my thoughts on Marlen Haushofer's The Wall

Summary: a woman is visiting at a hunting cabin in the alps and awakes one day to find herself alone, and surrounded by an invisible wall outside which everything is dead. She finds animals along the way, and survives for a few years alongside her cow, dog, and cats. The Wall is widely recognized as an important feminist text.

To start off, I really liked this book! I thought the prose was very simple in a calming way, and a lot of the descriptions were very cozy (kind of giving witch-looking-for-lost-cat-in-the-alps vibes >w<). I especially liked how there were no plot twists; major plot events, like being attacked and certain characters dying, were mentioned at different points throughout the narrative well before their actual description.

I also really enjoyed how bland the main character was; she's an adult woman with young adult children, but almost nothing is known about her prior life, including her name, occupation, and most other things. She focuses a lot on the transformative experience of her trauma and of spending so much time self-reliant in nature, and how ill-equipped she was for it as a woman in a late-60s Europe.