Loft
An Austrian housewife sits in her loft intent on her drawings of birds and insects. Then one day a disturbing package arrives in the post...
The narrator of this story spends her free time in her loft. It is a retreat where she can draw undisturbed. It is also a retreat from her dull and dissatisfied husband, a man who sighs unhappily even when she sneezes. Their grown-up children are living independent lives and the house is very quiet. Her dreams are filled with domestic drudgery.
The arrival of the parcel threatens her quiet equilibrium. It contains extracts from the narrator's diary, written twenty years before. They date back to a time when she was sent away by her husband to a remote cottage in a bid to 'cure' her from unexplained sudden deafness. More mysterious packages arrive. Who is sending them? And what did happened all those years ago in the forest?
'A thrilling novel... What gives this book its tremendous power? First the voice is charming, with a skittish beauty throughout... But there is also disarming honesty, and a lack of vanity, which appeals as only truth can’ John Self, Guardian
TRANSLATED BY AMANDA PRANTERA
Marlen Haushofer (Author)
Marlen Haushofer (1920–1950) was born in Frauenstein, Austria, the daughter of a forester. After the Second World War, she worked in her husband’s dentistry practice and had two children, but before long she began publishing short stories in magazines. She lived something of a double life, splitting her time between being a quiet, traditional housewife in Steyr, and a writer in fashionable literary circles in Vienna. Her most enduring work was The Wall, first published in 1963, and now considered a classic of dystopian fiction.