Marlen Haushofer

A haunting feminist sci-fi masterpiece and international bestseller that is “as absorbing as Robinson Crusoe” (Doris Lessing) While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness. Allegorical yet deeply personal and absorbing, The Wall is at once a critique of modern civilization, a nuanced and loving portrait of a relationship between a woman and her animals, a thrilling survival story, a Cold War-era dystopian adventure, and a truly singular feminist classic.

The Wall

Shelby Doherty

Suddenly it seemed quite impossible that I would survive that bright May day. At the same time I knew I had to survive it, and that I had no means of escape. I had to stay quite calm and simply get through it. It wasn't the first day in my life that I had to survive like this.

Memories, mourning and fear will remain, and hard work, as long as I live.

From the Afterword, written by Claire-Louise Bennett

Men can live alone in the woods for years on end without anyone thinking too much about it. If you are a woman living alone, on the other hand. there must be something wrong with you; you are unappealing, or barren, or disturbed, or conniving, or frigid, or selfish, or degenerate, or bereft, or spent, or difficult, or abandoned, or deviant, or bonkers - someone to be wary of in any case, because it's quite unnatural, it's strange isn't it, to live on your own if you're a woman. What on earth do you do all day? Nothing good, that's for sure, since you're not involved with taking care of anyone. What kind of woman spends her days not looking after someone else? If you are a woman and you want to avoid causing offence there needs to be a legibility to your actions. You cannot be an unquantifiable presence on the periphery. The only way a woman can experience solitude, without judgement and recrimination scuffing up against her peace, is if the rest of the world has come to a complete standstill and there is no one around to see her. That's how it must have seemed to Marlen Haushofer, who, in writing The Wall, devised the most extraordinary scenario in order to imagine herself into a place where she could live alone and be free.

Now I'm quite calm. I can see a little further ahead. I can see that this isn't the end. Everything goes on.

If there should come a time when I am without fire, without ammunition, I shall deal with it and find a way. But now I have other things to do.

I knew I couldn't go on like this, but I've never been capable of simply nipping an anxiety in the bud. I always had to wait until it was ripe and mature and fell from me.

Sometimes I try to treat myself like a robot: do this and go there and don't forget to do that. But it works only for a short time. I'm a bad robot; I'm still a human being who thinks and feels, and I shall not be able to shake either habit.

Back then, walking back into my valley, it still hadn't quite dawned on me that my former life had come to a sudden end; I knew it, that is, but only in my head, so I didn't believe it. It's only when knowledge about something slowly spread to the whole body that you truly know it.

On the long way back I thought about my former life and found it unsatisfactory in all respects. I had achieved little that I had wanted, and everything I had achieved I had ceased to want

The Wall

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