The Threshold and the Ledger

by Tom McCarthy

Overview

A timely exploration of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann by Booker-shortlisted author Tom McCarthy.

Since her untimely death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms — the eponymous threshold and ledger — and takes off on a line of flight: through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare.

Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit- or boundary- state? A condition of ecstasy or ec-stasis, standing outside of oneself? With identity ruptured and surpassed, how and by whom might such experience be recorded?

Appearing on the eve of Bachmann’s centenary year, McCarthy’s book argues for the centrality of her vision to the very act of literature itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912559671
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	09/09/2025
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	4.60(w) x 6.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre, and radio. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award; his third, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. McCarthy has held Visiting Professorships at the Royal College of Art London, Columbia University New York and Städelschule Frankfurt. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen, and lives in Berlin.

Editorial Reviews

McCarthy has crafted a crackling literary investigation that will captivate with its close readings…Readers will not only marvel at how the author reads but also at his ability to articulate that experience into something both erudite and accessible.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2025-06-13
A dizzying invitation to explore the poetry and prose of German author Ingeborg Bachmann.

Originally conceived as an academic lecture and later expanded into a lengthy essay, McCarthy (The Making of Incarnation, 2021, etc.) has crafted a crackling literary investigation that will captivate with its close readings. He begins with Bachmann’s poem “Salt and Bread,” an elegiac, post–World War II enigma that features in its wistful imagery the “threshold” and “ledger” of his essay’s title. “This book,” McCarthy writes, “will be a slow unpacking” of the poem and involve “a set of digressions, of departures and returns.” Grappling with themes of interiority and liminality, McCarthy jumps, in search of clues, from Greek tragedies and the poetry of Anne Carson to David Lynch’s filmLost Highway. He revisits an early work of his own, a high-concept play inspired by both Aeschylus’Oresteia and artist Douglas Gordon’s seminal video installation24-Hour Psycho. McCarthy’s play is reprinted in this book’s appendix, as is Bachmann’s “Salt and Bread,” in both English and German. Reveling in the subtle delicacy of Bachmann’s wording, the author investigates particularly potent etymologies and scans multiple translations in tandem. Invocations of works by Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare add to McCarthy’s storm of citations, all of which usher in a short study of Bachmann’s 1971 magnum opus, the novelMalina. McCarthy’s work is an invigorating and inspiring incantation: Readers will not only marvel at how the author reads but also at his ability to articulate that experience into something both erudite and accessible. Eventually, Bachmann’s importance feels secondary to the journey: McCarthy resists guiding readers to a comprehensive closing statement and instead chooses to create a framework for the reader with a foundation of literary ideas. Ending on “the threshold of bothMalina and the poetic event-field, all the books-to-come, to which Bachmann’s masterpiece opens the door,” McCarthy invites readers through, toward revelations of their own.

An impressive and inspiring critical reading.

Kirkus Reviews