Killing Stella

Anna is "on [her] own at last." Her husband, Richard, has taken their children--Wolfgang, 15; Annette, 8--to visit his mother. Her desperation is immediately palpable: she must exorcise what happened to the titular Stella, a friend's 19-year-old daughter who came to live with the family and died when she stepped off the curb into the path of a heavy truck. "I have to write about her before I begin to forget her. Because I'll have to forget her if I want to resume my old peaceful life," Anna narrates. Complicit guilt is stifling Anna, as she's the one who enabled "clumsy and shy" Stella to blossom into her beauty, accidentally igniting Richard's philandering predation. Anna knew about Richard and Stella. Precociously observant Wolfgang knows. Only Annette seems oblivious. The late Haushofer (1920--70) brilliantly transforms an inevitable fatal ending into an electrifying beginning. Originally published in 1958, precisely translated by Shaun Whiteside (who also anglophoned The Wall, 2022), Stella remains timelessly potent, its haunting horror more relevant than ever.

This potent 1958 novella from Austrian writer Haushofer (The Wall) takes the form of a mother's agitated confession. Anna, 40, sits by the window in her house while her adulterous husband, Richard; 15-year-old son, Wolfgang; and eight-year-old daughter, Annette, are gone. In the empty house, Anna feels an implacable urge to tell the "pitiful" story of Stella, the 19-year-old daughter of a friend, who recently came to live with Anna's family and died after being hit by a truck. Stella's stay starts out amicably enough, but Anna soon reveals the disharmony that contributed to the tragedy. Describing Richard's coldness to their house guest, Anna notes: "No one is a stricter guardian of morality than the secret lawbreaker, for it is clear to them that humanity would crumble and perish if everyone lived as they did." Another source of tension is Anna's attachment to Wolfgang and disconnection from Annette, whom she sees as "just as weak and helpless as a young tiger or carnivorous plant," in part because the girl reminds her of Richard. Haushofer, who died in 1970, vividly evokes Anna's shame, fear, numbness, regret, and anger, revealing the depths of claustrophobic unhappiness in her household. This one hits hard. (June)