The Wall (discover This Addictive Dystopia From The Vintage Earth Series)

By (author) Haushofer Marlen; Translated by Whiteside Shaun
Description:

When her cousin and wife fail to return from a walk, this story takes a sinister turn to a quest of survival

A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When the couple fails to return from a walk, the woman sets off to look for them. But her journey reaches a sinister and inexplicable dead end. She discovers only a transparent wall behind which there seems to be no life. Trapped alone behind the mysterious wall she begins the arduous work of survival.

This is at once a simple account of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one''s name, and simultaneously a disturbing dissection of the place of human beings in the natural world.

**PERFECT FOR FANS OF THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, STATION ELEVEN AND THE MARTIAN**

VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each one is a work of creative activism, a blast of fresh air, a seed from which change can grow. The books in this series reconnect us to the planet we inhabit - and must protect. Discover great writing on the most urgent story of our times.

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It''s a novel that contrives to be, by turns, utopian and dystopian, an idyll and a nightmare... Every joint and sinew of the story is restless with a sense of threat
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Brilliant in its sustainment of dread, in its peeling away of old layers of reality to expose a raw way of seeing and feeling. Doris Lessing once remarked that only a woman could have written this novel, and it''s true... I''ve read The Wall three times already and am nowhere near finished
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It makes you sick, because, if she wasn''t a woman, everyone would be reading it, like Robinson Crusoe
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Totally gripping
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An extraordinarily interesting writer, always underappreciated
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The Wall is a wonderful novel. It is not often that you can say only a woman could have written this book, but women in particular will understand the heroine''s loving devotion to the details of making and keeping life, every day felt as a victory against everything that would like to undermine and destroy
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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
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The Wall is speculative fiction of a distinctly existential sort, where the subject being speculated on is not what happened to the world, but what happens to reality when society is stripped away...Nothing resolves, yet the book is constantly resonating
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Brutal and absorbing... But The Wall is also a resonant and realistic account of a widowed, middle-aged woman, disenchanted and depressed with the sum of her days, who is presented with the opportunity to enact what has previously eluded her: a life of her own imagining. In this way, Haushofer''s book is one of the most profoundly feminist works of the past century
Biographical note:

Marlen Haushofer (Author)
Marie Helene Haushofer was born in Frauenstein, Austria in 1920. Following the Second World War, she worked in her husband''s dentistry practice. She began publishing short stories in magazines from 1946. She enjoyed success with her novella The Fifth Year, which was published in 1952 but her most enduring work was The