The crockery was hiding in the cabinets out of sheer terror that it might get used.īut Hannes is so charming. The kitchen was small and surgically clean, as in a catalogue. From his grandfather’s sofa you had a magnificent view of a monstrous ironing board, which was stationed in the middle of the room and illuminated by an energy-saving bulb in an ugly shade of milky-coffee-coloured glass. When Judith visits his apartment for the first time she notes how:Įach object, including some dark antique pieces worth a considerable amount of money, had its own place and gave the impression it could not be moved. They start to date and things seems okay initially, but even so there are indications that something really isn’t right with the man. And whenever he sees her, he acts so bowled over, so devastated by love, that she can’t help but be flattered. There’s no particular sexual charge to the relationship for her, but Hannes is just so persistent.

Hannes is older than Judith and an architect. But a chance encounter in a supermarket with a man who stands on her foot precipitates her into an intense relationship.

She doesn’t have the best relationship to her family, but has a great group of friends, isn’t looking for her life to change, and seems to all intents and purposes, completely settled. Judith is a single 30-something, running her own lighting shop in Vienna with her sweet but shallow assistant, Bianca. It’s an easy read, witty in places, quite clever in its resolution, and if you are happy to simply follow where a book takes you, without needing your own motivations to belong to the characters, then I think it’s an edgy pleasure.

But in my mind, if you shot this in black and white and put it on a cinema screen, it would look perfectly at home. I found it to be an intriguing, almost old-fashioned noir number that probably disconcerts because the main female character is forced by events into a passive imperiled relationship, something a lot of women readers might react negatively to. Well this is a curious book, and one that’s been divisive in the online reviews, with a fair few readers not getting it at all, or not liking what they get.

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