Björn recenserade Die Wand av Marlen Haushofer
None
5 stjärnor
Man cannot become an animal. He just passes the animal stage on his way to the abyss.
Something Happens, and a middle-aged woman is suddenly, as far as she can tell, the last human being on Earth, waking up in a friend's hunting lodge up in the decidedly Julie Andrews-less Austrian alps, and finding an invisible wall all around the area she's in.
(Insert space here for snarky comparisons to The Simpsons Movie or that Stephen King novel, even though The Wall predates them by 50 years and is a very different beast.)
The wall has kept her safe from whatever seems to have killed all life outside it, but also traps her in a world she, as a city dweller, has no idea how to survive. She has a gun, a dog, a cat, a cow, and her hands and feet. She can grow potatoes (insert space here …
Man cannot become an animal. He just passes the animal stage on his way to the abyss.
Something Happens, and a middle-aged woman is suddenly, as far as she can tell, the last human being on Earth, waking up in a friend's hunting lodge up in the decidedly Julie Andrews-less Austrian alps, and finding an invisible wall all around the area she's in.
(Insert space here for snarky comparisons to The Simpsons Movie or that Stephen King novel, even though The Wall predates them by 50 years and is a very different beast.)
The wall has kept her safe from whatever seems to have killed all life outside it, but also traps her in a world she, as a city dweller, has no idea how to survive. She has a gun, a dog, a cat, a cow, and her hands and feet. She can grow potatoes (insert space here for snarky comparisons to The Martian etc) and shoot deer, so she won't starve, but gradually loneliness, back-breaking physical exertion and the inability of that big Homo Sapiens brain to not keep spinning begins to... I almost wrote "break her down", but that's not entirely true; evolution knows nothing about higher or lower levels. "Reshape her" is probably more apt. Two and a half years in, she starts writing down her story to hang on to whatever humanity remains, going over and writing down every detail, every emotion, every hard-earned piece of satisfaction she can remember.
The Wall is an astounding novel, which opens up to a ton of interpretations (cold war eschatology, existentialism, feminism, depression, post-nazi self-deception (it's supposedly one of Elfriede Jelinek's favourite novels), etc etc) but remains so grounded in its details of everyday hard-working life and in the Vonnegutian ways Haushofer keeps dropping hints of what will inevitably have happened that it never really feels like an allegory. Even without a name, she remains singular, just a woman with her dog and her cat and her cow trying to survive even at the end of hope.
