Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful bore
Review: I adore literary historical fiction, but gave up on The Fig Eater halfway through--something I almost never do--because of the dragging pace (excruciatingly slow even for literary fiction), half-realized and uninvolving characters, and the frequently self-indulgent artiness of the author's prose. The use of the self-conscious present tense (a choice that, in my opinion, should be used only for good reason, and sparingly, to set off particular sections of a novel) for the entire narrative didn't help matters. Nevertheless, it's obviously well-researched and 1910 Vienna is described in lush detail. It's too bad the plot and characters don't live up to the evocative atmosphere the author created.
Rating: 
Summary: 2/3's literary fiction, 1/3 mystery
Review: As I read the other reviews of The Fig Eater, I realized that the key to this book lies in the reader's expectations. Those who expected a detailed yet page turning book such as "The Alienist" were very disappointed. Just because they are set in around the turn of the century, does not mean they are similar. Those who approach this book as a literary fiction with mystery flavoring (think Perez-Reverte or Pairs) are more likely to find the book to be what they expected. If nothing else, the fact that it's a trade paperback (not a mass-market paperback) and that it has a reading group guide should alert you to the other than a typical mystery character of The Fig Eater.That being said, in many ways I got what I expected out of this book. I selected it because of the setting in 1910 Vienna. Shields does an impressive job of conveying a strong sense of time and place in this novel. It's easy to draw pictures in your head of a city that has one hand in modernizing Europe and the other hand in its Hungarian/Gypsy heritage. The food descriptions are fabulous. Unfortunately, the plot suffers for the abundance of detail. The pacing is slow. Likewise, while the main characters are described in detail, they didn't grow on me. There was something clinical instead of warm about them. Bottom line -- this isn't a pure entertainment mystery but if you are interested in turn of the century central Europe, a book you may want to consider.
Rating:
Summary: Fig pudding
Review: I have mixed feelings about this book. While beautifully and lyrically written with instances that draw you in and keep the pages turning--somehow it never pays off. All the clues and key pieces of the "investigation" by both the Inspector and Erzebet are never made sense of--the book draws to a close without putting the pieces together and leaving a tremedous amount of questions unanswered. Perhaps this was the writers intention, however they are too many pieces NOT in place that don't provide for a pay-oof. Mixed feelings--it could so easily have been a 5.
Rating:
Summary: Had the making of a winner but some flars made it slow going
Review: In 1910 Vienna, someone murders teenager Dora, a patient of Dr. Freud, in the Volksgarten. The Inspector takes charge of a case that seems void of clues. The medical examiner discovers one puzzling item that the Inspector decides might be worth tracing. Just before dying, the victim ate a fresh fig. What is remarkable is that this is not the season for fresh figs. The Inspector tells his Hungarian wife Erszebet how frustrating the case is. Unlike the Inspector who uses rational thought to solve mysteries, Erszebet turns to her Gypsy background and secretly her spouse's notebooks to begin her own brand of inquiries into where the young woman went before being murdered. THE FIG EATER is a well-written historical mystery that showcases the past much more than the investigative elements. The story line brings to life pre-World War I Vienna at a time when science and superstition still battle for supremacy. The who-done-it is cleverly designed, but mystery readers need to know that the police procedural and amateur sleuthing subplots slowly develop as it takes a back seat to the fabulous look at 1910 Vienna. In turn the early chapters describing the atmosphere and the time serving as background to the murder is near perfect writing, but when the case finally takes center stage the story line remains slow paced. Historical readers will relish Jody Shields methodical interesting novel while mystery fans will like the tale but ask for faster pacing. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: standing in the room and not being noticed
Review: this book takes you by the hand and allows you to be a literary voyeur. the descriptions are warm sensual and colorful. i was there. a great escape. a wonderful combination of science art and spirituality. it left me thinking. and rereading the last chapter more than once.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I bought this book because it was being compared to "The Alienist" by Caleb Carr. While it is true that both books are historical mysteries, that is about all they have in common. I found this book to be exceedingly boring. In fact, the only reason that I finished reading it was because I wanted to know who the murderer was. However, I should have given up long before that moment. The end of the book where the identity of the murderer is finally revealed makes little sense. It is almost as if the author completely disregards all of the clues/evidence to pull the murderer out of the hat. Some might find the lengthy descriptions of character and locale to be one of the strengths of this book. I merely found them to be long-winded, slow, and boring. Even the main charaters (who are meant to be vivid and engaging) failed to appeal to me. You never really care about these people and their motives for behaving the way they do. To me the most appealing character was the nameless inspector, but the fact that he wasn't even blessed with a name seems significant in retrospect. He is an incomplete man, just as this was an incomplete book.
Rating:
Summary: A Tale of Vienna
Review: I liked this book, but at the same time it exasperated me. It tells the story of Dora, a young woman who is found murdered in a public park in Vienna. The nameless Inspector investigating Dora's murder is a fledgling criminalist, who practices forensic science in solving cases. He determines that Dora had eaten a fresh fig immediately prior to her death. Erzebet, the Inspector's wife, is a believer in Gypsy lore. She becomes obsessed with Dora's murder and starts a clandestine parallel investigation with the help of her friend, Wally. Wally is an English governess at loose ends because the family she serves is on vacation. Erzebet and Wally are sure that the figs found in Dora's stomach are a vital clue since no fresh figs are available in Vienna in winter. This novel is successful in bringing Vienna to life. One can almost see the snowy landscape and the whirling skaters on the icy rivers, feel the biting cold, and taste the rich desserts and hot chocolate drinks. The author certainly cannot be faulted on atmosphere. She takes us to a strange, men only, museum where men can view anatomically correct figures of women. Along the way we learn a lot about botany, Gypsy superstition, photography and food. However, the puzzle of the figs is never satisfactorily explained. The homoerotic feelings of Wally toward Erzebet are clearly present, but are never addressed, either. I finished the book feeling very unsatisfied. This novel is a fictionalization of the story of one of Freud's patients.
Rating:
Summary: Exasperating Characters Need Editor
Review: This mystery is populated with a large cast of odd and exasperating characters, including the police inspector who investigates the crime, the inspector's wife who becomes obsessed with the crime, the parents and governess of the victim, and friends of the family. One ends up being sad for the murder victim, not because she is murdered, but because no one in her life was who they seemed to be. The historical details and characters were just interesting enough to make the short, choppy sentences tolerable. But, when the denouement takes place and the murderer revealed, I felt swindled. After two hundred pages of ragged clues, including a severed thumb removed from the corpse after it was buried and the failed reconstruction of the deceased's father's appointment book, the author pulls the murderer out of thin air in the last chapter. A good editor could have created a decent book from the author's messy manuscript. The plot has merit, but the author does not have the skill to create three-dimensional characters with consistent traits and motivations or even a victim that the reader wants to see vindicated. I was left wondering why I kept reading after my usual litmus test of 60 pages.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely disappointing
Review: This book is so disappointing because it had the potential to be quite good. It started out well, with a wonderful location and time period, unusual characters, engrossing atmosphere, and a shocking crime. Unfortunately, it all came apart very quickly. The Inspector and his wife evolved from unusual to overwrought, needy, secretive and selfish. The engrossing atmosphere went sour as the author padded the book with several contrived and irrelevant scenes. And the crime itself was solved in a ridiculous way that completely ignored the main clues of fig, excrement, and severed thumb. And finally, if there was any link between this story and Freud's Dora, I completely failed to see it.
Rating: 
Summary: A Twist Of Freud's History Encased In Mystery
Review: The premise of Jody Shields' hypnotic first novel, "The Fig Eater," is based on a questioning premise. What if Freud's groundbreaking case study "Dora" did not crack the case of female hysteria being caused solely by sexual repression? What if not psychoanalysis but another of our modern secular religions, criminology, was brought to bear on the mystery of Dora? Interesting fodder and Shield's pulls off the switch with impressive élan. While "The Fig Eater" is satisfying as a nuts-and-bolts story of detective work in early 20th century Vienna, the novel also leaves us with the haunting sense that we can approach the truth only by opening our minds to more than one way of knowing. As the novel opens, Dora has been murdered. In sinuous, disciplined prose, Shields relates the painstaking efforts of one Inspector (whose name we never learn) to piece together the circumstances of the girl's death. He follows the exacting principles outlined in the 1901 "Enzyclopädie der Kriminalistik," the first psychological approach to crime. The novel includes many excerpts from this remarkable work, which is as much a philosophical tract -- a guide to living a fully conscious life -- as it is a handbook on criminology. The Inspector's Hungarian wife, Erszébet, finds herself moved, for reasons she doesn't fully understand, by the pathos of Dora's murder. She decides to investigate on her own, with the help of a game young English nanny she has befriended. Erszébet has her own methodology, derived from the Gypsy folklore she grew up with: She focuses on dreams, spells, the weather, animals -- in short, everything her husband's rationalist training overlooks. The novel abounds with sensual pleasures -- especially the exquisite descriptions of rich Viennese food -- made all the more appealing by the precise, unhurried way Shields illustrates them; she is a visual artist, too, and her eye for the painterly is evident. While the author takes liberties with the historical record, having the girl murdered at 20 feels true to the disturbed-family scenario that led the father of the real-life Dora -- a woman named Ida Bauer, who actually lived to be 63 -- to send her to the great psychoanalyst for treatment. Shields makes the murder seem historically plausible. And that's just the first of the means by which, in "The Fig Eater," she expands our ways of seeing. A substantial literary view of murder, mayhem, and mind-expansion.
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