Left alone for the weekend while her husband and two children are visiting her in-laws, the narrator recounts the addition of her friend's daughter, Stella, into their already tense and tumultuous household. Staring out the window at her garden, she worries about the baby bird in the linden tree, about her husband, Richard, who flits from one adulterous affair to another, about her son's gloomy demeanor and her daughter's obliviousness to everything, and, most of all, she worries about Stella, a confused teenager who has just met a sudden and disastrous end.
Vividly translated ... Sparse yet unsparing, it is a riveting, merciless fable of blame, shame, and consequence ... It’s a total, self-encapsulating project—about a total, self-encapsulating doom.
This is a book that gets more, not less, mysterious as it goes ... Why is the narrator like this? Why can’t she face the truth of the world? Why does she need to forget? The more we read, the clearer it becomes that these questions, more than any whodunit elements, are the real mysteries the novel is wrestling with ... I would not want to live in a world where all our novels were like this, guided by narrators who don’t carry us from mystery to solution, but instead just thrash around in the darkness. Still, I am glad that such novels exist; they are the literary equivalent of a sudden plunge into icy waters. They shock, they clarify.
An accomplished work of real-life horror ... The human capacity to simply keep going lies at the heart of Haushofer’s understanding of the world. What is momentous and beautiful about life, she suggests, is that there is hardly anything we can’t stand; that is its horror, too. For those who can’t or won’t stand it, who refuse to be diminished by life’s experiences, who want to be able to believe in love, Haushofer offers little consolation.
