoanalysis, gypsy superstition, sexual tension, snow, repression, secrets, a murder), this book was an irresistible prospect. However, it ultimately proved to be less meaty than I'd hoped. Someone once said that they couldn't bear novels in which the author kept showing off how much research they'd done. It's a temptation that Jody Shields has not been able to resist. Set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, "The Fig Eater" is top heavy with detail: every cake in the cafes is precisely named, the trim of every cloak, the name of each paint colour into which Erzebet dips her brush: all elaborately and carefully set out. Shields must have spent hours walking the paths of the Stadtpark, noting the fall of the light at different seasons, at different times of day. All this detail certainly builds an evocative, sinister atmosphere, thick with superstition and striking images. Shields has a background in screenwriting, and it shows: time and again, scenes are set up: we're presented with a powerful tableau, a cinematic shot: a young girl in a darkened garden, confronted by a man with a silver nose; a woman moving through a room hung with white sheets; a silent museum filled with naked wax figures. The trouble is that all these scenes, striking as they are, don't really lead us anywhere. "The Fig Eater" is presented in the form of a murder mystery, yet the threads of the mystery are never satisfactorily tied together. The chief pleasure of the mystery story lies in its solution. Shields leads us through not one, but two complicated investigations of Dora's murder, but neither delivers that gratifying series of clicks when all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. In the end, I was left tantalized, even titillated, but ultimately unfulfilled.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is an intriguing novel about the murder of Dora, a young eighteen year old woman found dead in a park. The contents of her stomach at the time of death contained a half digested fig. She was also a patient of Dr. Freud. You see, her murder happened in Vienna, Austria in 1910.
The case is assigned to a nameless inspector, who is trying to investigate this homicide according to certain principles set forth in a book of criminalistics written at the turn of the century. It is an intellectual and cerebral approach to a criminal investigation. It is also an interesting look at a turn of the century police procedural.
Meanwhile, Dora's murder has captured the imagination of the inspector's independent, Hungarian born wife, Erzebet, who, unbeknownst to her husband, has begun her own parallel investigation based upon intuition and her own cultural proclivities. She is joined in her endeavor by her friend, a governess who is at loose ends while her employer is away.
During the investigation, this elegantly written novel paints an atmospheric, three dimensional portrait of turn of the century Vienna, lush with details about everyday life. It is this part of the book that is the strongest and the most interesting, as it is highly evocative of a place and time gone by. The mystery itself, however, ends up not being much of a mystery, after all. In the final analysis, the promise of this highly ambitious novel remains unfulfilled, as the author simply bit off more than she could chew. The novel whets the appetite but, ultimately, fails to sate it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Initially tempting, this book lacks depth and good characterisation. The people don't take shape and their relationships are thin. It looks as though the author found a couple of books on Hungarian cooking and detection and used them much too generously in her rather disappointing plot.
There is obviously heavy editing, but not enough. There are gaps in the plot, such as how Wally got away from the gypsy. The ending is a let-down, rather seedy.
And in turn of the century Vienna, where are Freud and Mahler and all the other creative Jews? They are incredibly absent in this supposedly realistic picture. Strange. The buzz of Vienna at that time is not in this book.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Waste of time
Having struggled to complete the reading of this book - due to its long winded and pointless descriptions of everyday Vienna - I was totally dissappointed with the ending to the... Read more
Published on 17 Dec 2003 by "toywaytornado"
Hang on a minute....
... I found it so absorbing and atmospheric - the depth of the characters and the way that they evolve is mesmerising. Read more
Published on 6 Oct 2002 by "ejminx"
The Fig Eater
Mixed feelings and somewhat let down after such good reviews
Set in Vienna in the early 20th century the novel offered much to readers of murder mystery. Read more
Published on 18 Aug 2002 by avidreader
A moody, dramatic tale of science and magic
As a british/hungarian who loves Vienna this novel was a real treat for me. Shields has certainly done her research. Read more
Published on 18 Oct 2001 by Jacqueline Sinclair
Not up to its billing
It is a puzzle, to me, that this book got favorable reviews. The reader's reports (here and elsewhere) give you the real story, which is that The Fig Eater is a... Read more
Published on 18 Jun 2001
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