Killing Stella

"Marlen Haushofer’s Killing Stella has much in common with the claustrophobic-yet-idyllic milieu of White Lotus or Patricia Smith’s Ripley novels. Originally published in German in 1958 and incisively rendered into English only recently by Irish translator Shaun Whiteside, this deceptively restrained novella by the Austrian author – framed as a written confession by an otherwise thoughtful housewife about her non-intervention regarding her husband’s casual seduction of a guileless teenager – anticipated Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange and Hannah Arendt’s famous “banality of evil” thesis. The novel’s chilling dissection of moral apathy, while confined to a small group of well-educated bourgeois in an urban European setting, is especially prescient since it implicates all of us. Our natural sins of omission can be extended to any marginalized individual or group, due to our cowardice, our insistence on the status quo, or our need to maintain emotional safety and social stability."