By MARLEN HAUSHOFER
Review by BRIANNA BEEHLER
When I was a child, I was afraid to go upstairs by myself at my grandparents’ house. At the top of the stairs was a print of Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting, Weeping Woman’s Head with Handkerchief III, and the sight of the woman’s tears found their way into my dreams at night. I didn’t know the painting’s context and the casual violence against civilians in Guernica that it referred to, but the image of the woman’s suffering would give me a sense of vertigo, and in the night I imagined climbing the stairs only to lose my balance on sight of the woman’s tight grip and upturned face.
This relationship with an artwork made me feel a sense of kinship with Marili, the four-year-old whose consciousness is at the center of Marlen Haushofer’s The Fifth Year, translated by Shaun Whiteside into English for the first time since its original publication in German in 1951. In Marili’s room hangs an oil painting of the crucified Christ. While Marili imagines God as a loving and grandfatherly figure, the painting’s Christ oppresses her as she tries to sleep. For Marili, the Christ figure takes on a threatening physical presence that suffuses the room, sometimes being convinced to climb “back into his painting” and other times refusing “to be moved by her pleas.” This ghostly instability reemerges elsewhere within Haushofer’s novella as Marili’s dreams, imagination, and sense of reality converge. A dead mouse and pool of water encountered in life enter Marili’s dreamworld, leading her to wake in terror; the coldness of a glass on her mother’s picture sets her heart racing, creating the sense that something “had gone wrong.” In documenting the fifth year of Marili’s life, Haushofer captures a child’s consciousness attempting to make sense of the great pastoral beauty––and immense loss––that surrounds her.
The compact form of this representation contributes to the effect of Marili’s movement between reality and dreams as well as to the text’s blending of child and adult impressions of time, which emerges through the adult third-person narrator’s focalization of Marili’s perspective. In a slim 92 pages, Haushofer details the passing of seasons from winter to winter in the presumably post-World War II Austrian countryside where Marili lives on a farm with her grandparents. These grandparents––always loving, but at times distant from Marili in their grief and in their long, shared life together––are mourning the deaths of all five of their children, three of whom died, as Marili’s grandmother puts it, “in the war.” Marili’s existence is haunted by a war she cannot remember and the deaths of people she has only briefly, if ever, met. These are all events that belong to what Marili’s grandmother refers to as “before,” which acts as an “unapproachable force” for Marili, who lives in the eternal present of childhood. When she wakes, she feels that “nothing had ever existed but snow and winter.” It was “always cold in the room in the morning” and her grandparents’ room was “all as it had always been.”
This sense of permanence is at odds with the narrative’s progression of the seasons across Marili’s fifth year and the text’s own brevity. I finished the novella in a single sitting and the experience felt as fleeting as my childhood feels to me now, reduced as it is to a handful of memories. And yet, what Haushofer manages through her narration is for her reader to experience both of these perspectives at once: the child’s certainty of the present and the reader’s knowledge that that present has long since disintegrated.
Buoying the sadness that pervades the novella is Haushofer’s prose and Whiteside’s sharp translation, which glitter like the dew on the apple tree in Marili’s grandparents’ farmyard. What most struck me were the moments of pastoral beauty: a patch of sunlight on a dog’s forehead, the sound of milk hitting a pail, Marili’s careful rescuing of drunken wasps from funnels of “green-gold” cider. Haushofer conveys Marili’s delight in her surrounding landscape in language that almost quivers with Marili’s suppressed laughter. For example, this description of Marili encountering bumblebees in a nearby valley:
When [Marili] raised her eyes she saw swarms of huge, furry yellow and brown bumblebees hanging from the blue blossoms. The tall stems trembled under the weight of their round guests. Marili loved the bumblebees from the bottom of her heart, their belligerent buzz, their wooly fur, and their wings as clear as water.
Marili’s wonder at the natural world and almost instantaneous tenderness towards the bumblebees is both comic and endearing, and our ability to laugh along with Marili’s joys (as well as her fears, moments of boredom, and flashes of anger) make her perspective an engaging one to inhabit.
But beneath these idyllic moments lies the constant presence of death, the knowledge of which Haushofer holds just out of Marili’s reach. In one of the novella’s final images, Marili awakens from a severe illness only to notice that the image of Christ in her room “still seemed to be waiting for something.” That her own death lies in the future is a fact she is only momentarily suspended from. For, as Marili thinks earlier when trying to uncover the meaning of an unfamiliar word, “That was always how it was: all of a sudden the knowledge was there and you couldn’t imagine not having known it a minute before.”
Brianna Beehler received her PhD in English Literature from the University of Southern California. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Public Books, and elsewhere. Raised in Vermont, she now lives outside San Francisco.
