On the Phone

On their 20th anniversary a man invites his wife to dinner to announce that he is leaving her. What is initially a shock for Elfriede Schweiger, however, soon opens new possibilities for her, as she receives her law degree, sets up shop as an attorney, and embarks on simultaneous affairs with two men. As a recently divorced woman, successful in a male-dominated field, yet fearful of aging, she attempts to balance her affairs while still carrying on her career. The ensuing tale depicts how the feminist strivings of a professional female in a provincial Austrian town are thwarted by her self-destructive attachments to the men in her life. On the Phone tells the story of two years in Elfriede's life in the form of a monologue to an anonymous listener over the phone. Aloof, laconic, and full of irony, the narrative causes this period of upheaval to pass like a parade before the reader's view. The author dissects the sensitivities of a woman in the prime of her life, recounting moments of hope, disappointment, love, self-doubt, and megalomania. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, Grill's breathless cascade of sentences wring out every bit of a reader's feelings and compassion. The text is a fiendish dollhouse, and its characters diabolical Barbies and Stepford men. Where today's literature frequently depicts young women collecting the scalps of men, here it is nakedly demonstrated by a mature woman. The absurdity of this fictional confessional narrative of a middle-aged woman will provoke both laughter and tears. This is a story of a modern European woman trying desperately to be modern and European, and managing in the end only to be human. When Evelyn Grill writes about people whose life is at a dead-end, she succeeds through her writing in finding a route to freedom for them.