Janique Vigier at Bookforum:
IN 1946 THE AUSTRIAN WRITER Marlen Haushofer began publishing fairy tales and short stories in newspapers and small magazines. Her prewar writings—stories, poems, chapters of novels—had all been lost, and during the war she wrote “not a single line.” The new stories were a pragmatic measure: they were written to be published, to supplement the household budget. (Her husband, a provincial dentist, frittered the family’s finances away on flashy cars.) Yet since neither he nor her sons read her works, they could also be a form of revenge. “Professionally, I feed on anger,” she wrote to a friend in 1968, two years before her death. This stifled anger takes oblique forms. Philosophical novels, thrillers, dreams: her enervating allegories are like burrs—they stick.
Haushofer never achieved the international recognition of her radical postwar contemporaries—Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke. Slightly older, preternaturally unimposing, she rarely left the country, was only tepidly recognized in her time, and worked at the margins.
more here.
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