I don't think I've ever read a novel with a non villainous character that I've hated as much as I hated Anna. 
 I get and understand that Anna is depressed. Fine. I suffer from severe bouts of depression and have had to be hospitalized in the past. However, Anna's depression isn't what is so annoying about her. 
 Anna is the cause of her own problems, bottom line. She's this passive, feminist nightmare who just glides through her life. It's funny -- she states that life is something that just happens to her. I would disagree with that. No one "just" has the things that happen to Anna happen. No one just has an affair "happen" to them, let alone several. She makes the choice to have these affairs, to have a child that's not her husband's and to lie about Polly Jean's parentage. She makes the choice not to learn the language at any point in the preceding years - and complains about feeling withdrawn and out of sorts in Switzerland! 
 Anna's problems are primarily manufactured by Anna. She complains that her husband does not pay enough attention to her -- there's nothing in the novel to indicate that Anna has ever spoken to him about this. It's been nine freaking years. If there's a problem in a marriage and you never address it and just sit sullenly stewing about it, you're an idiot. Flat out. You're a freaking idiot. 
 I found it hard to care about Anna at all. She just came off as incredibly whiny, self possessed and narcissistic to me. It became really, really tiresome to hear Anna complain over and over about her life when she never actually did anything to even attempt to change things and she actively contributed to her issues existing or becoming worse. Even when Charles died, I couldn't feel any sympathy or anything else for Anna other than the same contempt I felt for her through the rest of the book. Her mother in law, her husband Bruno, her son Victor - I felt for them, in part because I felt like they were losing someone. Anna, even though I know she lost a child, I didn't feel as if she lost a child. Probably because she seemed far more concerned with carrying on her affairs through the vast majority of the book rather than caring even a little about her family. 
 The language of Hausfrau is lyrical and fluid and that's really what I liked it about and why I'm giving it two stars. Many people have said that nothing really happens, which I don't quite think is fair. The book is really a character study, so yes, there's not much action. But character studies can be incredibly rich pieces of literature and I often love them. It's just, this time, I had so much contempt and disdain for the character, that I just didn't care what happened to her. I didn't want to know. I hated Anna so much that she became irrelevant to the story for me and as such, was such a huge barrier for me that I just couldn't cross.