Roving Eye is the Book Review’s essay series on international writers of the past whose works warrant a fresh look, often in light of reissued, updated or newly translated editions of their books.
We’re used to stories in which buried secrets are forced to the surface, prompting some kind of reckoning — and in that reckoning’s wake, transformation. KILLING STELLA (New Directions, 87 pp., paperback, $14.95), a newly translated 1958 novel by the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer, charts an opposite trajectory.
This is a book that gets more, not less, mysterious as it goes. As for transformation, forget it. Even when a few shards of truth wiggle their way aboveground, they change nothing. Everything stays obscured by a dense fog of repression. It’s the air the characters breathe, even when they think they’re spitting it out.
This is true most of all for the main character and narrator, an Austrian housewife and mother. Left home alone for two days, she’s writing down her account of some recent disturbing events. An old friend’s teenage daughter, Stella, came to live with the narrator’s family some months earlier; now Stella is dead. It looked like an accident; the narrator is sure it wasn’t. Terrible things have happened — some recently, some further back — but they can’t be processed or even acknowledged. Doing so, we sense, would rip the fabric of postwar, middle-class normalcy, a condition that makes the narrator miserable, but that she is nonetheless committed to preserving at all costs.
For American readers already familiar with Haushofer’s work, this mood of jittery claustrophobia might seem, at first, like a departure. Her reputation here rests almost entirely on “The Wall,” a cult classic first released in 1963 and reissued two years ago. (Both novels were translated into English by Shaun Whiteside.) “The Wall” tells the story of an Austrian widow confined to a rural valley by the overnight arrival of a mysterious force field. As far as she knows, everyone else on Earth is dead.
Much of the novel is focused on the ins and outs of this woman’s quest for survival, including her interactions with the land, animals and her own body. Her situation gives the writing an earthy immediacy. Repression appears mostly in the rearview mirror, a feature of the dissatisfying life she has been severed from.
But in “Killing Stella,” no fantastical force fields come down to cleave the narrator from her stifling circumstances. All she gets are her two days of solitude. By writing down the story of Stella’s time with her family, she clearly hopes to stop thinking about it. “I have to forget her if I want to resume my peaceful life,” she writes.
Who killed Stella? We more or less have an answer by the halfway mark. There’s plenty of blame to go around: Here’s some for her neglectful mother; here’s some for the narrator’s womanizing husband; here’s some for the narrator herself and her powerful reflex to look the other way. Sometimes she’s beset by pity for Stella and guilty about her own role in her death. At other times, she blames the victim: Stella “was unable to learn the rules of the game,” the narrator muses coolly. “She couldn’t adapt and she had to perish.”
Why is the narrator like this? Why can’t she face the truth of the world? Why does she need to forget? The more we read, the clearer it becomes that these questions, more than any whodunit elements, are the real mysteries the novel is wrestling with. “Something had happened years ago that left me in a diminished state, an automaton,” the narrator writes. “At some point, everything was fine and orderly, and then someone muddled the threads.”
Something. Someone. At some point. But what? When? There are hints that the narrator is referring to dashed illusions about life in general and love specifically. There are hints (fainter ones) that she’s dancing around the psychological effects of Austria’s participation in World War II. But we never get answers — they’re like land mines that the narrator knows are buried under what she’s telling us and that she’s absolutely terrified of stepping on. The sense of danger suffusing the prose is all the more potent for its murky origins. What’s more petrifying than something we sense is lurking in the closet at night, but we can’t see or name?
“Sometimes, I wake up with a profound sense of guilt whose origins I can’t comprehend,” says the narrator of Haushofer’s “The Jib Door” (1957), an oblique account of passionate love morphing into alienation over the course of a pregnancy. “What taboo have I violated? I’ll know one day, but I don’t want to force that dawn too soon.” If she ever does force it, Haushofer doesn’t show us the results.
Besides “Killing Stella,” “The Wall” and “The Jib Door,” two more of Haushofer’s novels have been translated into English but were published only in Britain. Together, these five books chart the coordinates of a worldview defined by extremes.
“The Loft,” published the year before Haushofer’s death in 1970, is another fever dream of mysterious repression. A housewife’s subconscious determination not to face the full truth of her world, whatever that might be, is so strong that it renders her functionally deaf. She falls into a harrowing relationship with a man who seems to appreciate her company primarily because he can scream about all the terrible things he’s done — without her learning what they are.
“Nowhere Ending Sky,” from 1966, is a plotless examination of an idyllic childhood in rural, prewar Austria, with very few insertions of adult wisdom. It feels like an attempt to trap pre-adulthood in amber, as if by doing so it could be reclaimed — on the page, at least — from the compromises and disappointments of adulthood. I thought of that novel when the narrator of “Killing Stella” reflects that, in contrast to her current life, she can “remember certain days of her childhood that were without grief and melancholy.” But no more: “The little girl from back then was dead, strangled and beaten by big, skillful hands.”
For Haushofer’s women (for all her characters, really), adult life is an oppressive hellscape of domination, lies and high-energy avoidance of the truth, passed inexorably from generation to generation. What little agency they have lies in their ability to understand the constraints of the world and conform to them, latching onto whatever temporary consolations and comforts they can find.
“The Wall” is the superficial exception that ultimately proves the rule: The narrator’s life transforms only after she is literally separated from it by the force field. And in the end, a lot of her old dilemmas turn out to still be with her. Haushofer is a writer of traps, not escapes. (She has one novel and a handful of novellas and short stories left to be translated, and I would be shocked if they challenged this generalization.)
Again and again, the narrator of “Killing Stella” does her best to avoid the truth. Once, when she feels herself getting too close to it, she takes a sleeping pill. Other times, she consoles herself with chilling ideas expressed in the register of self-help, like “You don’t need to grieve for things and people that don’t defend themselves,” and “We need to get used to thinking past people and things.”
I would not want to live in a world where all our novels were like this, guided by narrators who don’t carry us from mystery to solution, but instead just thrash around in the darkness. Still, I am glad that such novels exist; they are the literary equivalent of a sudden plunge into icy waters. They shock, they clarify. They remind us that life is not always a journey from confusion to understanding — that our insights can quickly turn into shovels we use to pile dirt on the truth, whatever it might have once been.
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