Marlen Haushofer (Author)
Marie Helene Haushofer was born in Frauenstein, Austria in 1920.
Following the Second World War, she worked in her husband's
dentistry practice. She began publishing short stories in magazines
from 1946. She enjoyed success with her novella The Fifth Year,
which was published in 1952 but her most enduring work was The
Wall, first published in 1963 and now considered a classic of
dystopian fiction. She died in 1970.
Shaun Whiteside (Translator)
Shaun Whiteside is an award-winning translator from French,
German, Italian and Dutch. His most recent translations from German
include Aftermath by Harald Jähner, To Die in Spring by Ralf
Rothmann, Swansong 1945 by Walter Kempowski, Berlin Finale by Heinz
Rein and The Broken House by Horst Krüger.
It's a novel that contrives to be, by turns, utopian and dystopian,
an idyll and a nightmare... Every joint and sinew of the story is
restless with a sense of threat
*London Review of Books*
Brilliant in its sustainment of dread, in its peeling away of old
layers of reality to expose a raw way of seeing and feeling. Doris
Lessing once remarked that only a woman could have written this
novel, and it's true... I've read The Wall three times already and
am nowhere near finished
*Nicole Krauss*
It makes you sick, because, if she wasn't a woman, everyone would
be reading it, like Robinson Crusoe
*Sheila Heti, author of 'Motherhood' and 'Pure Colour'*
Totally gripping
*Spectator, *Books of the Year**
An extraordinarily interesting writer, always underappreciated
*Elfriede Jelinek*
The Wall is a wonderful novel. It is not often that you can say
only a woman could have written this book, but women in particular
will understand the heroine's loving devotion to the details of
making and keeping life, every day felt as a victory against
everything that would like to undermine and destroy
*Doris Lessing*
What is the wall? An allusion to the Cold War? An allegory for the
Berlin Wall? Yes. But it also serves as a metaphorical stand-in for
so many restrictions. It creates a situation that allows the main
character and the reader to examine our ontology and what we think
makes us real
*Kirkus Reviews (starred)*
The Wall is speculative fiction of a distinctly existential sort,
where the subject being speculated on is not what happened to the
world, but what happens to reality when society is stripped
away...Nothing resolves, yet the book is constantly resonating
*Wall Street Journal*
Brutal and absorbing... But The Wall is also a resonant and
realistic account of a widowed, middle-aged woman, disenchanted and
depressed with the sum of her days, who is presented with the
opportunity to enact what has previously eluded her: a life of her
own imagining. In this way, Haushofer's book is one of the most
profoundly feminist works of the past century
*The Atlantic*
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