The Loft by Marlen Haushofer has a quiet, introspective charm that I really respected. The atmosphere feels like stepping into another time, and the author's attention to detail is beautifully captured I found the writing style elegant and contemplative.

Haushofer has a way of painting solitude with honesty and care, and there’s something haunting yet soothing about the narrator’s reflections and retreat into her loft. It’s a thoughtful read that I think would resonate with anyone drawn to slower, character-driven storytelling.

This is a very strange novel but apparently celebrated in Austria and published in a new edition here. The story is narrated by a mature woman and covers one week in her life with her husband Hubert. It’s fair to say that their relationship has gone cold but she has a loft at the top of the house which is her retreat. Here, she makes a small living as an illustrator by drawing animals and birds. During the described week, she receives a daily package containing her diary entries from a much earlier time when she experienced temporary deafness and was sent away to the country to be looked after by a gamekeeper. She claims to have an idea of who has sent these.

The way she describes her relationship with her husband is an interesting feature and contains some dry insights into the compromises people make in later life. She spends most of her time trying not to think of, or remember, better times.

The diary entries explain how she meets a stranger, X, who is clearly seriously disturbed and it is one hysterical meeting with him that appears to cure her deafness.

After all this, it is fair to ask what the book is all about. It’s not exactly a feminine classic given that the narrator does very little to change her life, although men are obviously criticised. It might be that she has been traumatised by events around the period of her deafness but nothing additional adds to this hypothesis. Perhaps the book is a kind of allegory of the state of Austria after the Second World War, where Hubert is the blinkered government, and X the damaged citizens, while the loft represents the only escape into the mind.

Who knows? The book ends with the narrator being able to draw a fantastical and creatively inspired dragon instead of the detailed pictures of small creatures and, maybe, that represent some kind of escape.

Should you read it? It’s an interesting story with some perceptive comments about marriage and quite amusing in its own way. As to what the rest means, there’s an interesting discussion to be had!

This is a quiet and understated short novel about a woman’s inner world and her struggle between her artistic and domestic life. She is the unnamed narrator who takes us through her reflections as she looks back on a period of her life when she suffered some sort of breakdown which caused temporary deafness and when she was sent away for a “cure”. Now back home with her husband and children, she is still alienated from her circumstances and often takes refuge in the loft where she compulsively draws birds and insects – a skill in which she is proficient but which obviously expresses her inner turmoil. When some mysterious packages start to arrive her hard-won equilibrium is put at risk and she has to confront yet again her claustrophobic and empty marriage, from which there is no escape. It’s a disquieting and unsettling novel, atmospheric and often painful to read, an unusual yet insightful exploration of domesticity and repression and a woman’s place in society.

The Loft by Marlen Haushofer begins with an Austrian housewife minding her own, sketching birds and bugs in her loft – until a weird package shows up. Inside are diary entries from 20 years ago, when her husband shipped her off to some remote cottage to “cure” her sudden deafness. Sounds cozy. Then more yellow envelopes show up, and suddenly, I'm wondering: who’s sending these, and what actually went down in that creepy forest back then?

This is definitely a slow simmer with some seriously deep observations about loneliness, boredom, and a marriage slowly rotting from the inside. The story is told through our nameless narrator who is kind of like a friend who’s a little bit depressing but you can’t stop listening to. Despite all the gloom, the narrator is relatable and refreshingly honest but mostly just stuck in her own head.

The ending left me wanting more. This one’s a bit odd, definitely different, but I'm really glad it was sent to me by the publisher via NetGalley to read and review with my honest thoughts.

This is an insight into the domestic routine of a woman in Australia during the 60's and the outlet she found to beat the boredom of routine and to lighten up her life by drawing birds and insects. Still, the surprise comes from the past that opens up old feelings of what happened during that time.
This is a book that was ahead of its time, capturing the restrictions imposed on women, the feeling of being alone even though her husband is in the house, and the haunting of the past that bears down on us.
An absolute gem of a book and well worth a read

This is a really slow paced, unsettling read that did at first strike me as a little underwhelming, but the more it went on and the more you understood the characters then the more it struck a chord and felt like a very well written and intricate look at the lives of seemingly normal people.

Told from the viewpoint of the female character, who loves to retreat to her loft to paint birds, it paints a picture of a married couple, seemingly at odds with each other and where they are in life and living mostly separate lives. A son has left the family home, but there's still a teenage daughter living with them who is going through a rebellious stage so wants very little to do with her parents.

And then the envelopes begin to appear, addressed to the wife, and she starts to look back on pages from her old diary and you start to unravel the mystery of why they are where they are in life right now.

if you are looking for fast paced action, then this isn't the book for you! But it is a really intriguing novel and you can see why it made such inroads when first released!

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!

The Loft is an unsettling novel about a woman who finds solace in the loft of her house, until she doesn't.

I thought this was beautifully written but a little dull? For a book that is so character focussed I feel like I never really got to know the protagonist. I am definitely intrigued enough to read The Wall now though.

The Loft by Marlen Haushofer is a truly engaging story of an Austrian woman and her relationship with her husband and family with respect to what happened in her past.

Initially we are not sure why she antagonises her husband over minor things such as the type of tree they see from their window. But when she starts to receive envelope packages she retreats to her loft to read what she recognizes and we understand the source of her antipathy.

The Loft is a unusual and very well-written story that I really enjoyed reading. Glad to see it has been translated and republished so many years after it's first publication.

The Loft by Marlen Haushofer is a quiet yet deeply unsettling exploration of memory, isolation and domestic suffocation. At its centre is a seemingly unremarkable Austrian housewife who spends her days sketching insects and birds in the sanctuary of her attic. Her loft is more than a workspace – it is a refuge from the oppressive silence of her marriage and the absence left by her adult children.

Haushofer masterfully captures the monotony and emotional inertia of the narrator's existence. Her husband is passive yet stifling, their home static and stripped of affection. But the delicate stillness begins to crack when a mysterious parcel arrives – a bundle of diary entries she wrote twenty years ago, during a troubling period of unexplained deafness and exile to a forest cottage.

As more packages follow, the story edges into psychological suspense. The fragmented memories unearthed from that time raise unsettling questions about what really happened in the forest and why her husband had sent her away. Haushofer’s prose is quiet, almost austere, yet it brims with menace and tension, making the everyday feel uncanny.

This is not a thriller in the traditional sense, but a haunting character study that challenges the reader to confront the hidden costs of repression, the fragility of memory and the quiet devastation of a life unlived. Introspective and chilling in equal measure, The Loft confirms Haushofer’s place as a master of claustrophobic domestic fiction.

Read more at The Secret Book Review.

The Loft
By Marlen Haushofer
Translated from the German by Amanda Prantera

Originally published in 1969, this must have been considered quite subversive in it's day. Told over 8 days through a stream of consciousness narrative, it's the story of an Austrian housewife, an empty nester, who appears on the surface to live in service of her bland and dull husband, attending to her household chores and minimising inconveniences in his life. Her only outlet is her daily escape to the loft where she sketches birds and insects.

Unexpectedly, she begins to receive packages through the post, containing some of her old journals, and she is drawn backwards to a time when she experienced a period of deafness and had a dalliance which we must read between the lines about.

This is one of those stories where the voice is the hook. In the first sentence, Haushofer sets up everything we need to know about the state of the marriage, and questions start to arise, many of which are never truly resolved.

Through hint and allusion, it becomes clear that the narrator has a rich parallel life. In the 1960s, especially in rural and traditional locations, married women had little scope for anything other than domesticity. Women were still ancillary characters in literature and media. As chance would have it, I'm also currently reading Deborah Levy's "Real Estate", and the exact same themes are the subject of her early chapters. I laughed out loud when I read it within minutes of finishing this one.

Between her "deafness", her unarticulated affair, her snarky parallel inner discourses and her dragon in the attic, she may be the slipperiest anarchist of a little wifey I have read about in a while.

Publication date: 5th June 2025
Thanks to #Netgalley for sending me the ARC, these are my honest opinions

It is nice to occasionally read an old fashioned classic or other book.
I wouldn't quite call this a classic, and the style is a little hard to get to love at first.
Too much thinking compared to modern books.
I got to love this book style.
The book tells the story of a troubled 30 something housewife, who become deaf and has traits that would probably be considered on the spectrum nowadays.
The story is essentially told through her brain rather than her mouth.
I would recommend all serious readers to give this ago, they may be surprised like I was, and really enjoy it.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

A deep and moving study of what might have been.

"The Loft" opens in a bedroom, where a husband and wife are arguing over what kind of tree they can see from the window. The middle-aged couple are clearly in a rut, arguing over small things, as those married for many years do. We learn that the wife spends much of her time in the loft, drawing birds, an escape from her mundane life. But one day. a small package arrives in the post, containing pages of a notebook she kept at a time when she was sent away by her husband in a bid to cure her sudden deafness. When further packages arrive, she begins to wonder who is sending them, and why. As the story develops, we learn much about the woman, her husband, and their life.

The style of writing used in this book is perhaps not what modern readers might be used to, and there are sections which do drag on somewhat. But the prose is almost lyrical, the observations profound and insightful. We learn more about the narrator (whose name we never discover) and what led her to this point in her life. She is the sole narrator, so everything we see is from her perspective, her inner voice. We learn about the slow death of a marriage, the isolation and the boredom. The ending of the book might frustrate modern readers, but the journey to get the the final page is immensely rewarding.

This book was written in 1969 - author Marlen Haushofer died in 1970. I'm sure she would be delighted to know that more than fifty years later, her book was bringing pleasure to readers once again. Thoroughly recommended.

The Loft by Marlen Haushofer

The drudgery of an Austrian housewife's everyday life with her husband is relieved by her time spent in the loft where she draws birds. When she starts to receive packages of pages of her diary in the post, written 20 years ago when she was sent to recuperate in a remote hut in a forest after suddenly becoming deaf, the quiet if boring life she has lived since then is disturbed.

I really enjoyed this book and read it in one go. It reminded me of The Yellow Wallpaper at times, or Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness, and the writing is so good that the inner voice/monologue works really well and is very compelling. I was intrigued about why she went deaf and then how she recovered... and who was sending the packages. Very highly recommended.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book.

To be honest I thought this book was going to be in "thriller mode" so I misjudged completely. I loved this book and really glad I decided to request it.
Maybe just my take but I did hear loud echoes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman here. Whilst Haushofer's character is freer there are definite paralells between the two, a woman, in one room, the restrictions of life, the way she focuses on her art but only ever draws birds or butterflies.The constraints of being female and trying to please her husband
The writing is beautiful, almost poetic and draws you in to the story. Slightly disappointed that the mystery is never fully resolved but then maybe that's the point.
A real gem of a book

Our unnamed narrator is 47 and lives a quiet life with her husband Hubert in Austria. She is a housewife, she works hard to make Hubert’s life as easy as possible, spending her free time in the loft of their house where she draws birds and insects, though many a time they fail to meet her satisfaction and are confined to a drawer. The loft is her place of retreat, of peace from her somewhat dull, silent and distant husband whose horizons are very narrow. It’s a release from the monotony of her days and the mundane repetitiveness, where she aims to keep busy to keep her thoughts under control. One day her uncertain equilibrium is disturbed when an unexpected package in a yellow envelope arrives and so she bundles it away so it cannot have its intended impact. However, read it she must as it’s her old diary. This 1969 work centres around the anatomy of a marriage which can best be described as shrivelled on the vine and the guilt that lies at the heart of it all. It examines how being solitary can be rewarding in the quest for survival.

This novel is beautifully written, it’s lyrical at times with apt phrases and images. Each scene is written with careful clarity so they can easily be seen with the minds eye. I can picture Hubert, reading his historical tomes of epic battles and her carefully drawing swallows or whatever the focus is and the dissatisfaction when what’s in her head doesn’t always translate to how she imagines. It’s very revealing on her background, her parents and extended family and how this leads to keeping herself so buttoned up. Despite the bleakness of it, the spotlight on her marriage is revealing and immersive reading and as for Hubert, it’s no wonder she takes herself off to the loft so frequently!

I really like the author’s style of writing, she seems to be able to make the most ordinary interesting by her tone, her occasional humour, her incisive and often amusing phrases or descriptions of people. This means that our narrators encounters are always fascinating as you see these people through her eyes.

There’s a real mystery attached to the yellow envelopes and it’s never fully resolved. You never truly find out what trauma precipitates the sequence of events. Despite the darkness and the depressing nature of her life, our narrator is very likeable, she’s honest and good company. A lot of what happens to her seems to be self imposed, but it all demonstrates her isolation from life in general. You become part of inner turmoil but by sticking to a strict routine it helps to keep her going.

This is a very different and unusual novel, it’s insightful and I’m glad to have been offered the opportunity to read it.

Marlen Haushofer 1920-70

An Austrian author, her most famous work is The Wall, published in 1963. The Loft was published in 1969 shortly before her death from cancer and has an excellent translation from the original German by Amanda Prantera. I’m intrigued enough to want to read The Wall.

With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Vintage for the much appreciated copy in return for an honest review.

The Loft is a quietly unsettling novel by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Amanda Prantera, tracing the inner life of a woman trapped in the routines of domesticity and silence. Through her retreat to an attic studio, where she obsessively draws insects and birds, the narrator seeks a fragile sense of autonomy amid the emotional vacuum of her marriage.

Rendered in spare, luminous prose, Haushofer captures the disquiet beneath ordinary life — the burden of memory, the constrictions of womanhood, and the subtle terror of losing oneself. The Loft is both intimate and existential, a haunting meditation on solitude and the suppressed self.