The Wall
by Marlen Haushofer, translated from the German
by Shaun Whiteside, and with an afterword by Claire-Louise Bennett. New Directions, 239 pp., $16.95 (paper)
“Today, the fifth of November, I shall begin my report. I shall set everything down as precisely as I can…. I don’t expect these notebooks will ever be found. At the moment I don’t even know whether I hope they will be. Perhaps I will know, once I’ve finished.” Already, before we’ve finished the first page of the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer’s novel The Wall, we see that someone wants to write down what happened. There are obstacles in their way: memory is imperfect, precision impossible. What exactly does this person want to write about? Why write without being sure that the writing will be read?
These concerns are quickly overshadowed by more immediate drama. The narrator, an Austrian widow with two grown children, writes that she accepted an invitation to spend three days with her cousin and her cousin’s husband at their hunting lodge. On her first night there, she stays in while her hosts walk to the local village for a drink. She goes to sleep before they return, and when she wakes in the morning they’re still gone. Soon enough she discovers why: an invisible wall has sprung up, separating the hunting lodge and its land from the village—and, it seems possible, from the rest of the world. She discovers the wall by bumping her head against it:
Baffled, I stretched out my hand and touched something smooth and cool: a smooth, cool resistance where there could be nothing but air. I tentatively tried again, and once more my hand rested on something like a window-pane. Then I heard a loud knocking sound and glanced around before realizing it was my own heartbeat thundering in my ears. My heart had been frightened before I knew anything about it.
The people and animals that can be seen on the other side of this transparent wall are all dead, frozen eerily in
