Malina

by Ingeborg Bachmann, Philip Boehm (Translator), Rachel Kushner (Introduction)

Overview

Now a New Directions book, the legendary novel that is “equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett” (New York Times Book Review)

In Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Ingeborg Bachmann invites the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men: viewed, through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety, and genius. Malina explores love, "deathstyles," the roots of fascism, and passion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811228732
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/25/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	283
Sales rank:	939,403
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) is widely regarded as one of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century. Her poems, plays, stories, and only finished novel, Malina, have been championed by Paul Celan, Hannah Arendt, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Christa Wolf, and Elfriede Jelinek.
Philip Boehm is an American playwright, theater director, and the translator of numerous books, including Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina (forthcoming from New Directions).
Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, Telex from Cuba, and The Mars Room.

Editorial Reviews

This demanding work contains flashes of great beauty and insight but is ultimately marred by Bachmann's cryptic, fragmented prose and internalized story line that is based entirely on the narrator's emotional responses to events conveyed only obliquely to the reader. Part of the problem derives from the veiled yet critical references to Austrian history, which are satisfactorily explained only in the excellent afterword. Also difficult is the subject matter itself: the inability of language to express our deepest emotions and Bachmann's own frustrating struggle to create a new, all-encompassing prose. Like the author, who was ambivalent about her success as one of Austria's most influential postwar writers, the narrator is in a personal and professional crisis as she begins a new book. The novel loosely chronicles her love affairs with two men, the life-affirming Ivan, a Hungarian who begs the author to write about joy rather than express her own dark vision of humanity, and Malina, the introverted man she lives with. The narrator's playful attempt to act as a companion and `` wife'' to Ivan ends disastrously, with her own personality disintegrating. She becomes dependent on Malina who, as her alter ego, first leads her through a terrifying fantasy sequence about her father, and then, quite literally absorbs her into his own personality. First published in 1971, Bachmann's only novel is being reissued posthumously as part of the Modern German Voices series. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

First published in Austria in 1971, this work gained quick acceptance into the canon of modern Austrian and women's literature. It concerns a triangle consisting of the narrator (an unnamed woman writer in Vienna), her lover (Ivan), and her alter-ego and male roommate (Malina) and culminates in her murder. Experimental in form and lyrical in style, this sometimes difficult novel explores the limits of language and the enigma of time--major themes in Austrian literature at least since the turn of the century. The role of gender in identity and personality is also considered. Malina was originally conceived as the ``overture'' to a trilogy entitled Ways of Dying , which remained incomplete at the time of the author's death in 1973. Recommended for collections with holdings in modern European or women's literature.-- Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.

Library Journal

…a psychological thriller of a tormented, existential sort…Bachmann's prose is often lucid and powerful, enlivened by her poetic gifts…The churn of the narrator's mind and the absurdist exchanges between characters earned the novel comparisons to Virginia Woolf and Beckett. This revised translation appears at a time when the book feels quite contemporary. Though even innovative mainstream fiction now being published reads like "A Is for Apple" compared to Malina, there's no question that the book shares a spirit with any and all books about the unsought psychological challenges of being a woman in this world.

The New York Times - John Williams

"A psychological thriller of a tormented, existential sort. And it’s a love triangle, though a triangle most accurately drawn with dotted lines, given that it’s debatable how many of its members are real....This revised translation appears at a time when the book feels quite contemporary. Though even innovative mainstream fiction now being published reads like “A Is for Apple” compared to Malina, there’s no question that the book shares a spirit with any and all books about the unsought psychological challenges of being a woman in this world. Lucid and powerful."

Book of the Times: A Postwar Love Triangle in Which One Partner May Be Pure Fantasy - New York Times Book Review - John Williams

"In place of Wittgenstein’s language as city, Malina creates a vision of Vienna as language, one might even say as mind: to what extent it may be feminine, masculine, or otherwise is impossible to discern."

Music & Literature - Jessie Ferguson

"It seems in Malina there is nothing Bachmann cannot do with words."

The New York Review of Books

"Exhilarating and claustrophobic"

Hudson Review - Will Harrison

"Bachmann’s vision is so original that the effect is like having a new letter of the alphabet."

The Guardian

"Although Bachmann imbibed the despondent charm of her forebears, her only finished novel reaches the contemporary reader as something strange and sui generis: an existential portrait, a work of desperate obsession, a proto-feminist classic, and one of the most jagged renderings of female consciousness European literature has produced. In its torrent of language, paralyzing lassitude, and relentless constriction of expectation and escape, Malina condenses—and then detonates—the neurasthenic legacy of the interwar Austrian novel."

The Nation - Dustin Illingworth

"A variation on the detective novel: Malina’s first-person narrator proceeds from the 'universal prostitution' of Vienna to the proximate causes of her destruction."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"The most intelligent and important woman writer our land has produced this century."

Thomas Bernhard

"In the astonishing desolation and wonder that is Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina... there is no certain narrative, but there are many, deeply internalised, stories."

The Guardian - Nicci Gerard

"A Viennese woman cooks dinner for her lover, waits by the telephone, delays embarking on a trip or writing the book she’s meant to write. And in that null-time, the abyss of twentieth-century trauma yawns wide open and engulfs her."

Tom McCarthy

"Enigmatic, yet piercing: equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett."

New York Times Book Review

"It seems in Malina there is nothing Bachmann cannot do with words."

|Los Angeles Times

"If I was permitted to keep one book only it would be Malina. Malina has everything."

Claire-Louise Bennett

"A feminist classic."

The Paris Review

★ 2019-08-19
Famed Austrian writer Bachmann's only novel, set in Vienna and first published in 1971, takes on the vexed struggle between the sexes in a decaying city.

The narrator, an author, lives with her partner, Malina, but is madly in love with Ivan, who lives nearby. On the surface the story of an affair, the first section of the novel ("Happy with Ivan") captures the way love seems to affect the lover's surroundings: "the incidence of pain in my neighborhood is decreasing, between Ungargasse 6 and 9 fewer misfortunes occur...the world's schizoid soul, its crazy, gaping split, is healing itself imperceptibly." She plans to write a "glorious book," one that will make people "leap for joy." The threat to her happiness is not Malina, who "torments me with his impeccable self-control, his imperturbable trust," but something darker and harder to name. She is haunted by "murder thoughts" and the threat of violence, against anonymous women particularly. In the second section, ill and confined to her apartment, she is cared for by Malina while she dreams disturbingly of her father attempting to kill her beside "the cemetery of the murdered daughters." The postwar years hang over the city and the book. "Here there is always violence. Here there is always struggle. It is the everlasting war." As well as dreams, the narrative is interspersed with dialogues, an absurdist, hilarious interview, the story of a princess, fragments of the narrator's writing, and unsent letters she signs "an unknown woman." Her ways of coping as well as her despair come to feel inevitable. "I react to every situation, submit to every emotional upheaval and suffer the losses—which Malina notices, detachedly." "Most men usually make women unhappy," she tells us, "and there's no reciprocity, as our misfortune is natural, inevitable, stemming as it does from the disease of men, for whose sake women have to bear so much in mind, continually modifying what they've just learned—for, as a rule, if you have to constantly brood about somebody, and generate feelings about him, then you're going to be unhappy." In the book's final section, as Ivan's feelings cool and Malina's caretaking stifles, the narrator retreats into the story of a postman who, out of a sense of delicacy, stopped delivering the mail. "There is no beautiful book, I can no longer write the beautiful book."

Dense, compelling, often weirdly funny, a dark fairy tale told as a murder mystery. Rewarding and highly recommended.

Kirkus Reviews