Smooth and Cool
Exploring The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer
Book club week! We read cult classic THE WALL by Marlen Haushofer (translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside). Here are some behind-the-scenes from our in-store meet-ups. Potential spoiler warning!
A woman has gone to visit her cousin and her husband at their mountain lodge, while they are on a holiday. One evening, they decide to walk into the nearby town for a drink, and they do not come back. When the woman goes to look for them, she finds her way blocked by an invisible wall she cannot find either end of. Looking through the wall, people and animals on the other side are frozen, dead. Accompanied by her dog, the cow she finds, and the cat that finds her, the woman finds ways to survive, and begins to write an account of what has happened.
The wall changes everything—is everything—and she lives entirely in light of it while barely giving it thought and denying the reader room to think about it either. The wall makes no sense: if it circles the earth, then half the world and its inhabitants are on her side of it and presumably alive. If it has boxed her in, then shouldn’t she locate its three other sides and determine what and who’s been boxed in with her?
Without giving too many spoilers, it’s exactly this lack of thought, or refusal of thought, that is her downfall, in the end. By not ever investigating the wall, she’s left herself open to more possibilities, and darker ones, than maybe she otherwise would’ve.
We talked a lot about this: is the whole idea of the book that she just doesn’t interact with the wall? That she refuses to think about it? And is it a conscious decision?
But the wall isn’t the only thing that she mentally distances herself from: she’s very detached all the time; from the wall, from what happens to Lynx and Bull, from the situation she finds herself in.
Caitlin sent across this article from the London Review of Books, by Nicholas Spice, and it’s fascinating:
Haushofer didn’t wish her work to remain obscure, but that this has been its fate is all of a piece with her character. Anonymity answered to something in her nature. Being cut off and unknowable was also what she wrote about best.
At various points in the novel, the woman notes that her old life was “unsatisfactory.” She doesn’t miss her children, and actually quite enjoys not having to deal with other people any more. More than once, she comments on being pleased with herself - or, her body - as a useful tool. She notes the changes in her face and her body, from hard work, the toll of the seasons, her mountain diet completely lacking in anything but the bare essentials. She is surviving in the mountains, but is she also finding a way to thrive, outside of the society she felt more boxed in by than the wall?
She’s not a likeable character (or is she?), but we decided that maybe she doesn’t need to be. Who would she be trying to be liked by? She also, by the sounds of it, would have been quite a difficult woman of the 1960s - she’s not maternal, and says she lost interest in her children once they weren’t babies any more. She likes caring for the animals that need her - they’re really her reason for surviving, and she’s as attached to them as they are to her.
It’s mostly a very slow-moving, quiet novel, although it ends with the most climactic action we see in the whole book, but we’re never given the satisfaction of a resolution. Some of us were shocked by the ending, some felt cheated by it, and for some it felt appropriate to have an ending with no answers after a whole book of no answers.
PIC
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.
And some recs for if you loved the book and want to read something with similar vibes…
I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN, by Jacqueline Harpman // UNDER THE DOME, by Stephen King // SEVERANCE, by Ling Ma
And other things our bookclubbers have been reading and recommending this month…
WUTHERING HEIGHTS, by Emily Brontë (also WH by Emerald Fennell, but they’re not the same thing) // THE EMPLOYEES by last month’s book club author, Olga Ravn // More Stephen King in THE STAND // STRANGERS, by Belle Burden // GOODLORD, by Ella Frears // BOX HILL by Adam Mars Jones // FIVE TUESDAYS IN WInTER by Lily King // SMALL BOAT by Vincent Delacroix // THE ORIGINAL by Nell Stevens // FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley // ROUGE by Mona Awad
Have you read THE WALL? What did you think of it?
In April, we’ll be reading PICK A COLOUR, by Souvankham Thammavongsa, which will have 10% off in store. Tickets for our book club meet-up(s) are available here.