KILLING ME SOFTLY

A German novel published by a celebrated Austrian writer in 1985 kept me terrific company on my coast to coast flight.

When I read The Wall by Marlen Haushofer a few years ago I found it disorienting and harsh. All of a sudden, while a woman is on holiday, she finds herself fettered behind a huge glass wall, cut off instantaneously from the rest of the world where, she discovers by and by, that the people are dead. Now she must find a way to live off the land—without any human contact whatsoever for as long as she can. We watch her as she makes sense of her new universe, a world in which self-preservation means caring for animals in the farm hourse—a cow, a dog, a cat and other creatures—and we realize that living away from human beings makes her into a person whom we do not recognize towards the end of her ordeal.

As I read Haushofer’s other novel in translation today—Killing Stella—I realized that this novel is really not that different from The Wall at its core. The protagonist of this novel is also walled off from the rest of the world. She is in her own head for so long that it has now become a habit. She is eroded by the machinations of her own mind, by her habitual paralysis and her tendencies of letting things just be. An extraordinary passage on the force of habit clues us in on how prescient her words are for what’s about to happen in the story.

I read somewhere that you can get used to anything, and habit is the strongest force in our lives. I don’t believe it. It’s only the excuse that we need to keep from thinking about the suffering of our fellow beings, or indeed about our own suffering. It’s only the excuse that we need to stop thinking about our own suffering. It’s true, a human being can endure a lot, not only out of habit, but because a faint spark glimmers within them, which they secretly hope will one day allow them to break the habit. The fact that they usually can’t, out of weakness and cowardice, does not speak against it.

It’s a world in which everything happens right under her very roof but she won’t speak of it to anyone. This is another act of self-preservation that some put into practice inside a marriage. They are not exactly in denial yet they pull an invisible cloak over themselves, not reacting to any development in order to protect what they believe they have. Things happen but nothing is said or done. In Killing Stella, so much happens but it’s never questioned or discussed even as the story hurtles towards its shocking end.

This work resonated with me powerfully with respect to the politics of this moment, as to how the silence within an exclusive group managed to do untold harm to scores of young women. I quote an article from The New York Times on how the price of admission into Jeffrey Epstein’s exclusive club was silence. The reporter quotes Kurt Gray, a moral philosopher at Ohio State University, who “described how people might find themselves complicit in unimaginable harm and collective silence;” I found myself connecting this to the situation inside the small family in this story, where the disingenuousness is tantamount to complicity.

What we also realize as we read the narrative is that self-preservation as a coping mechanism often leaves enormous destruction in its wake. Within relationships, what we often see as fracturing and destruction can actually end up being a constructive force. I’ve often heard that a divorce is sometimes be the only way to fix the inherent dysfunctionality of the said partnership. All too often, the child of a broken marriage recovers from the domestic upheaval, for he realizes that it is possible to move on and find peace and happiness again.

Rather than leave a trail of spoilers, I will just mention this is a story about a woman named Anna who recounts the tale of the arrival of a friend’s daughter into her small household, one that is already rife with tension from Richard, the adulterous husband, Wolfgang, their brooding teenage son, and Annette, a daughter in her pre-teens.

I did everything according to routine; for me reality meant staring into the garden, wandering restlessly around the house, and feeling warmth in my breast at the sight of Wolfgang. Something had happened to me years ago that left me in a diminished state, an automaton that just gets on with its work, barely suffers, and is only turned back for seconds at a time into the living young woman that it once was.

Translated by Shaun Whiteside, Killing Stella is brilliant—in plot, pacing, and prose. There are infinitely quotable and profound passages about life in this novella that left me wondering when this writer’s other novellas and short story collections will be translated and available in English.