Reviewed by Catherine Parnell
The Fifth Year
by Marlen Haushofer
translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside
New Directions
May 2026, ISBN: 9780811239981, 80 pages
There’s a primal instinct to protect children in times of war and conflict, and when war ends – does it ever? – physical and emotional wounds appear, inhabiting the shadows where the littlest contend with losses beyond their young comprehension. In The Fifth Year, a novel by renowned Austrian author Marlen Haushofer, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside, five-year old Marili lives out a year of post-war wonder with her grandparents, her parents lost to battle, presumably WWII. To view the world through a child’s eyes illuminates even as it devastates. To feel a five-year-old’s confusion and fear is to understand how innocence is lost; to see a dog, Pluto in this case, through a child’s loving eyes is to have hope.
Not even one-hundred pages, The Fifth Year is a short book, a novella that that follows the seasons as Marili explores the natural world in a zone of comfort and safety. Haushofer’s prose, ably translated by Whiteside, is direct and bright in its details, but there’s menace and mystery. Yet the safe and small enclave in the country is all the world Marili needs at this roaming stage of life. As the days roll by, Marili learns her mother’s name, that all five of her grandparents’ children, including her mother, are dead. Who is she, then, she wonders, but her grandmother reassures her, that she is her granddaughter. Marili grapples with death: her family, but more immediate, a toad, and a trapped and killed mouse with a drop of blood on its nose, and again, her grandmother reassures her. There is a place in heaven for animals, too.
But’s it’s the ominous crucified Christ figure nailed to the cross by “bad people … for our sins” in a dark painting in Marili’s bedroom that the child turns away from in favor of a loving god, one who more closely resembles her grandfather. For children, abstractions require concrete approximations. Her grandmother defines sin as something she will have when she is older, but Marili encounters recognizable sin in another on an excursion to the miller’s with her grandfather, when she fights with a boy who threatened to drown a litter of kittens. Her torn sleeve is sewn by the miller’s wife, and while Marili and her grandfather agree it’s better her grandmother not know about the fight, the child senses her grandfather’s pride in her for fighting and defeating “a big boy all by herself.” It’s an important psychological step in navigating the world. This, coupled with her grandmother’s “regrets,” alerts Marili to the fates, especially the singular fate of a child who would have been her uncle, dead at her age. Her grandmother regrets punishing him one fine spring day by keeping him in the house, for whenever young Max ventured out, he tore his clothing, and she was tired of mending. He died a year later, and Marili’s grandmother wishes it had been otherwise, that she let the boy play in the sunshine, for he had so little time on this earth.
The Fifth Year is brilliant in its descriptions, alive and pulsing with energy. It’s not precious, precocious, or irritatingly coy. Haushofer captures “the shimmering of the sun” and the darkness that falls beyond the beams, the comfort and strength of love, and the peculiarities of character, including that of Marili, in a world where “The birds seemed to have dozed off in the yellow trees, and sometimes a leaf dropped silently and landed on the water.”
Even so, Marili notes, “it all felt slightly eerie.” And that’s Haushofer’s point.
About the reviewer: Catherine Parnell is a writer, editor, educator, and the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. She is co-founder of MicroLit and serves on the board of Wrath-Bearing Tree. Her publications include the memoir The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, essays, and reviews and interviews in Arrowsmith Journal, Euonia Review, Reckon Review, Compulsive Reader, Five on the Fifth, LEON Literary Review, Cutleaf, Funicular, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Mud Season Review, Emerge, Orca, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines.