THE FIFTH YEAR

From one winter to the next, a year elapses in the life of a little Austrian girl living on her grandparents’ farm in this novella first published in 1951.

Marili is in her 5th year. Imaginative and with outsize emotions, she’s learning to understand the world around her. She knows her hardworking grandfather, who tells her stories and allows her to help with apple cider-making. She knows the hardworking farmhand, who dotes on her. She knows her beloved grandmother and is just starting to comprehend the reasons behind the old woman’s melancholy—namely, the loss of her children, several of whom died during the war. Included among these deaths is Marili’s mother, Lisl; Marili sometimes makes newspaper dolls to represent her lost family and relegates them to the attic of her little log dollhouse, where she imagines her grandmother happy again because her dead children are once again within reach. The little girl prays at night: “‘Dear God,’ she thought, ‘let no one be sad and take the regret away, definitely do that, please.’” Haushofer’s novella is effortlessly poignant in this way throughout. As the year goes by, Marili experiences the quotidian—the return of her favorite flowers in spring—and the existential, as when she contemplates who Jesus was or when she attacks a bigger boy in town who threatens to drown his own kittens. The reader’s empathy for Marili is almost painful, as she experiences things like bad dreams or seeing a mouse dead in a trap. The book’s charge comes not from plot, but from the emotional tension of finding Marili on the brink of understanding the adult world’s woes and, especially, the mortality that lurks around every corner. 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.