The Wall (1991) - Marlen Haushofer torrent

Category: Adults, Fantasy, General Fiction
Language: English
Keywords: Lonliness Survival

Written by Marlen Haushofer
Read by Kathe Mazur
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: June 4, 2013
Duration: 09:15:54

Shaun Whiteside - Translator

“I can allow myself to write the truth; all the people for whom I have lied throughout my life are dead…” writes the heroine of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, a quite ordinary, unnamed middle-aged woman who awakens to find she is the last living human being. Surmising her solitude is the result of a military experiment gone awry, she begins the terrifying work of not only survival but also self-renewal. The Wall is at once a simple and moving journal—with talk 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 a disturbing meditation on twentieth-century history.

A woman, her sister, and her brother-in-law vacation at a hunting cabin. The unnamed narrator stays at the cabin when the other two go into town and never return. While exploring outside the next day, she runs into an invisible wall, and it soon appears that she’s the only one left alive inside it except for her dog, a cat, and a cow. She hopes that someone will find her story, told as diary entries, someday. Kathe Mazur narrates in a flat, unemotional voice filled with despair. She conveys the woman’s drive to survive amid nearly overwhelming feelings of futility, loneliness, and depression, weighing the listener down with hopelessness. How could anyone find the will to survive such a bleak situation? —- AudioFile