... a portrait, in language, of female consciousness, truer than anything written since Sappho’s Fragment 31 ... It’s a difficult book in which to find your footing. There are all sorts of references in it, to Schoenberg, to Vienna, to historical events, not all of which the reader will catch. But once you’re in, you’re in. You’re not decoding. Toward the end, you’re racing along, deep in the rhythms of the narrator’s thoughts, which are bone-true and demonically intelligent—and I mean it would be a real burden to be that mentally acute, it can’t go well for a person to know that much, it can only lead to ill health, drinking, and despair—and then the novel careens over a cliff ... [The narrator] is steeped in a broad lexicon of existential issues that burn her like lit cigarettes. She’s also very funny, especially in the third section of the book, when her mind goes into overdrive.
... 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. Summary does Malina no favors. Bachmann exhibits great impatience with tidy unities, and any attempt to capture the frothing consciousness at the book’s center is a little like trying to describe a captive tiger’s attack from the other side of the cage ... Malina’s many formal gambits, then, are not only the features of an avant-garde novel, but attempts to outpace the insufficiencies of a language that hides within it a system of control. Like the warping effect of capital, this totalizing grammar tends to co-opt its own critique ... The boil of the narrator’s consciousness is captured in intricate and surprising structures: the dynamic markings of orchestral music (accelerando, crescendo, presto, prestissimo), play-like dialogue, atonal scores, drug-induced mania, and letters signed by 'an unknown woman.' The effect is an acceleration of thought that enacts its own depletion, like the whirling vortex that drains a basin of its water.
The plot of Malina...is impossible to follow; it exists only in the form of a wavering procession of scenes in the nameless narrator’s mind. Instead, appreciating Malina requires abandoning yourself to Bachmann’s darkly ponderous prose, which creeps and flows like magma, enfolding and swallowing up the bric-a-brac of reality—street names, childhood memories, momentary meetings. The text is labyrinthine, wandering, abstract; reading it feels like stumbling through the ramifying hallways of an abandoned castle with interminable galleries and courtyards stuffed with decaying statuary ... Anxiety dashes off its dark, recursive question marks, as the narrator perpetually interrogates herself, demanding to know whether her feelings are justified by her circumstances or simply the product of nerves, the rawness of her psyche. This uncertainty bleeds outward, extending even to language itself. Aphasia sweeps through the narrator’s long sentences, leaving behind a cindery, pale, depleted script ... Communication in the book is broken and elliptical, trailing off into silence ... Malina is, in essence, an agonizing assertion of being, a victory over the forces that conspire to shroud one in silence. As slippery and senseless as language can sometimes be, the book asserts, it’s still the best way of pinioning oneself to the world.
In the astonishing desolation and wonder that is Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, first published in 1971, there is no certain narrative, but there are many, deeply internalised, stories ... And yet for all its terror and dread, its death-haunted self-interrogations, Malina is never a depressing novel. Instead, it is eerie, vulnerable, brave and captivating. With its long ribbons of digressive sentences – sometimes looping over a page – and its echoes and rhythms that bring coherence where there is none, it performs a task that it declares impossible: retrieves a self from the rubble, redeems the corrupted act of writing, becomes its own unwritten 'beautiful book'.
There are brief flashes of the narrator’s wartime trauma in this first section...but this trauma fully lights up the book’s blazing second section. It’s a stunning stretch, filled with the recounting of vivid nightmares, which include gas chambers and incest and being slowly poisoned ... Nothing is nailed down in this book, not even at the very end. Its terse and chilling final line lands with enduring ambiguity ... Taken in bites, Bachmann’s prose is often lucid and powerful, enlivened by her poetic gifts. At length, she can be tough chewing ... For every aphoristic dart she throws at the human condition ('the world is sick and doesn’t want a healthy force to prevail'), there is a sentence or meaning that remains tightly knotted, and a general lack of clear orientation prevails ... 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 ... Like a lot of existential literature, Malina has digressive depths and charms impossible to summarize in such a small space.
Malina is a work of harrowing, head-spinning magnificence, and Philip Boehm’s new English translation—a revision of his first, which was published in 1990—brilliantly imparts the elegance of Bachmann’s mind, feral and full and excruciatingly alert ... Bachmann’s is a deft miscreation, relaying the deranging realities of being a woman by way of sentences that rush forth like life force from an open jugular ... Malina will perhaps be most perplexing to readers who believe that the most one can make of literature is perfect sense ... Bachmann is at the height of her powers in the book’s second chapter ... her prose glows white hot to illuminate the unthinkable—the deportations, the gas chambers, the murdered, the complicit—all the while refusing to reinscribe, or reify, fascism on the level of form ... The condition of paradox can be fiction’s prerogative and playground and—at a time when language is pulped from all sides in the pursuit of power—one of its most potent charges. As Bachmann’s books remind us: To cower in the delusion of certainty rather than reach for the greater and freer would damn us to fates we wrote long ago, ones we could have rewritten.
... a startling edifice of psychological intensity, centered on the men in [the narrator's] life ... Malina’s long sentences hold the reader close, and the novel’s white-hot emotions make it an addictive read. Bachmann’s vision is so original that the effect is like having a new letter of the alphabet.
Malina does have the feel of a draft, of the commencement of a middle period Bachmann wouldn’t live to realize ... Readers frequently view the book as veiled autobiography ... Such reductionism would be an error, but a parochial avoidance of biography—however often its invocation has cast doubt on the sovereignty of women writers over their creations—is no less ill advised. Bachmann saw fiction as something more than storytelling: it was a mode of thinking particularly suited to universal problems that become palpable through individual experience ... Her climactic phrase 'Die Wahrheit ist dem Menschen zumutbar' is often translated as 'Mankind can bear the truth,' which is pithy, but leaves out the uncertainty—it means that it is reasonable to expect mankind to bear the truth. That is not the same thing as saying it is possible. The truth Bachmann sought to bear...seems in the end to have been too much, but Malina is a stark relic of her steadfast attempt to do so.
It 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.
Bachmann must have known that 'murder' would strike many readers as an imprecise or exaggerated accusation. But it was only imprecise because the language of criminality was too literal-minded, too blunt an instrument to detect the increasingly affable guises that cruelty had assumed now that murder had emerged as an international spectacle, an evil far easier to identify and denounce than when she had been a child ... Malina...exposed tthe 'interior settings' of these murders with uncanny precision ... Her characters’ masochism, and, at moments, the reader’s sadism, is elicited by the recognition that there is rarely another way of holding men accountable. They must pull the trigger, must strangle us with their bare hands, simply and precisely ... Women are made to crave victimhood, to court it. In its absence, they must resign themselves to less spectacular ways of dying.
Bachmann’s moral seriousness, modernist and primeval, is nowhere in doubt, nor is her terror: it rides her language (burning and cooling, by turns) into strange dialectical valleys, up Alpine peaks, into labyrinthine Viennese apartments and sardonic lakeside villas. It strands the reader in transparent waters of time and place (some fairy-tale, primordial past; postwar Austria; a later economic miracle of technology and capital) but also in darker, wetter, more damaging questions of morality. Bachmann’s anxiety is moral, her clarity and lack of clarity moral, intimations of violence moral ... But Malina is also, at times, hilarious ... There is something skinless about Bachmann’s writing, it has no cover.
...the novel is a formally experimental tour de force ... In its endeavor to capture the workings of the narrator’s chaotic, keenly perceptive mind, Malina has much in common with such groundbreaking modernist novels as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart, and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy ... Malina is a difficult book — both in the personal and cultural histories it recounts, and in its plotlessness and fragmentary formal structure. But it is also a richly rewarding one, given the narrator’s — which is to say, Bachmann’s own — first-rate intelligence and verbal inventiveness. At one point, the narrator comments that 'expression is insanity; it arises out of our insanity.' It is hard to imagine a more eloquent illustration of this claim than Malina.
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.
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 postwar years hang over the city and the book ... 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 ... Dense, compelling, often weirdly funny, a dark fairy tale told as a murder mystery. Rewarding and highly recommended.
