The Wall

I can allow myself to write the truth; all the people for whom I have lied throughout my life are dead… writes the heroine of Marlen Haushofers The Wall a quite ordinary unnamed middle-aged woman who awakens to find she is the last living human being. Surmising her solitude is the result of a too successful military experiment she begins the terrifying work of not only survival but self-renewal. The Wall is at once a simple and moving talk of potatoes and beans of hoping for a calf of counting matches of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of ones name and a disturbing meditation on 20th century history.