Killing Stella

Rezensionen / Stimmen

"This potent 1958 novella from Austrian writer Haushofer (The Wall) takes the form of a mother's agitated confession. ... Haushofer vividly evokes Anna's shame, fear, numbness, regret, and anger, revealing the depths of claustrophobic unhappiness in her household. This one hits hard." -- Publishers Weekly "The late Haushofer (1920-1970) brilliantly transforms an inevitable fatal ending into an electrifying beginning. Originally published in 1958, precisely translated by Shaun Whiteside, Stella remains timelessly potent, its haunting horror more relevant than ever." -- Booklist "It is not often that you can say only a woman could have written this book, but women in particular will understand the heroine's loving devotion to the details of making and keeping life, every day felt as a victory against everything that would like to undermine and destroy." -- Doris Lessing "Brilliant in its sustainment of dread, in its peeling away of old layers of reality to expose a raw way of seeing and feeling. I know of no closer study in claustrophobia and liberation, and of an independence whose severity is at once ecstatic and doomed." -- Nicole Krauss "Haushofer's sentences are simple and concise, and full of careful thought. The ideas she expresses are so important that you wonder how you have managed to get by without them." -- Missouri Williams - The Nation "A slim domestic horror story that serves as a perfect entry point to Haushofer's work." -- Vulture "A book that gets more, not less, mysterious as it goes. I am glad that such novels exist; they are the literary equivalent of a sudden plunge into icy waters. They shock, they clarify." -- Peter C. Baker - The New York Times "Killing Stella explores the everyday horror of the heterosexual family, its violence, and the perversion of its relationships" -- Asymptote "A window into the singularity of consciousness." -- Janique Vigier - Bookforum "Killing Stella is an accomplished work of real-life horror, the documentation of a woman whose choices have entombed her alive in a comfortable hell." -- B.D. McClay - Washington Post "The narration circles around itself, sidling up to startling revelations about illicit desires and discontents, confessing in fits and starts." -- Cleveland Review of Books "Haushofer stands alongside writers like Elfriede Jelinek and Ingeborg Bachmann... Reading Killing Stella feels like breathing down the necks of the cracked women-shaped icons that haunt Klaus Theweleit's "Male Fantasies" or longing pain of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" (1962). You can feel the "boot in the face," the "brute heart," that lies at the story's center." -- Annette Lepique - Newcity