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A Novel
by Jed Rubenfeld
Book Reviewed by:In this ingenious, suspenseful historical thriller, Sigmund Freud is drawn into the mind of a sadistic killer who is savagely attacking Manhattan’s wealthiest heiresses
Inspired by Sigmund Freud’s only visit to America, The Interpretation of Murder is an intricate tale of murder and the mind’s most dangerous mysteries. It unfurls on a sweltering August evening in 1909 as Freud disembarks from the steamship George Washington, accompanied by Carl Jung, his rival and protégé. Across town, in an opulent apartment high above the city, a stunning young woman is found dangling from a chandelier—whipped, mutilated, and strangled. The next day, a second beauty—a rebellious heiress who scorns both high society and her less adventurous parents—barely escapes the killer. Yet Nora Acton, suffering from hysteria, can recall nothing of her attack. Asked to help her, Dr. Stratham Younger, America’s most committed Freudian analyst, calls in his idol, the Master himself, to guide him through the challenges of analyzing this high-spirited young woman whose family past has been as complicated as his own.
The Interpretation of Murder leads readers from the salons of Gramercy Park, through secret passages, to Chinatown—even far below the currents of the East River where laborers are building the Manhattan Bridge. As Freud fends off a mysterious conspiracy to destroy him, Younger is drawn into an equally thrilling adventure that takes him deep into the subterfuges of the human mind.
Richly satisfying, elegantly crafted, The Interpretation of Murder marks the debut of a brilliant, spectacularly entertaining new storyteller.
In 2007 The Interpretation of Murder won the prestigious Best Read of the Year award from Richard and Judy's Bookclub in the UK (comparable to Oprah Winfrey in the USA).
Chapter One
There is no mystery to happiness.
Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago,
some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of
love put out by scorn—or worse, indifference—cleaves to them, or
they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of
yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn’t look
ahead. He lives in the present.
But there’s the rub. The present can never deliver one thing:
meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To
find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only
live for the moment. But if he wants meaning—the meaning of his
dreams, his secrets, his life—a man must reinhabit his past,
however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus
nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting
only that we choose between them.
...
The Dante Club meets the sexual manipulations of Les Liaisons dangereuses in this intelligent historical, first novel...continued
Full Review
(283 words)
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club
...a richly motivated thriller that will make you reconsider the mysteries of Freud and Hamlet. Here is a novel that you'll only want to put down in order to think more about the book.The Interpretation of Murder is
inspired by the real-life mystery
surrounding Freud's one and only
visit to America in 1909 when he came to
deliver lectures at Clark University.
The trip appeared to be a tremendous
success and Freud was portrayed
glowingly in newspapers. However,
he returned to Europe referring to
Americans as "savages" and "primitives"
and blaming America for his breakdown in
health, even though he had been sick
well before visiting the USA.
Although many of Freud's theories have
been rejected, his memory, and some of
his methods, ...
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