Book review: The Wall

 Thank you to Robert Koehler for this book review. 

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

In this gripping novel, a nameless woman is visiting friends at a hunting lodge in the Austrian Alps.  Her companions had gone to a nearby village for drinks the night before.  She wakes the next morning to discover they have not returned.  Going to investigate, accompanied by the lodge owner’s dog, she encounters an invisible, impermeable barrier which has cut her off from the rest of the world.  Worse still, it soon becomes evident that no one else is left alive on the other side of this wall.  Published in 1963, The Wall, written by the Austrian author Marlen Haushofer, is usually labeled a work of dystopian fiction.  While it does include the trappings of the genre, its true focus is on a woman coming to terms with the reality of her isolation and the struggles she undergoes daily to survive.

She is not completely alone.  Besides the dog, there is a cow, and she is soon joined by a cat as well.  These animals become an integral part of her life and of the story itself.  The book describes, without chapter breaks – in what she calls a report – the first two years of her life following the appearance of the wall.  She is the mother of two daughters, and while she is haunted by such ghosts from her past, the story is the description of a person shedding her old self, and the emergence of a truer essence.  Written in diary form, it is a meditation on the meaning of life and of humans’ relative insignificance in the natural world.

Published at a time when fears of nuclear war were high, Haushofer’s novel imagines a scenario in which human civilization disappears in the blink of an eye.  It has strong feminist overtones, showing how a woman could survive without the help of men in her life.  It also draws on the story of Robinson Crusoe and on Thoreau’s Walden.  Just as importantly, the characters of the animals in her life are vividly provided in their starring roles.  This book captivated me from the beginning and kept me spellbound to its very end.  

https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-wall-1/