THE LOFT by Marlen Haushofer — Review by Stella

This psychologically charged novel is a slow burn. Haushofer hypnotises us with the banality of suburbia — housework is a not only a constant occupation for our narrator, but also described in detail — and then awakens us to the trauma, both personal and societal, underpinning a week in the life of a middle-aged woman in 1960s Austria. On Sunday, she argues with Hubert, her husband, about the tree outside their bedroom window, an argument on repeat. He insists it is an acacia — she says an aspen, but maybe an elm. Their middle-age married life is one of habit and company, but also they appear estranged. Into this predictable existence, a disturbance from the past intrudes. A diary: its pages arriving in the mail over the week unsettle the woman. It’s her diary, an account of living away from civilisation, away from her husband, and small child, about twenty years ago. Who is sending them to her we never know, but she has her suspicions. Banished to the woods by her mother-in-law and by her husband to recover from a psychosomatic deafness as a young woman, her words on the page send her into a flurry of tasks — anything to avoid looking straight on. It is only in exhaustion that she has the courage to read, in private, in her loft, and then to take these pages to the cellar to burn. Both facing her past and expunging it. We are left in the dark, feeling our way, our ear attuned to a narrative not altogether reliable. A woman who, in spite of her fondness for Hubert, is trapped in a marriage and the expectations of being wife, mother, daughter. Here there is loneliness, repression and frustration. Her work as an illustrator has been stymied. Hubert admires her drawings and allows her time in the loft, but lacks understanding, relegating her art to a hobby. Like her two years in the woods, the loft symbolises both freedom ( à la ‘a room of one’s own) as well as threat. Here perfection does not come, she is restless and paces the floor. Is it the ‘mad woman in the attic’ or a woman recognising a truth? It’s the 1960s and the war still looms large. An amnesia has crept in, pushing against truth with attempts to relegate the war to acceptable stories, to move on and away from a collective guilt. The desire to forget, to repress the trauma at both a personal and societal level, drives the banality forward. The diary-entry arrivals in the letterbox disturb this illusion. Both threat and release, they insist on being recognised. For a book about trauma and seeking truth, The Loft is surprising wry. Haushofer’s final book is tautly written (well translated), strangely compelling, and a novel that comes into fuller focus when you step a little aside, as if the narrator has trained you to see the world as she does.