Marlen Haushofer's The Wall

 

The Wall / Marlen Haushofer
translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside; read by Kathe Mazur
Ashland, OR: Blackstone Audio, 2013, c1963.

Another dystopia with a final woman left in the world, but I listened to this one rather than read it. I thought that worked quite well for this story -- the narrator was calming to listen to, which suited much of the story. 

The book opens when an ordinary middle-aged woman wakes up to find herself alone, the only person left in the world. She's up at a country chalet, her hosts had gone into town the night before. She walks down to see what's up and hits a wall, a literal, though invisible, wall. On the other side are people frozen into place, but fully dead. She assumes it has been a military experiment gone wrong, and tries to plan her survival.

She has a dog, a cow and a cat. She has a chalet with supplies for a weekend's trip. She has tools, arable land, and time -- lots and lots of time. Much of the book is a quiet, methodical description of her planting and gathering and animal husbandry and thinking. She edges toward introspection but doesn't spend a lot of time on existential questions, she's too busy with physical survival. 

It's a really interesting setup, melding the absolute silence of the natural world with one person trying to survive within it, with all of her memories of her life before, as a social being. It's a quiet read, elegaic, thoughtful, with a few moments of higher drama, particularly near the end. When I started the book I felt it was becoming repetitive, and I didn't know where it was going, but once I got into the rhythm of it, I found it almost hypnotic. Fascinating concept and an unusual way to examine a woman's place in the world.