RaveThe NationHaushofer’s sentences are simple and concise, and full of careful thought. The ideas she expresses are so important that you wonder how you have managed to get by without them. There is something fundamental about The Wall in particular that reaches far beyond the supposed territory of its story. The book is a lesson—and an agonizing one—on how one might come to live among things neglected with cost. That New Directions has recently reissued it with an elegant picture of a cow on the front should be a great event for everyone who cares about literature ... Though The Wall shares the broader fascination of postapocalyptic fiction with a slow and inevitable loss of reference—of what it looks like when objects, flora, and creatures cast off the meanings we have assigned to them—it is more interested in the transformative potential of this kind of quiet interlude. Stock images of clocks that have stopped working and roads overgrown with weeds soon give way to an extended meditation on identity and purpose ... Throughout the novel, there is a refusal to spell things out, to speculate, and instead an intense interest in rhythms ... despite the terrible event that ends this relative idyll, some hope is left with the reader after finishing The Wall, as Haushofer’s quiet philosophy does not admit of despair.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
