"Exhilarating and claustrophobic"— Will Harrison Hudson Review
"Bachmann's only novel—set in Vienna and first published in 1971—takes on the vexed struggle between the sexes in a decaying city. Dense, compelling, often weirdly funny, a dark fairy tale told as a murder mystery. Rewarding and highly recommended."— Kirkus (starred)
"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
"It seems in Malina there is nothing Bachmann cannot do with words."— Los Angeles Times
"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."— Jessie Ferguson Music & Literature
"Enigmatic, yet piercing: equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett."— New York Times Book Review
"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."— John Williams New York Times Book Review
"A masterpiece!"— Naja Marie Aidt Publishers Weekly
"A masterpiece!"— Naja Marie Aidt Publishers Weekly
"Bachmann’s vision is so original that the effect is like having a new letter of the alphabet."— The Guardian
"In the astonishing desolation and wonder that is Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina... there is no certain narrative, but there are many, deeply internalised, stories."— Nicci Gerard 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."— Dustin Illingworth The Nation
"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."— Dustin Illingworth The Nation
"It seems in Malina there is nothing Bachmann cannot do with words."— The New York Review of Books
"A feminist classic."— The Paris Review
"If I was permitted to keep one book only it would be Malina. Malina has everything."— Claire-Louise Bennett
"The most intelligent and important woman writer our land has produced this
century."— Thomas Bernhard
"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
★ 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.
