Becca Rothfeld

Marlen Haushofer’s​ masterpiece, The Wall (1963), opens with the cessation of time, at least as humans mark and measure it. ‘Today, the fifth of November, I shall begin my report,’ the narrator writes, before correcting herself: ‘I don’t even know if today is really the fifth of November. Over the course of the past winter I’ve lost track of a few...

Awoman in a field​ cradling a baby and whispering: ‘This is what they want to take from you.’ A man explaining that bathing in cold water reduced his age by three years. An animated frog. A group of Mormon mothers performing a synchronised dance routine, then squabbling about their infidelities in a series of reels. Shitposts. Earnest sadposts. Thirst traps. A bulging man who...

Elfriede Jelinek’s​ eleven novels and more than twenty plays have few plausible characters and even fewer parsable plots. When she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004, the committee praised ‘her musical flow of voices and counter-voices’, which ‘reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power’. This is a polite way of saying...