The Loft

An Austrian housewife sits in her loft intent on her drawings of birds and insects. Then one day a disturbing package arrives in the post... 
 
The narrator of this story spends her free time in her loft. It is a retreat where she can draw undisturbed. It is also a retreat from her dull and dissatisfied husband, a man who sighs unhappily even when she sneezes. Their grown-up children are living independent lives and the house is very quiet. Her dreams are filled with domestic drudgery. 
 
The arrival of the parcel threatens her quiet equilibrium. It contains extracts from the narrator's diary, written twenty years before. They date back to a time when she was sent away by her husband to a remote cottage in a bid to 'cure' her from unexplained sudden deafness. More mysterious packages arrive. Who is sending them? And what did happened all those years ago in the forest? 
 
'A thrilling novel... What gives this book its tremendous power? First the voice is charming, with a skittish beauty throughout... But there is also disarming honesty, and a lack of vanity, which appeals as only truth can’ John Self, Guardian 
 
TRANSLATED BY AMANDA PRANTERA

Her prose is a model of simplicity and concision; but the pictures which her sentences paint are enigmatic, overdetermined, elusive. We can claim her books for feminism, for eco-politics, for existentialism or psychoanalysis, or we can take them as thrillers or dreams

Marlen Haushofer (Author) 
Marlen Haushofer (1920–1950) was born in Frauenstein, Austria, the daughter of a forester. After the Second World War, she worked in her husband’s dentistry practice and had two children, but before long she began publishing short stories in magazines. She lived something of a double life, splitting her time between being a quiet, traditional housewife in Steyr, and a writer in fashionable literary circles in Vienna. Her most enduring work was The Wall, first published in 1963, and now considered a classic of dystopian fiction.

An Austrian housewife sits in her loft intent on her drawings of birds and insects. 
 
The loft is a retreat where she can work undisturbed. It is also a retreat from her dull and dissatisfied husband, a man who sighs unhappily even when she sneezes. Their grown-up children are living independent lives and the house is very quiet. Her dreams are filled with domestic drudgery. 
 
Then one day, a package arrives containing extracts from the narrator's diary, written twenty years before. Back then she had been sent away to a remote cottage in a bid to 'cure' her from unexplained sudden deafness. More mysterious packages containing old diary entries arrive. Who is sending them? And what did happened all those years ago in the forest? 
 
'A thrilling novel... What gives this book its tremendous power? First the voice is charming, with a skittish beauty throughout... But there is also disarming honesty, and a lack of vanity, which appeals as only truth can’ John Self, Guardian 
 
TRANSLATED BY AMANDA PRANTERA

Marlen Haushofer

Shaun Whiteside

A woman's weekend away in the Austrian mountains takes an inexplicable and sinister turn - and becomes a fight for 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. 
 
'Every joint and sinew of the story is restless with a sense of threat' London Review of Books 
 
'Brilliant in its sustainment of dread, in its peeling away of old layers of reality to expose a raw way of seeing and feeling.' Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love 
 
TRANSLATED BY SHAUN WHITESIDE

Marlen Haushofer

Books by Marlen Haushofer

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