THE WALL by Marlen Haushofer; trans. by Shaun Whiteside

“A woman finds herself alone at a hunting cabin, cut off from the world by an invisible, impenetrable wall.”

the wall

THE LONGCUT

Hall, Emily Dalkey Archive (120 pp.) $15.95 paper | May 10, 2022 978-1-628-97397-6

A young artist seeks the subject of her work within the teeming ontology of the city. The unnamed narrator of this debut novel is an artist. This facet of her identity, the fact that she is an artist, is indisputable to her in spite of the fact that her art—its subject, its premise, and its form—is, as of yet, inscrutable both to others and to herself. The question of what exactly is her work is one that consumes her, occupying her near total attention as she walks the streets of her city, slots answers into the “completed” column at her absurdist job, eats unsatisfying, overpriced sandwiches, or moves items from place to place inside her tiny studio, aka apartment. It seems possible that the permutations of the question “what is my work?” could occupy the narrator’s thoughts more or less endlessly, especially in a time when, in the narrator’s words, it is acceptable “to make art from anything, with anything, about anything, the world constituting the art world in my time being undelimited in a liberating or terrifying manner”; however, a deadline of sorts has been superimposed on this question because the artist has a meeting. This meeting, set up by a well-known artist friend of the narrator’s whose artistic endeavor consists of “setting up situations,” is with a gallerist whose attention may just help the narrator place her work in the public eye, if only she knew what that work was. In recursive prose—mirroring the art-world use of deliberately abstracted language with an expert’s ear—the narrator circles the question of her identity, her interiority, her agency, and her originality, even as she circles the location of her long-anticipated meeting through familiar streets that have become defamiliarized by the intensity of her observation. Surreal, heady, and elliptical, this book reads like a Seinfeld episode if it were co-written by Beckett and Derrida. Unfortunately, much of the wit, trenchant observation, and insight are occluded by the density of the language. This clearly intentional, even integral, stylistic choice is at the heart of the novel’s attempt to elevate even the most utterly banal elements of modern life to the level of “the work,” and yet it will prove a barrier to all but the most dedicated of readers.

A book that toys with brilliance but falters in the bog of its own telling.

THE WALL

Haushofer, Marlen Trans. by Shaun Whiteside New Directions (248 pp.) $16.95 paper | June 7, 2022 978-0-8112-3194-7

A woman finds herself alone at a hunting cabin, cut off from the world by an invisible, impenetrable wall. In this translation of a 1963 German novel, an unnamed narrator is suddenly forced to fend for herself at a hunting lodge deep in the Austrian woods. She’s isolated from all human contact by an invisible wall that appears overnight. “I shall set everything down as precisely as I can,” she writes, recording her life for posterity, if there is one. She also writes to stay sane. “I’m not writing for the sheer joy of writing; so many things have happened to me that I must write if I am not to lose my reason.” The wall, “this terrible, invisible thing,” hems her in and forces her to rethink everything about her existence. Everyone beyond the wall appears to be dead. The woman begins by limiting her space and establishing a garden. Her story is a study in survival but also a study of being human. The woman is left with a cat, a cow, and a dog for companionship; these creatures create meaning by giving her something to do. Caregiving fills the days and makes them bearable. So do manual labor and the completion of tasks, which comfort her and “[bring] a bit of order into the

huge, terrible disorder that had invaded [her] life.” 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. Similarly, the main character has a sense that being read would give meaning to her words and, thus, her life: “I still hope someone will read this report…” she says, “my heart beats faster when I imagine human eyes resting on these lines, and human hands turning the pages.” She isn’t coy about the toll that the isolation and hard work take on her body, nor about her own inevitable demise. She considers the world before, but she doesn’t mourn it. All that matters is the present. “I may be in a position,” she says prophetically, “to murder time.”

Strangely relevant as we begin to reflect on our own experiences during the pandemic shutdown.

WITH A MIND TO KILL

Horowitz, Anthony Harper/HarperCollins (288 pp.) $26.99 | May 24, 2022 978-0-06-307-841-3

Horowitz completes his James Bond trilogy—begun in Trigger Mortis (2015) and Forever and a Day (2018)—by providing what would be the nonpareil British spy’s final adventure if only all those other earlier scribes hadn’t preceded him at the feast. Brought back home in 1964 after executing Francisco Scaramanga in Jamaica in order to fake the assassination of M, his longtime superior in the Secret Intelligence Service, Bond performs so well that everyone who knows the actual position of Adm. Sir Miles Messervy—perhaps 50 people all told—is fooled into thinking that he’s dead. This fraud only lays the groundwork for Bond’s real job: to continue pretending that he remains indoctrinated by the Soviets aligned with Scaramanga in order