The Fifth Year follows a five-year-old girl, Marili, through each season of a single year on her grandparents’ farm in the mountains of Austria. Her grand- mother is a quiet, melancholic woman; her grandfather, with his calm, cheerful disposition, radiates warmth. Marili’s parents have died in the war, and she is left to discover—with curiosity, wonder, and fear—the beauty and darkness of a quiet pastoral life. Sinister elements lurk beneath the surface of The Fifth Year, in Marili’s dreams and fantasies, and this deceptively simple tale of childhood, told in effervescent and evocative prose, bubbles to life in Marlen Haushofer’s inimitably alarming style.
The mysteries only deepen the further you get in Marlen Haushofer’s fiction, which takes on domestic repression in its many guises.
— Peter C. Baker, The New York Times
The human capacity to simply keep going lies at the heart of Haushofer’s understanding of the world. What is momentous and beautiful about life, she suggests, is that there is hardly anything we can’t stand; that is its horror, too.
— B. D. McClay, The Wall Street Journal
A window into the singularity of consciousness.
— Janique Vigier, Bookforum
Haushofer’s sentences are simple and concise, and full of careful thought. The ideas she expresses are so important that you wonder how you have managed to get by without them. There is something fundamental about The Wall in particular that reaches far beyond the supposed territory of its story. The book is a lesson—and an agonizing one—on how one might come to live among things neglected with cost. That New Directions has recently reissued it with an elegant picture of a cow on the front should be a great event for everyone who cares about literature.
— Missouri Williams, The Nation
An extraordinarily interesting writer, always underappreciated.
