The Wall

A simple, unadorned, matter-of-fact journal about living in the forest with a handful of animals after the end of the world. Told in the first person, it is simply a record of the day-to-day practicalities of a woman who may be the last human on earth: finding a few vegetables to plant, chopping wood, harvesting hay for the cow, mending clothes. There is surprisingly little overt philosophizing, though these thoughts stood out for me:

“I can allow myself to write the truth; all the people for whom I have lied throughout my life are dead.”

“I have never held the shortcomings of the unimaginative against them, sometimes I’ve even envied them. They had an easier and more pleasant life than everyone else.”

“I pity animals, and I show more pity people, because they’re thrown into this life without being consulted. Maybe people are more deserving of pity, because they have just enough intelligence to resist the natural course of things. It has made them wicked and desperate, and not very lovable. All the same, life could have been lived differently. There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one. We should have recognized in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life. For an endless army of the dead, mankind’s only chance has vanished for ever. I keep thinking about that. I can’t understand why we had to take the wrong path. I only know it’s too late.”

It is quietly devastating. show less

[3.25 stars] Fans of dystopian fiction who expect a heart-pounding adventure will likely be disappointed by Haushofer’s work. First published in the early 1960s and reissued decades later, “The Wall” unfolds at a maddeningly slow pace to explore themes such as isolation, disenchantment and the concept of time. One summary aptly describes the plot as “largely uneventful.” Indeed, about 90 percent of the book involves the protagonist foraging for food and performing routine tasks for a menagerie that includes cats, dogs and cows. But the author embraces the sluggish pace with purpose. The narrator realizes that in slowing down her pace, she has truly connected with the forest. It’s an important message to those who live show more frenzied lives and fail to observe and appreciate their surroundings in the rush-rush of life. show less

A dystopic "Walden," narrated by the last woman alive and starring a cat, a dog, a cow, and some other animals. I keep thinking about this book & I don't know why it's not taught in schools; it's so elegant & precise. It ends so swiftly. It's so well-written it should be required reading. There isn't an excess word in this book & I loved it, I hope all my friends read it.

Marlen Haushofer’s 1963 Austrian novel The Wall is a hauntingly claustrophobic feminist sci-fi masterpiece that subverts traditional survival narratives. It tells the story of an unnamed 40-year-old woman who is on holiday at a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains and wakes to find herself completely cut off from civilization by a mysterious, transparent, impassable wall. On the other side of the barrier, all life seems instantly petrified and dead. Her life is isolated forever, turned into a brutal series of alpine survival routines with a small menagerie of animals: a loyal dog (Lynx), a pregnant cow (Bella), and a cat. And yet the story is profoundly meditative. I enjoyed the eerie environment and moments of poetic reverie that show more the author created. show less

Man cannot become an animal. He just passes the animal stage on his way to the abyss.

Something Happens, and a middle-aged woman is suddenly, as far as she can tell, the last human being on Earth, waking up in a friend's hunting lodge up in the decidedly Julie Andrews-less Austrian alps, and finding an invisible wall all around the area she's in.

(Insert space here for snarky comparisons to The Simpsons Movie or that Stephen King novel, even though The Wall predates them by 50 years and is a very different beast.)

The wall has kept her safe from whatever seems to have killed all life outside it, but also traps her in a world she, as a city dweller, has no idea how to survive. She has a gun, a dog, a cat, a cow, and her hands and feet. She show more can grow potatoes (insert space here for snarky comparisons to The Martian etc) and shoot deer, so she won't starve, but gradually loneliness, back-breaking physical exertion and the inability of that big Homo Sapiens brain to not keep spinning begins to... I almost wrote "break her down", but that's not entirely true; evolution knows nothing about higher or lower levels. "Reshape her" is probably more apt. Two and a half years in, she starts writing down her story to hang on to whatever humanity remains, going over and writing down every detail, every emotion, every hard-earned piece of satisfaction she can remember.

The Wall is an astounding novel, which opens up to a ton of interpretations (cold war eschatology, existentialism, feminism, depression, post-nazi self-deception (it's supposedly one of Elfriede Jelinek's favourite novels), etc etc) but remains so grounded in its details of everyday hard-working life and in the Vonnegutian ways Haushofer keeps dropping hints of what will inevitably have happened that it never really feels like an allegory. Even without a name, she remains singular, just a woman with her dog and her cat and her cow trying to survive even at the end of hope. show less

You know those books that are so intense that when you finally sit back from them, you pause a bit, blink, and notice yourself breathing, slightly differently from normal? That's this one book 100%.

I don't know what to say about this book beyond the description itself: "A woman wakes up one morning in a mountain hunting lodge and finds herself locked in by an invisible wall, beyond which life no longer exists." It's quite an affecting post-apocalyptic book, full of navel-gazing with a Little House on the Prairie tinge. It's deep. It's meaningful. It's rather depressing. I feel like I've overcome something massive just to have stayed with the heroine and made it through the book. I expect this one to stick with me. Recommended.

A woman is trapped in a mountainous area by a mysterious physical barrier. She chooses survival, which includes the essential work of caring for a cow, a dog, and handful of cats. The nature of the disaster and the wall are never quite clear, but the narrator presumes it to be perhaps a nuclear disaster or conflict.

The book was originally released in 1968 and is part of the standard curriculum in Austria, only recently available in English translation. Placing a woman, and not a particularly rugged one at that, at the heart of a survival tale is part of Haushofer's subversive take, as well as the dawning reality that there will be no rescue.

The book is structured without breaks, as though you sat down with the narrator and she told show more you the story. Although much of it focuses on the routines of securing food and fuel, it is engaging immersive read. with offhand references to the previous life of the narrator. hints of pending events, and brief reflections on her circumstances. Yet there is heroism in the caretaking and the labor itself. Despite the highly developed connections between the narrator and her creatures, but readers learn early on that some meet terrible ends.

The narrator reflects on the her predicament in ways that feel fully prescient of our own times, under threats of climate change and expanding conflicts:
"Maybe people are more deserving of pity, because they have just enough intelligence to resist the natural course of things. It has made them wicked and desperate, and not very lovable. All the same, life could have been lived differently. There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one. We should have recogniyed in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life. For an endless army of the dead, mankind's only chance has vanished forever. I keep thinking about that. I can't understand why we had to take the wrong path. I only know it's too late." show less