A Brilliant Writer Whose Books Offer Traps, Not Escapes
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.
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