The Sub-Rosa reading group will meet Saturday, December 6, at 6:30pm at Book Beat to discuss Marlen Haushofer’s novel The Wall, translated by Shaun Whiteside.
A haunting feminist sci-fi masterpiece and international bestseller that is “as absorbing as Robinson Crusoe”
–Doris Lessing
“One of the most beautiful and most harrowing books I’ve ever read, as well as one of the best.”–Susan Choi The New York Times Book Review
“Haushofer’s thought-provoking masterpiece stands as a touchstone for popular literary post-apocalypses by such authors as Emily St. John Mandel and Ling Ma and is certain to be a life-changing read for many.” –David Wright Library Journal
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.
“In Germany and Austria, The Wall is routinely compared to Robinson Crusoe, but it’s more like Walden in a parallel universe (Walled-in), a shepherd’s calendar and primer in subsistence living for a disturbingly altered world. It’s a novel that contrives to be, by turns, utopian and dystopian, an idyll and a nightmare. In her isolation behind the wall, together with her animals, the woman discovers a new life, in comparison with which her existence before she came to the mountains seems trivial and pointless. For a while, she experiences an unfamiliar inner peace. But she has also told us that something terrible has happened – we don’t know what it is until the last pages of the novel – and every joint and sinew of the story is restless with a sense of threat. The natural world which it describes with such rapt attention is cupped in the larger receptacle of a vivid and sinister dream, a dream we seem to have had many times before and which on each retelling leads to the same scene of horror at its climax.”
—The London Review of Books
Marlen Haushofer (1920–1970) was an Austrian author of short stories, novels, radio plays, and children’s books. Her work has had a strong influence on many German-language writers, such as the Nobel Prize–winner Elfriede Jelinek, who dedicated one of her plays to her. The Wall was adapted into the 2012 film, directed by Julian Polsler and starring Martina Gedeck.