PositiveMusic & LiteratureIt was such a deeply familiar and congenial book, from the very first page ... It is an allegory, written as if indifferent to allegory, with unnerving immediacy and detail ... The relationships between and among...characters grow steadily more abstract until it seems that the narrator and Malina may not be two strictly separate characters, for all that they remain locked in intimate struggle. The narrator is clearly unreliable, but the book leaves open the question of how reliable any possible narrator could be, to discomfiting effect. Malina is a constant shapeshifter, drawing on multiple genres to create a coherent form. The three sections of the book can be understood as acts in a play, or movements of a musical work ... Whatever you think of Rachel Kushner’s introductory claim that this is a true portrait in language of female consciousness, it certainly is a portrait of consciousness, unrelenting and terrifying—even the narrator’s dreams are snatched out of sleep and pushed into the flow of text and interpretation. 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 ... Malina would like to be a gift, but it can’t forget the thefts that placed it in the giver’s hands (and the receivers’, one and all). Its song may endure, but not before it finally, briefly, resolves itself into the human shape of its absent singer.
