For
that purpose, I have found nothing so satisfying as The Wall, Austrian author Marlen
Haushofer’s splendid 1962 novel (English translation published in the U.S. by
Cleis Press, 1990). The unnamed protagonist awakes one morning to find the
entire mountainside where she is staying encircled by an invisible wall.
Judging by indicators such as the lack of any aircraft, she surmises that the
world has been silently destroyed and she is the only survivor. Rather than
fighting off enemy legions, she struggles with feelings of futility, a
toothache, planting and harvesting, and the responsibility she feels towards
the animals that have fallen into her care. A beguiling incident of violence
recounted at the end of the book is what prompts her to begin writing a report
of her 2½ years (and counting) within the confines of the wall.
Reading
is always a solitary act, even more so in a book with only one human character.
I took refuge in the story’s rustic setting and in the company of this, the
last woman alive, speaking in a voice that quietly commands recognition.
The
narrator hopes against hope that someone will read her report: “[M]y heart
beats faster when I imagine human eyes resting on these lines, and human hands
turning the pages.” I felt as if I were the lucky someone who happened upon
this account, on the shelf somewhere in an Alpine lodge. The sole survivor of
the old world communicating directly with me, the first occupant of the new
world that I—alone at last—was given to glimpse in the book’s pages.
(This piece was originally published in Paste Magazine online, here.)
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