Malina (German Edition)

by Ingeborg Bachmann

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)

InMalina,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.Malinaexplores love, "deathstyles," the roots of fascism, and passion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783518371411
Publisher:	Suhrkamp Verlag
Publication date:	02/29/2000
Edition description:	German-language Edition
Pages:	353
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

(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

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

Los Angeles Times

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

The Guardian

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

New York Times Book Review

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

Thomas Bernhard

A feminist classic.

The Paris Review

It seems inMalina there is nothing Bachmann cannot do with words.

The New York Review of Books

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

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

Claire-Louise Bennett

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

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

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

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