Killing Stella by Marlen Haushofer

Stella had always been a little clumsy and shy, and even when she was cheerful, her regular, wide face was immobile. Then it blossomed from within to her lips. Stella had been very happy for a short time, but she was unable to learn the rules of the game, she couldn't adapt and she had to perish.

Killing Stella is narrated by Anna, a dissatisfied housewife whose husband, Richard, cheats on her constantly. She's reconciled herself to this life, which is mostly miserable, though she maintains her grip on family life by nurturing an intense attachment to her son, Wolfgang, who seems not to have much of an attachment to anyone. Another, younger daughter, Annette, is still too young to understand just how dysfunctional the family is. Into this world comes Stella, the teenage daughter of a friend, who upsets the delicate balance that Anna has struck: she isn't happy, but it might be much worse. We know from the beginning that Stella's visitation ends with her demise--killed by a passing truck--and Anna must tell us, by way of expiating her own guilt, an glee, how it came to be.

Anna's theory is that Stella was fated to die. She begins to waste away quickly in the household, falling into spells of depression and tearful explosions. Stella, Anna reasons, has fallen in love with Richard, and is tortured by Richard's lack of regard. Is that true? Or is it only Anna's projection onto Stella, derived from her resentment toward her husband's philandering? The trick of Killing Stella is that Stella herself is always something of a black box. Anna tells us that there was no other fate for Stella than to step in front of that truck, and the logic of this seems to emerge from the teenager's declining demeanor as well as a sense of Anna's own fatedness: she is stuck in this marriage, and anything that threatens to disrupt it, for better or worse, must eventually be expelled. No, the real central character here is Anna, whose conflicted feelings about Stella are terribly frightening. It's not suggested that Anna had any hand in the death, of course, but her claims to feel guilty are unconvincing, and her insistence that Stella's intrusion in their life necessitated her death only makes her feel, somehow, more implicated.

Even for Short Book February, this is a slim little book, a snapshot of misery and resentment that is incredibly dark. Unlike The Wall, which has become a book I recommend to everyone anywhere I go, nothing unfolds and no one changes, except perhaps for Wolfgang, who hightails it out of Dodge. The Wall is about a woman trapped beneath a glass dome, but the barriers that enclose Anna seem somehow even smaller, and more impermeable.