Description
Description
The Fifth Year follows a five-year-old girl, Marili, through each season of a single year on her grandparents' farm in the mountains of Austria. Her grand-mother is a quiet, melancholic woman; her grandfather, with his calm, cheerful disposition, radiates warmth. Marili's parents have presumably died in the war, and she is left to discover--with curiosity, wonder, and fear--the beauty and darkness of a quiet pastoral life. Sinister elements lurk beneath the surface of The Fifth Year, in Marili's dreams and fantasies, and this deceptively simple tale of childhood, told in effervescent and evocative prose, bubbles to life in Marlen Haushofer's inimitably alarming style.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
The mysteries only deepen the further you get in Marlen Haushofer's fiction, which takes on domestic repression in its many guises.--Peter C. Baker "The New York Times"
A window into the singularity of consciousness.--Janique Vigier "Bookforum"
An extraordinarily interesting writer, always underappreciated.--Elfriede Jelinek
The human capacity to simply keep going lies at the heart of Haushofer's understanding of the world. What is momentous and beautiful about life, she suggests, is that there is hardly anything we can't stand; that is its horror, too."--B.D. McClay "The Wall Street Journal"
Haushofer's sentences are simple and concise, and full of careful thought.The ideas she expresses are so important that you wonder how you havemanaged to get by without them.--Missouri Williams "The Nation"
Effortlessly poignant. Haushofer's prose is like clear lake water: clean, crisp, seemingly simple yet with surprising depths. This novella's translation from German to English was worth the 75-year wait.-- "Kirkus (starred)"
Deeply perceptive and sensuous--it's a stunner. The main event is Haushofer's painterly depiction of the landscape, as when she describes how the fog lifts as winter approaches.-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Pub date:
2026-05-05
Length:
80 pages
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