The Wall

SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP

i love this book so much. this is how i envision my future—in the middle of nowhere with no one but animals as my companions and being self sufficient. the narrator's life is hard but she was content and at peace. yes, it was lonely especially when dealing with death but that's life, that's nature. i found this book really beautiful that i can't even articulate my thoughts right now.

and of course, a man ruins EVERYTHING

I read this book over the course of 3 days while camping alone in the woods (the absolute perfect setting to read this book about a woman alone in the forest). What a dream of a novel - nothing and everything happens on every page. It is simultaneously mundane and wildly surreal. It also contains the most compelling description of a human being's relationships to domestic animals that I have ever read.

Highly recommend - incidentally, I found it a little bit hard to track down a copy of this book. I think it's possible that the English translation is out of print (or at least it was out of stock indefinitely everywhere I looked for it). I found it on thriftbooks. I found out about it because it is mentioned (not by name, just described) in one of the stories in Pond by Claire-Louise Bennet (the narrator describes the book she is reading, and it is this book).

It was ok. It really is a report of sorts about a woman who lives together with animals she meets and how she survives with them in a world where she might be the only one left.

It's quite simple and I'm not necessarily bought by its possible transformative nature. It doesn't have too much introspection, it's mostly just her account how she lived in the Austrian Alps and what she did daily and how she loved her animals.

At 160 pages I decided to skim towards the end, but the report mode continues the same and then it just ends. No dramatic conclusions or anything.