Maggie Stiefvater's Reviews > The Wall

A slippery, vaguely speculative novel from 1960s Austria about an invisible wall that descends to separate the narrator from everyone else; impossible to not read through the lens of postwar ennui—Haushofer would've been a wide-eyed liberal arts student when WW2 upended every plan she thought she had for her life. Haushofer's naturalistic attention to detail reminded me, strangely enough, of I Capture the Castle and My Side of the Mountain more than any older speculative titles.

Am I happy I read it? Yes. Would I recommend it? I don't know; it's too long, for starters, and deeply pessimistic, for finishers. Haushofer didn't live long enough to see the war disappear from the rearview mirror, and you can feel it on every page. But the mood of the novel has lingered with me for weeks; I suspect that means it was great.