The Loft by Marien Haushofer translated by Amanda Prantera

I would like to thank Vintage for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Vintage Classics

Published – Out now

Price – £16.99 hardback £8.99 ebook

A 1960s Austrian housewife is forced to re-examine her past when pages from old diaries begin to arrive mysteriously in the letter box at her family home. Each day after the windows are clean and the baking is done, she forces herself to read and burn the evidence of her troubled youth. The Loft, published shortly before Haushofer's death in 1970, explores the anatomy of a desiccated marriage, the power of solitude, and the failure of Austrian society in the aftermath of Nazism. Like Haushofer's cult feminist classic The Wall, The Loft is a disturbing and ultimately uplifting tale of alienation, survival, and of finding joy in the strangest of places.

Do you idly watch people and wonder what they are thinking. We may notice the same people on our commutes like us doing the same things at the same times. Life from the outside can be ordinary but what someone’s inner thoughts may be very different. Imagine being prey to those inner thoughts, seeing the world and someone’s life from their own perspectives. That is the treat in the dark and fantastic novel The Loft by Marlen Haushofer translated by Amanda Prantera and this 1969 novel now being re-issued in a new edition takes what outwardly looks an ordinary housewife and makes us see her inner life, her secrets from her past, thoughts on the future and creates something strange, eerie and unsettling out of the everyday.

Austria in the 1960s. Our narrator is a married mother of two and sometimes illustrator. Her husband a lawyer, her eldest son left home while her remining daughter is becoming a rebellious teenager. Life is fairly routine for her and yet in the last few days diary entries from nearly twenty years ago are being mailed to her. A time when she was hidden from the world trying to recover and she was very unsure as to her future. This starts to interfere with her regular routine and where her life may be going. Her loft where she draws has been her own inner sanctuary but now the past appears to be arriving in it to be read and digested all again.

If you’re wanting a tale of big action, huge events and earth shaking revelations I am going to warn you this is not that kind of book, but this was a story I decided to read knowing very little in and for me is one of the most engrossing and beguiling novels I’ve read this year. While very much an intimate human drama where one character over a week talks to us about their day and mixes this with their past it nimbly creates an atmosphere of someone clearly troubles, repressed and has such a powerful strangeness it almost feels a touch of the psychological horror to it. A story about the feeling of getting to your late forties and thinking is this all I’ve got to do.

Haushofer creates the feeling initially of a couple who know each other’s routine by the clock. The standard weekend routines, the conversations they always have and the petty annoyances that over years become aggravating. Our unnamed narrator shows the husband Hubert to be slightly set in his ways and seemingly oblivious to his wife’s thoughts. This could very easily be a standard literary drama, but Haushofer throws into stranger thoughts. Our narrator is an artist fixated by drawing birds but always troubled by what she creates. The contrast between this very middle class gendered normal life and these strange uneasy feelings in our character start to There is a Shirley Jackson like quality to us feeling things aren’t quite right and then we get these diary pages suddenly appearing in the mail.

We establish that some event triggered our character being sent to the countryside shortly after marriage and giving birth. She’d suddenly become completely deaf to the world though doctors think this is psychological. Supervised by a strange gamekeeper she ponders her future and soon expects her new husband to abandon her. What future could await her?

There is something darkly fascinating about finding out this secret to our character’s life. One she seems to both have forgotten about and as we follow her over the week, we sense have led to many of her choices. Haushofer plays with contradictions. The husband Hubert appears so engrossed in his own life we think they are going to break up and yet we get to meet their first awkward meeting as young people and there is a strange tenderness to them. We find our narrator had parents who thanks to tuberculosis could not touch her and died on her. Without being explicit the reader starts to put our characters life in order and starts to understand her choices even if we do not always agree with them. Why may she suddenly had decided to turn her outer world volume control to silent?

One recurring theme is our character feels driven to meet people she isn’t really that fond of. This may be a haughty overbearing woman she met in an air raid shelter named The Baroness, a woman she met in hospital while both gave birth named The Nice lady and even a dying cook she never really liked who worked for her mother-in-law. These encounters are awkwardly fascinating as our narrator tells us what she really thinks and eventually this links back to a very strange man she met while secluded called X. Our character seems to be repeating this trend but its left for us to work out why. It is worth noting that the shadow of WW2 which only ended less than 15 years ago for the Austrian characters does raise some provocative questions about what has been going on in various people’s lives and yet nothing is ever explicitly explained which I think really works for this book. People are processing events that have left huge marks on their lives that in many ways they want the next generation to not experience like they have. Our narrator is not getting amazing self-revelations indeed as we follow her days we think she may be contradicting herself in places but the personal battle of someone at least revisiting a hidden past is the key arc for the story and perhaps finding some inner peace. No confrontations, no explicit explanations for every strange event we see but just perhaps an acknowledgement that you can move on slowly.

The Loft is a beautifully strange read. Intimate, quiet and yet as we follow one character’s not so ordinary week we gain a whole sense of her own inner world, past and potential future. I found it often disquieting and yet has a shade of hope for the future in it. The psychological character study we get is so well handled. I come away with he thought that you can sometimes move on and come to terms with yourself even if your world will not be amazingly changed in the process. It is strongly recommended!