Review: 'My Husband,' by Maud Ventura, translated from French by Emma Ramadan

"My Husband" is a short French novel about obsession, mind games and gaslighting masquerading as love. It unfolds over the course of a week, one chapter per day, narrated by an unnamed 40-year-old married woman with two children.

The narrator works as a teacher and translator, but it is her husband's behavior that she spends most of her time trying to interpret. Despite their 13-year marriage, she seems stuck in the early, besotted stage of the relationship — she thinks about him constantly, examines his smallest gestures, covertly tape-records their conversations so she can go over them and over them, parsing out meaning. Does he still love her? Might he leave her? What does it mean when he doesn't touch her when they sit on the couch? Why does he sleep with his back to her?

Each behavior that causes her pain or concern she meets with "punishment" — hides his keys or wallet, doesn't respond when he calls to her from the other room, doesn't pick up when he phones.

Ventura does an excellent job of slowly escalating the narrator's neuroses; by about Wednesday or Thursday the reader starts thinking, "This woman is flat-out crazy." And yet the book, while disturbing, is also very funny. (The husband's jokey comparison of his wife to a clementine — to her deep distress — had me weeping with laughter.)

Once, on vacation, the narrator tells another woman about her feelings — her fears, her desire, her eternal questions. That's obsession, the woman tells her. "You don't even really love him."

Winner of France's First Novel Prize in 2021, "My Husband" will have you thinking hard about the meaning of love.

My Husband

By: Maud Ventura, translated from French by Emma Ramadan.

Publisher: HarperVia, 272 pages, $28.99.