2024 book 119

Marlen Haushofer's The Wall (trans. by Shaun Whiteside)

I definitely did not PLAN to read another book that is the diary of a woman who is maybe the last person in the world right after reading I Who Have Never Known Men, but that happened somehow. This was originally written in Austria in the early 1960s, and it's about a woman who goes with some friends to visit their remote hunting lodge. They go out one afternoon but never return, and soon she realizes she in inside a sort of transparent wall, and every living creature outside the wall is dead (she assumes this is some sort of war thing). So she has to survive in this weird circle that's left--along with a dog, a cat, and a cow. (WARNING: some of these animals die! But the narrator makes that clear pretty early on--there is still some dread leading up to those deaths though.) This was a slower book, but an interesting companion (both authors were children during WWII and I think there's a discussion to be had about that for sure). I will say after all that slowness, the end felt VERY abrupt. A-/B+.