The Wall

I don't know why, but it seems I am drawn to books about singular women that have a heightened contact with nature. I've just read The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip, about a female wizard that grew up in isolation, surrounded by fantastic beasts. I also have fond memories of Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by the Polish Olga Tokarczuk - who won the 2018 Nobel Prize. And don't get me started on The Door by the Hungarian Magda Szabó: while my review of that 1987 book was just short, it is one of my favorite reads ever - if you haven't read it, I urge you to give it a try.

25 years older than The Door and 46 years younger than Drive Your Plow..., The Wall also has a central European origin: Austria. Marlen Haushofer wrote it in German, and Die Wand was translated in English in 1990 by Shaun Whiteside.

The story has a clear speculative premise: the female protagonist gets trapped in the Austrian mountains, as a suddenly appearing giant transparent wall closes her in, encircling the hunting lodge and the surrounding landscape - mountains, woods, an alm, a valley. It seems all animal life outside the wall is dead, and the woman is left to her own devices to survive - together with a cow, a dog, and a cat.

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In a way, it is a miracle Haushofer managed to write an utterly compelling novel, rather than a drab, boring tale about someone planting potatoes again and again. The Wall sucked me in after 30 pages, and if I could, I would have finished it in one sitting.

Two factors contribute to that. The fact that the main character writes only for herself makes for an honest voice, resulting in someone interesting, devoid of moral conventions, a woman that isn't shy to admit she has grown disinterested in her two children.

Haushofer herself led something of a double life, living partly in small town Steyr, where she was the quiet wife of a dentist and nobody knew she was a writer, and partly in Vienna, where "she moved in fashionable literary circles, discussed books and ideas, had affairs". The Wall's protagonist easily convinces as a real character, not some naive concoction, and it seems to me this is the result of Haushofer being in touch with the full spectrum of human existence - and not some idealized moral version of it.

The second factor is that Haushofer - with very few narrative tricks - manages to convey a constant feeling of dread to the reader. Because of the specific nature of these tricks, it is best to limit your exposure to spoilers.

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Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It...