Two thirds of the way into Peter C. Baker's review of a recent translation of The Wall, a 1963 postapocalyptic novel by Marlen Haushofer, he arrives at a series of questions that underlie mysteries, science fiction, and, implicitly, literature as a whole: 'Why write? Why describe your life for others? Why do anything at all?' In The Wall, Baker observes, Haushofer comes at these questions 'sideways': the narrator, writing in her journal while trapped alone in the Austrian forest, discovers that 'her worries over life's purpose . . . ring louder and louder, too loud to possibly ignore.'
I stumbled on The Wall fifteen years ago in a used bookstore in Rome. I was on vacation by myself and tore through it in a day, having one of those totally absorbing reading experiences that seem to get rarer as we get older. I wasn't doing much analysis at all, just reading, reading, reading. Completely immersed. On subsequent readings, and especially after becoming a novelist myself, I made more of an attempt to look under the hood at the book's machinery.
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