The Wall - Marlen Haushofer

Summary:

After a mysterious invisible wall suddenly isolates her from the rest of the world, an unnamed woman finds herself trapped in the Austrian Alps with only a dog, a cow, and later other animals for company. Believing everyone beyond the wall has died, she gradually learns to survive by farming, hunting, and caring for her animals. Years pass in complete isolation until one day she encounters another man, who kills her bull and her beloved Lynx before she shoots him. Left alone once again, she continues living, and the novel ends with a white crow appearing outside, waiting for her.

I have very mixed feelings about The Wall.

The first thing that frustrated me was the timeline. The narrator constantly tells us that the dog is dead, the bull is dead, Lynx is dead, or someone has died, then casually continues the story as if none of it has happened yet. We eventually catch up to those moments, but by then I’ve already “experienced” those deaths several times. Instead of building suspense, it made me wonder whether I had skipped a page. How many times do I need to hear that Lynx is dead before she actually dies in the timeline?

The book also has almost no dialogue. I can’t remember another novel I’ve read that had virtually no conversations. It feels like one long stream of consciousness. It was interesting, but also distancing.

Then there are no chapters. I never realized how much I rely on chapters as natural stopping points until I read this book. Without them, I constantly found myself looking for a place to stop but never finding one. If I ever write a novel, this is one thing I’ll definitely do differently.

One thing that kept bothering me throughout the book was how huge revelations were handled. Out of nowhere she mentions that someone killed the bull. My immediate reaction was, “Wait… there’s another person?” That’s an enormous revelation, yet she moves on as if she just commented on the weather. I kept thinking, “Jesus, can we have a reaction to one of these massive bombs you’re dropping here and there?”

Another thing I couldn’t understand at first was why she wanted the calf to be male. I assumed there had to be another reason because surely she wasn’t planning to breed it with its own mother. Then it turned out that was exactly the reason, and my only reaction was: What the fuck?

One unexpected thing this book gave me was a new appreciation for farmers. I would probably starve within a day if I found myself in her situation. Reading this made me realize how much knowledge goes into producing the food I eat every day. Bless them.

It also made me realize something about myself. I don’t think I could ever kill an animal, even if my own survival depended on it. It’s easy to say while sitting comfortably at home, but that was my honest reaction throughout the novel. In fact, this book has made me think more seriously about becoming vegetarian.

I also kept wondering why she accepted the wall so quickly. My instinct would have been different. I’d spend much more time trying to understand it, looking for weaknesses, testing every possibility of escape before accepting that there wasn’t one. Maybe I’d eventually reach the same conclusion, but I don’t think I’d get there as quickly as she did.

As I got closer to the end, the book stopped being about survival and became a question about what survival costs.

The deaths of Lynx and the bull genuinely made me cry.

Not because death happened, but because of the unfairness of it. Those animals hadn’t done anything to deserve it. They became her companions, and mine as a reader. What hurt me even more was how little space the novel gave to grieving them. I kept wanting the book to stop and mourn with me, but it always seemed eager to move on.

The novel also made me question something I hadn’t expected to question.

Is survival always the highest value?

The alternative is dying, but after watching her lose almost every companion she had, kill animals, live in complete isolation, and slowly watch her world disappear, I wasn’t sure death was automatically the worst outcome. I found myself asking what kind of life we’re actually trying to preserve.

The Wall also reminded me how much I take for granted. Food. A warm house. Security. Electricity. Other people. I realized I wouldn’t survive very long without the countless people whose work quietly keeps my life running.

And then I started wondering whether this is how humans originally lived. Mostly surviving. Is that what we’re wired for? Or are we wired for something more?

The ending left me conflicted.

Do I get angry at her for letting go of the animals that died so quickly?

Do I admire her incredible ability to survive?

Do I think she surrendered to the wall too easily?

Or do I think she was wise enough to accept what couldn’t be changed?

I still don’t know.

What I do know is that I didn’t love the way the story was told. The timeline, the lack of chapters, and the emotional distance never really worked for me.

But despite all of that, the book still managed to make me cry.

Maybe that’s the strangest thing about The Wall. I spent half the novel arguing with it, yet it still reached me.

Following is the parts I underlined while reading:

• It occurs to me that I haven't written down my name. I had almost forgotten it, and that's how it's going to stay. No one calls me by that name, so it no longer exists.
• I had achieved little that I had wanted, and everything I had achieved I had ceased to want.
• Sometimes I'm struck by how important it once was not to be five minutes late.
• Pearl had suffered an injustice, but that same injustice had also befallen her victims, the trout; was I to pass it on to the fox? The only creature in the forest that can really do right or wrong is me.
• But I realized that everything I had thought and done until then, or almost everything, had been nothing but a poor imitation, I had copied the thoughts and actions of other people. (...) My thoughts almost always reached ahead of my eyes and distorted the true picture.
• Things happen, and, like millions of people before me, I look for a meaning in them, because my vanity will not allow me to admit that the whole meaning of an event lies in the event itself.
• But we're condemned to chase after a meaning that cannot exist.
• Maybe people are more deserving of pity, because they have just enough intelligence to resist the natural course of things. It has made them wicked and desperate, and not very lovable.(...) There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one. We should have recognized in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life.
• Nature sometimes struck me as one great trap for its creatures.
• No-one wants to be abandoned, not even an old cat.

Looking at these, I realized it left with the following ideas:

• We take civilization for granted.
• Humans are the only creatures capable of moral responsibility.
• Survival isn’t necessarily the highest value.
• Love may be the most rational thing we do.
• No living creature wants to be abandoned.