Reviews

I ready 89% of this book in one afternoon in which I was getting progressively more obviously ill, reading in a fugue state which ended when I was forced to eat supper and take a covid test (positive) by my spouse and cat. It certainly tapped into the mood of despair and isolation I was feeling. The narrative has no breaks, lending itself to a feverish read. It alternates between matter of fact recounting of events - the report the narrator intends to set down - and passages of deep existential thoughts. It is an early critique of capitalism, and it dovetails well with the burgeoning second wave of feminism of the 1960s. It's also an early eco-feminist work, viewing the end of humanity with equanimity and acceptance that life will keep on without us perfectly well, though it will not be the same kinds of life. This book celebrates the last of the human-attached life but also turns the human into animal. Without other humans, the constructs that confine a woman's life can be discarded, but on a fundamental level, her humanity remains in the ability to love and care for others creatures. The isolationism that this book seems to endorse is undercut by the new community the narrator creates with the animals. In some ways, the isolation of this book, the individualism of it, is limiting, and dismissive of the importance of community, but at the same time it does advocate for the beyond-human kin and community beyond humanity. It is an interesting contrast to the book of Indigenous-futurism stories I'm also reading the The Deep, centered on Black community that I just finished. It shares the sense that community is larger than humanity, but denies the vitality of human community and history that the others embrace. And as much as this book embraces the kinship with the animal, it still reserves thought and agency as unique to the human, to some extent.

I very much liked that this also reads as a rebuttal to books like Jack London's where wilderness survival is almost exclusively a man's domain and must naturally be full of violent struggle. It is also something of a rebuttal to Walden; as Claire Louse Pond points out the afterword, of course a *man* might go live in the woods for years and that is perfectly fine and good, but should a woman wish to live alone there must be something unnatural about her. Her revelations from being alone with nature might not come out all that different from Thoreau's but they will certainly be dismissed by society at large.

Some passages:
p. 132-3

Even then Christmas had already died for me, not on that twenty-fourth of December in the forest. I realized I'd dreaded it since my children had stopped being children. I hadn't had the strength to bring the dying feast back to life
[...]
With me dies the feast of all the little children. In the future, a snowy forest will mean nothing but a snowy forest, and the crib in the stable nothing but a crib in the stable.
[...]
I wished my eyes could forget what that scene had so long meant to them. For something quite new lay waiting behind it all, which I was unable to see because my head was crammed full of old things and my eyes were unreceptive. I had lost the old without finding anything new: the new was closed to me, but I knew it was there. I don't know why that thought filled me with a very faint, almost imperceptible joy.

p. 161

I often look forward to a time when there won't be anything left to grow attached to. I'm tired of everything being taken away from me. Yet there's no escape, for as long as there's something for me to love in the forest, I shall love it: and if some day there is nothing, I shall stop living. If everyone had been like me there would never have been a wall, and the old man wouldn't have had to lie petrified by his spring. But I understand why the others always had the upper hand. Loving and looking after another creature is a very troublesome business, and much harder than killing and destruction. It takes twenty years to bring up a child, and then seconds to kill it. It took the bull a year to grow big and strong, and a few strokes of an ax were enough to dispatch him.

p. 184

The forest copes easily with my confusion. A new deer is born, another runs headlong to its doom. I'm not a troublemaker worth taking seriously. The nettles beside the byre will go on growing, even if I exterminate them a hundred times, and the will survive me. They have so much more times than I do. One day I shall no longer exist, and no one will cut the meadow, the thickets will encroach up on it and later the forest will push as far as the wall and win back the land that man has stolen from it. Sometimes my thoughts grow confused, and it is as if the forest has put down roots in me, and is thinking its old, eternal thoughts with my brain. And the forest doesn't want human beings to come back.
[...]
I find it hard to separate my old self from my new self, and I'm not sure that my new self isn't' gradually being absorbed into something larger that thinks of itself as "We." It was the Alm's fault. It was almost impossible, in the buzzing stillness of the meadow, beneath the big sky, to remain a single and separate Self, a little, blind, independent life that didn't want to fit in with a greater Being. Once my major source of pride had been that I was just such a life, but in the Alm it suddenly struck me as pathetic and absurd, an overinflated Nothing.

p.190

The night, which had always frightened me, and which I had often defied with blazing lights, lost all its terror in the Alm. I had never really known it before, locked in the stone houses behind blinds and curtains. The night wasn't dark at all. It was beautiful, and I started to love it. Even when it rained and a layer of clouds covered the sky, I knew that the stars were there, red, green, yellow, and blue. They were always there, even during the day, when I couldn't see them.

p.201

Well, she had chosen this free life of her own accord. But had she, really? After all, she couldn't choose. I saw no great difference between her and myself. I could choose, certainly, but only with my mind, and as far as I was concerned, that amounted to not being able to choose at all. The cat and I were made of the same stuff, and we were in the same boat, drifting with all living things toward the great dark rapids. As a human being, I alone had the honor of recognizing this, without being able to do anything about it. A dubious gift on the part of nature, if I thought about it.

from the afterword:

"But I shouldn't like to judge her too harshly," the arboreal woman says of the woman with the little double chin who was condemned to chase after a meaning that didn't exit and was quite unable to describe a common pigeon. "After all," she explains, "she never had the chance of consciously shaping her life. When she was young she unwittingly assumed a heavy burden by starting a family, and from then on she was always hemmed in by an intimidating amount of duties and worries. Only a giantess would have been able to free herself, and in no respect was she a giantess, never anything other than a tormented, overtaxed woman of medium intelligence, in a world, on top of everything else, that was hostile to women and which women found strange and unsettling." This censorious yet pragmatic evaluation of the domestic circumstances which enclose the lives of so many women is garnered no doubt from the author's own stifling experiences of womanhood. A reticent midcentury Austrian housewife, who preferred to remain on the edges socially, Marlen Haushofer may not have been a giantess, yet she was able to impart probity and strength while identifying the precise factors complicit in her subjugation, a feat which to my mind makes her absolutely colossal.

lindapinda's review against another edition

Go to review page

3.0

3.5 ✨

elsazetterljung's review

Go to review page

reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

fallinallinval's review against another edition

Go to review page

4.0

me partió el corazón en dos millones de pedacitos, aunque no me hubiera quejado si tuviera cien páginas menos

More...