The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

The wall has become so much a part of my life that often I don't think about it for weeks. And even if I do think about it, it strikes me as no more strange than a brick wall or a garden fence that stops me from going any further. What's so special about it? An object made of material whose composition is unknown to me. There was always more than enough of that kind of thing in my life. The wall forced me to make an entirely new life, but the things that really move me are still the same as before: birth, death, the seasons, growth, and decay. The wall is a thing that is neither dead nor alive, it  doesn't really concern me, and that's why I don't dream about it.

A woman, staying at a hunting lodge high in the Alps, discovers that an invisible wall has separated her from the rest of the world. There's no way over or around it, and even if there were, it may be a mistake to try: on the other side of it the dead are visible, frozen into the gestures they were presumably making when the wall came down. Her world has suddenly been constricted, but it's far from empty: besides the hunting lodge she has a hut in a high Alpine meadow, a dog named Lynx, a cat, and a cow who is with calf. These animals become both the narrator's burden and her salvation; they give her something to care for her in her new life. She quickly sets to the task of guarding her own life and those of her new charges: planting potatoes and beans, mowing hay in the meadow, hunting and freezing meat, creating a byre for the cow, scouting out berries and apples.

Is the wall, perhaps, a metaphor for confining ideas of womanhood? Guess again, idiot: her confinement, it turns out, frees her from the constrictions of gender:

My face was thin and tanned, and my shoulders angular, like those of a half-grown boy. My hands, always covered with blisters and calluses, had become my most important tools. I had taken off my rings ages ago. Who would decorate their tools with gold rings? It struck me as absurd, even laughable, that I had done so before. The womanliness of my forties had fallen from me, along with my curls, my little double chin and my rounded hips. At the same time I lost the awareness of being a woman. My body, more skillful than myself, had adapted itself and limited the burdens of my femininity to a minimum. I could simply forget that I was a woman.

In fact, the overarching story of the novel seems to be the growing awareness of one's self and position in the world by the removal of all social appurtenances. It's a little Walden, in a way: the narrator comes to understand herself better through a life of physical labor and solitude, of facing the black void of the sky and the stars from the alpine meadow with no interpret the scene for her. I was struck by the symbol of her host's automobile, rusting by the lodge, becoming a home again for mice and insects and other things of the natural world:

Here, in the forest, I'm actually in the right place for me. I bear the motorcar manufacturers no grudge now; they ceased to be of interest long ago. But how they all tormented me with things that repelled me. I only had this one little life, and they wouldn't let me live it in peace. Gas pipes, electrics and oil conduits; only now that people have ceased to be do these things show how truly pitiful they are. And back then they had been turned into idols rather than functional commodities. I too have one of those things standing in the middle of the forest, Hugo's black Mercedes. It was almost new when we came here in it. Today it's overgrown with vegetation, a nest for mice and birds. Particularly in June, when the wild grape blossoms, it looks very pretty, like an enormous wedding bouquet. It's beautiful in the winter, too, glittering in the hoarfrost or wearing a white helmet. In spring and autumn, between its brown struts I can see the faded yellow of the upholstery, beech leaves, bits of foam rubber and horsehair torn out and pulled apart by tiny teeth.

It's amazing how gripping The Wall is, for a book that consists of little more than two years of seasonal labor: planting, mowing, hunting deer. These things have their own dramas, of course, the drama of the seasons in which desolation follows abundance; that's part of the point of the novel, I think. In this radically constricted world we are struck by the deep sadness of every loss, the kitten, the dog, the bull--the deaths of these latter two being foreshadowed in a subtle and skillful way that make the novel's climactic moment, so unlike the rest of it, a real shock. These losses are tinged with special sadness because we know they are not unique, and that the longer the narrator manages to survive, the losses will continue to pile up. Someday the last match will go out, and the last bullet will be spent; the cow will lay down its life at last, and the loss of companionship will be more profound than the loss of milk. But in that sense the narrator's loss in not so different from our own.