Life Alone

The Wall (a novel), Marlen Haushofer

It isn't my intention to put you off this remarkable novel, but it is, hands down, the most depressing book I have ever read.  Depressing in a good way.  Haushofer set out to write a novel depicting the end of the world, the effects of debilitating solitude, and the hopelessness of the individual in the face of total meaninglessness--and she did. And what's worse (better) is how effectively Haushofer evoked not so much screaming-banshee terror but quiet despair. What has killed off everyone, and why?  We have as little idea as the nameless narrator.

There's lots of apocalyptic literature around these days.  The little of it that I have read feels either sensationalized and, frankly, disgusting (Cormac McCarthy's The Road), or preposterous (N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season).  The problem isn't plausibility--the world is ending after all. No, the problem with post-disaster books is that they don't take seriously the existential and psychological cost of living in the end-times. The characters in most of these books are victims whose lives are unimaginable struggles for survival. There's no provision made for reflection: around every corner is a cannibal, a carnivorous alien, or a another human who is (naturally) one's enemy.  In Eden there was scope for cooperation; when the Seventh Seal has been broken it's every woman for herself. 

I won't be forgetting The Wall anytime soon.  What happens when one wakes up to a world devoid of other human beings, with a transparent glass wall enclosing one in a valley whose outward prospect suggests that you are the only surviving human being?

Haushofer examines with painstaking care the claustrophobic daily life of an ordinary woman--she has no name--who has survived some kind of global disaster. Haushofer never lets on what has happened--where is everyone? Who built the Wall, and why? Like the woman, we operate wholly in the dark, and if we allow ourselves to fall into the conceit of the Wall a nightmare is opened to us: how does one cope with loneliness, with the daily grinding routine of survival?  The woman has a few companions--a dog, a cat, a cow--and in her ingenuity and sheer will to survive she reminds one of Robinson Crusoe, but without the human companionship of Friday.  There are no voices in the novel but that of the solitary woman, and her voice has the dull cadence and flatness of the dead.

Reading this novel requires one to think about solitude in a way that no other novel does. Hell may be other people, but there surely is a version of hell that is no one, not a human voice anywhere. Our woman survivor is incapable of reading--what's the point of information or art?--or of amusing herself in any way but with Tarot cards (a chilling idea), or of doing anything except sleeping and trying to stay alive. The state of nature so attractive to admirers of Ayn Rand and Rand Paul--well, here it is. Lusty independence, no government regulations, no one else's annoying needs to get in the way of the satisfaction of your own. Madness. I kept thinking of prison, but even in prison someone shoves food in the slot or tries to stab you with a toothbrush--horrible, but better than nothing.  

This is a deeply political book, a feminist meditation.  For what does our protagonist do but rebuild  civilization, remake a tiny world out of remnants of what has been lost. She creates order and routine, does chores, cares for the injured, buries the dead, in just the way that women have always done.  She's so depressed she can barely rise up from her bed, and yet she does so because otherwise the whole rickety edifice of her solitary civilization will fall to pieces.

And men? You'll need to read The Wall to find out about them. 

I understand there's a film. I can't imagine it. If ever there were an unfilmable book, it's this one.

George Ovitt (9/17/2018)

The Wall was published in German in 1968 and released by Cleis Press of Berkeley in 2012.