THE WALL by Marlen Haushofer — reviewed by Thomas

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer (translated from German by Shaun Whiteside)

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). Thinking 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. I have not spoilt the book by telling you this. 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.