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“... 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 days ...”

“... Among​ the leading Austrian writers of the postwar period, Marlen Haushofer is an unobtrusive presence. Where Bachmann and Bernhard, Handke and Jelinek all in their time achieved international recognition, Haushofer hung back, failing to take the chance, when it came, to break beyond Austrian borders, and, at her untimely death (she died of bone cancer in 1970, three weeks short of her fiftieth birthday), left a miscellany of work that has neither fallen into complete neglect nor settled into general acceptance ...”

“... what sense did she survive it? There’s a strange, haunting novel called Die Wand (The Wall) by Marlen Haushofer, an Austrian writer from the generation before Jelinek’s, in which a woman finds herself trapped in a mountain valley which has been sealed off by a mysterious and invisible wall. She is alone except for a dog, a cat and a cow. As the ...”