INGEBORG BACHMANN - MALINA

Image: Lied in der Dämmerung by Franz Sedlacek.

The work of Ingeborg Bachmann represents a thoughtless omission in my reading of 20th Century Austrian literature. Thomas Bernhard championed her; Elfriede Jelinek clearly emulated her; and oh baby have I valued the amount of time I’ve spent on those two authors. So now I am glad to have reached Bachmann, though ‘glad’ does disservice to the work itself, for Malina is a bracing narrative. Cold water and a shore where footholds laugh at you. The novel of the unraveling mind sometimes (often, in my experience) offers its reader hope in the end; Malina situates unraveling itself as a continuum, a norm, an inhabited and uninhabitable place. Read, September 2019.