Author(s): Marlen Haushofer; Shaun Whiteside (Translator)

Novel | Translated fiction | Austria | Read our reviews! | New Directions

'The air trembled, gold and green and clear, at the edges of the forest'
A woman goes to the Austrian mountains to spend a few days in a hunting lodge with her cousin and his wife. When the couple fail to return from a walk, the woman tries to go into the village to look for them. Instead she comes across a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped behind the wall, a result of a too successful military experiment, she begins the arduous work of not only survival but self-renewal. The Wall is at once a simple document of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one's name, and simultaneously a disturbing meditation on our place in the natural world.

"An extraordinarily interesting writer, always underappreciated." -- Elfriede Jelinek
"The Wall is a wonderful novel. It is not often that you can say only a woman could have written this book, but women in particular will understand the heroine's loving devotion to the details of making and keeping life, every day felt as a victory against everything that would like to undermine and destroy." -- Doris Lessing
"The Wall is a novel that contrives to be, by turns, utopian and dystopian, an idyll and a nightmare. In her isolation behind the wall, together with her animals, the woman discovers a new life, in comparison with which her existence before she came to the mountains seems trivial and pointless. The natural world which it describes with such rapt attention is cupped in the larger receptacle of a vivid and sinister dream, a dream we seem to have had many times before and which on each retelling leads to the same scene of horror at its climax." -- Nicholas Spice - London Review of Books
"Brilliant in its sustainment of dread, in its peeling away of old layers of reality to expose a raw way of seeing and feeling. Doris Lessing once remarked that only a woman could have written this novel, and it's true: I know of no closer study in claustrophobia and liberation, and of an independence whose severity is at once ecstatic and doomed. I've read The Wall three times already and am nowhere near finished." -- Nicole Krauss
"It is about our reasons for living, self-sufficiency, solitude, men, women, war, and love, and the problem of other minds. And the animals in this book-oh! I don't understand why this book is not considered one of the most important books of the twentieth century. I have been anxiously pushing it on everyone I know, and now I push it on you." -- Sheila Heti - The Paris Review
"What is the wall? An allusion to the Cold War? An allegory for the Berlin Wall? Yes. But it also serves as a metaphorical stand-in for so many restrictions. It creates a situation that allows the main character and the reader to examine our ontology and what we think makes us real. " -- Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"Ceasing to be a human being can mean something literal (death) or something harder to define (a loss of humanity).The Wall is interested in both....Yet the matter of life and death, foregrounded in all its practical details, looms over the novel as more than just a test of self-reliance. The central question of the story is not how to sustain existence but how to understand identity-what it's really made of, and whether it was made to endure. " -- Clare Sestanovich - The Baffler
"The Wall is speculative fiction of a distinctly existential sort, where the subject being speculated on is not what happened to the world, but what happens to reality when society is stripped away...Nothing resolves, yet the book is constantly resonating." -- Martin Riker - The Wall Street Journal
"Nothing short of miraculous." -- The Christian Science Monitor
"Marlen Haushofer's eerie masterpiece of a woman who gets trapped inside an invisible bubble in the Alps is a predecessor to books like Jeff VanderMeer's The Southern Reach Trilogy....and it is just as stunning." -- Shane Anderson - Spike Art Magazine

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
A woman accompanies her cousin and her cousin’s husband to their hunting lodge in Upper Austria and, when they don’t return from a walk to the village that evening, she discovers that she is encapsulated within an impenetrable transparent wall, outside which all humans and animals have been petrified (such as the old man frozen in the act of washing his face under a tap at a visible farmhouse). Finding herself the only remaining human on earth, the narrator devotes herself to planting potatoes and beans, milking and tending the cow trapped with her inside the wall, tending the bullock the cow gives birth to, building relationships with the dog and a cat and its kittens, laying in supplies of firewood and hay for the winter, and killing the occasional deer or trout for food. Through the minutiae of her mundane yearly work, including her taking the cattle to the alpine pasture for the summer, and in her responses to the impersonal forces of place and climate, the narrator, in a ‘neutral’ prose account that she does not expect anyone to read but writes merely to keep sane, conveys the shifts in her thinking as she makes a new life for herself and comes to terms with her isolation, the freedom she feels from identity, name, face, society and meaning, the relief at no longer feeling the gulf that separated her from other people, the responsibility she feels towards the animals she cares for and that she believes depend upon her for their survival (to the extent that she does not explore the possibility of passing under the wall where the stream passes under), the ecstatic personless oneness with her world she feels the first summer in the alpine meadow, the terrifying emptiness waiting always at the edges of her awareness, and the passing of time carrying her and all she cares about towards extinction. From early in the book the narrator tells us that an awful thing has happened, and this casts its shadow over even the most rapt of her descriptions of the natural world. In the final pages, in no more than a brief paragraph, the narrator describes the sudden appearance of a man who kills first the bullock and then the dog with an axe before she shoots him and throws his body over the escarpment from the alpine meadow. The pervasive feeling of the book is one of dread, within which all our love, our caring and our work can provide a small bubble in which it is just possible to survive as we move from one day to the next.
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Author Biography: Marlen Haushofer (1920-1970) was an Austrian author of short stories, novels, radio plays, and children's books. Her work has had a strong influence on many German-language writers, such as the Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek, who dedicated one of her plays to her. The Wall was adapted into the 2012 film, directed by Julian Poelsler and starring Martina Gedeck. Shaun Whiteside's translations from the German include classics by Freud, Musil, and Nietzsche. Claire Louise-Bennett is the author of Pond and Checkout 19.