The Wall
The Wall, written by Marlen Haushofer, took me a whopping 6 days to get through despite its measly 248 pages. If you can’t tell yet, you will soon see that I have a large fascination with dystopian speculative fiction novels. This one had a similar set-up to other novels I’ve read in the genre, but my reading experience was completely different. If we are asking if I enjoyed the book, my answer is definitely not. I did, however, develop a profound appreciation for the author’s writing style and artistic choices.
The main character in the book is faced with a seemingly endless solitude accompanied by a few animals. The story of her entrapment is told in a first person narrative story in a slightly non-linear fashion. This is where the distinction between author’s technique and personal enjoyment come in to the picture.
I hated the way the main character wrote her “report” about her stay. She was able to note many important events by using her dated journal as a reference to the timeframes of everything that occurred. I genuinely did not enjoy the way she kept describing outcomes of future events before reaching that point in the story. She often referred to how her behaviors/emotions have changed since/because of something that hasn’t even been described yet. I can understand why the author would write it this way. He describes things that aren’t completely lost on the reader, as possible outcomes at any time. With this being the case, these details couldn’t have been lost on the main character either. It feels like a way to immerse the reader into like a vague impending doom that the main character must have constantly felt being trapped in this situation.
The way that the novel ends so abruptly, after detailing the brutal murder of the bull and her dog Lynx, is extremely unsatisfying. You read this whole book absolutely sure that she’s 100% alone on this side of the wall. In the last 3 pages of the book, a man shows up out of nowhere and kills two of her animals before she shoots the man and throws his body over a cliff. Shortly after, the main character runs out of paper for her report and the novel ends. Nothing has left me thinking “what the FUCK” like this book has, and I read “I Who Have Never Known Men”! Again, I can admire the author’s choice to evoke the lost and confused emotions that the main character must be experiencing as well. The main character describes how she doesn’t want to dwell on things by questioning why things happened the way that they did. Realistically, some questions have no answers. A lot of questions have no answers, and the author has decided that the reader has to come to terms with that.
This book was painful for me to get through. It was extremely depressing and repetitive, as I imagine living behind that wall probably would be. I spent a good chunk of the book bracing for an inevitable disaster, as I imagine the main character probably did for the rest of her life behind the wall.
With all of that being said, I think the author achieved his purpose with this one.
