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Malina
Bachmann tells the story of lives painfully intertwined: the unnamed narrator, haunted by nightmarish memories of her father, lives with the androgynous Malina, an initially remote and dispassionate man who ultimately becomes an ominous influence. Plunging toward its riveting finale, Malina brutally lays bare the struggle for love and the limits of discourse between women and men.
244 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
About the author
Ingeborg Bachmann
181 books515 followers“What actually is possible, however, is transformation. And the transformative effect that emanates from new works leads us to new perception, to a new feeling, new consciousness.” This sentence from Ingeborg Bachmann’s Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics (1959-60) can also be applied to her own self-consciousness as an author, and to the history of her reception. Whether in the form of lyric poetry, short prose, radio plays, libretti, lectures and essays or longer fiction, Bachmann’s œuvre had as its goal and effect “to draw people into the experiences of the writers,” into “new experiences of suffering.” (GuI 139-140). But it was especially her penetrating and artistically original representation of female subjectivity within male-dominated society that unleashed a new wave in the reception of her works.
Although Bachmann’s spectacular early fame derived from her lyric poetry (she received the prestigious Prize of the Gruppe 47 in 1954), she turned more and more towards prose during the 1950’s, having experienced severe doubts about the validity of poetic language. The stories in the collection Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year; 1961) typically present a sudden insight into the inadequacy of the world and its “orders” (e.g. of language, law, politics, or gender roles) and reveal a utopian longing for and effort to imagine a new and truer order. The two stories told from an explicitly female perspective, “Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha” (“A Step towards Gomorrah”) and “Undine geht” (“Undine Goes/Leaves”), are among the earliest feminist texts in postwar German-language literature. Undine accuses male humanity of having ruined not only her life as a woman but the world in general: “You monsters named Hans!” In her later prose (Malina 1971; Simultan 1972; and the posthumously published Der Fall Franza und Requiem für Fanny Goldmann) Bachmann was again ahead of her time, often employing experimental forms to portray women as they are damaged or even destroyed by patriarchal society, in this case modern Vienna. Here one sees how intertwined Bachmann’s preoccupation with female identity and patriarchy is with her diagnosis of the sickness of our age: “I’ve reflected about this question already: where does fascism begin? It doesn’t begin with the first bombs that were dropped…. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman….”(GuI 144)
As the daughter of a teacher and a mother who hadn’t been allowed to go to university, Bachmann enjoyed the support and encouragement of both parents; after the war she studied philosophy, German literature and psychology in Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna. She wrote her doctoral dissertation (1950) on the critical reception of Heidegger, whose ideas she condemned as “a seduction … to German irrationality of thought” (GuI 137). From 1957 to 1963, the time of her troubled relationship with Swiss author Max Frisch, Bachmann alternated between Zurich and Rome. She rejected marriage as “an impossible institution. Impossible for a woman who works and thinks and wants something herself” (GuI 144).
From the end of 1965 on Bachmann resided in Rome. Despite her precarious health—she was addicted to pills for years following a faulty medical procedure—she traveled to Poland in 1973. She was just planning a move to Vienna when she died of complications following an accidental fire.
Joey Horsley
Although Bachmann’s spectacular early fame derived from her lyric poetry (she received the prestigious Prize of the Gruppe 47 in 1954), she turned more and more towards prose during the 1950’s, having experienced severe doubts about the validity of poetic language. The stories in the collection Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year; 1961) typically present a sudden insight into the inadequacy of the world and its “orders” (e.g. of language, law, politics, or gender roles) and reveal a utopian longing for and effort to imagine a new and truer order. The two stories told from an explicitly female perspective, “Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha” (“A Step towards Gomorrah”) and “Undine geht” (“Undine Goes/Leaves”), are among the earliest feminist texts in postwar German-language literature. Undine accuses male humanity of having ruined not only her life as a woman but the world in general: “You monsters named Hans!” In her later prose (Malina 1971; Simultan 1972; and the posthumously published Der Fall Franza und Requiem für Fanny Goldmann) Bachmann was again ahead of her time, often employing experimental forms to portray women as they are damaged or even destroyed by patriarchal society, in this case modern Vienna. Here one sees how intertwined Bachmann’s preoccupation with female identity and patriarchy is with her diagnosis of the sickness of our age: “I’ve reflected about this question already: where does fascism begin? It doesn’t begin with the first bombs that were dropped…. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman….”(GuI 144)
As the daughter of a teacher and a mother who hadn’t been allowed to go to university, Bachmann enjoyed the support and encouragement of both parents; after the war she studied philosophy, German literature and psychology in Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna. She wrote her doctoral dissertation (1950) on the critical reception of Heidegger, whose ideas she condemned as “a seduction … to German irrationality of thought” (GuI 137). From 1957 to 1963, the time of her troubled relationship with Swiss author Max Frisch, Bachmann alternated between Zurich and Rome. She rejected marriage as “an impossible institution. Impossible for a woman who works and thinks and wants something herself” (GuI 144).
From the end of 1965 on Bachmann resided in Rome. Despite her precarious health—she was addicted to pills for years following a faulty medical procedure—she traveled to Poland in 1973. She was just planning a move to Vienna when she died of complications following an accidental fire.
Joey Horsley
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October 5, 2020
It was murder! Twice! I just reread Malina. And weirdly, I liked getting murdered better the second time. Made more sense to me somehow. Maybe life has to catch up with Ingeborg Bachmann. I am adding a star because I can. The book is the same, but I have more stars to give this time.
It took me five months to finish this novel of internalised female pain. I had to stop reading after a couple of pages to recover strength when I felt the swamp of passive negativity pull me down until I was choking desperately.
Why did I finish it?
Maybe I have a streak of masochism in me, like the narrator of the novel? Maybe I secretly identify with her loss of identity in a world where she can only exist as a foil for the men that navigate it around her? Maybe I am stubborn to the point of self-destructive behaviour, wanting to finish each task, no matter how idiotic it seems at times? That personality trait definitely gave me my PhD degree, and made me choose my profession, and become quite decent at project management, but it also made me finish books I don't like, step into the 13th church in Rome when my brain is disintegrating and I can't even remember the name of the city I am speed-touristing in. I even finish knitting shawls I know I am not going to use.
There is something compelling in this novel of complete surrender to negative emotion and passive endurance, manifested in a lyrical language which convinces even when the narrative turns too bleak to be acceptable.
What is it then?
I thought about it a lot over the five months it took me to read it. What makes it a good novel even though I hated reading it?
Sadly, the answer is that I recognised the type of woman. It is truthful. The generation Ingeborg Bachman describes has made female victimhood an art form. It grated on my nerves because I have been fighting my whole life both against the male attitude of condescension and property and the female passive voice of pleasurable suffering.
"Look at me, I am killed by male dominance! Don't I look pretty in all my indignation?"
I acknowledge that this kind of literature had to be written, and that Ingeborg Bachmann is a fabulous word magician. I am just allergic to the dynamics she exposes. That is not her fault - she is so-to-say the "faultless, passive victim" of my dislike. I think she would have liked that.
It took me five months to finish this novel of internalised female pain. I had to stop reading after a couple of pages to recover strength when I felt the swamp of passive negativity pull me down until I was choking desperately.
Why did I finish it?
Maybe I have a streak of masochism in me, like the narrator of the novel? Maybe I secretly identify with her loss of identity in a world where she can only exist as a foil for the men that navigate it around her? Maybe I am stubborn to the point of self-destructive behaviour, wanting to finish each task, no matter how idiotic it seems at times? That personality trait definitely gave me my PhD degree, and made me choose my profession, and become quite decent at project management, but it also made me finish books I don't like, step into the 13th church in Rome when my brain is disintegrating and I can't even remember the name of the city I am speed-touristing in. I even finish knitting shawls I know I am not going to use.
There is something compelling in this novel of complete surrender to negative emotion and passive endurance, manifested in a lyrical language which convinces even when the narrative turns too bleak to be acceptable.
What is it then?
I thought about it a lot over the five months it took me to read it. What makes it a good novel even though I hated reading it?
Sadly, the answer is that I recognised the type of woman. It is truthful. The generation Ingeborg Bachman describes has made female victimhood an art form. It grated on my nerves because I have been fighting my whole life both against the male attitude of condescension and property and the female passive voice of pleasurable suffering.
"Look at me, I am killed by male dominance! Don't I look pretty in all my indignation?"
I acknowledge that this kind of literature had to be written, and that Ingeborg Bachmann is a fabulous word magician. I am just allergic to the dynamics she exposes. That is not her fault - she is so-to-say the "faultless, passive victim" of my dislike. I think she would have liked that.
November 19, 2023
Gran y compleja novela, como si a un Thomas Bernhard le hubiera dado por escribir sobre una pasión con la misma falta de pudor que una Annie Ernaux (qué bien quedaría esta frase para una faja de la supermeganecesaria reedición de esta novela… ahí lo dejo). Si esto no les ha atraído, lo demás ni falta que hace.
La novela es un monólogo de una mujer sin nombre que siente que su alma se divide trágicamente entre dos polos opuestos que identifica con su amante Iván y su pareja Malina (aunque Malina realmente es… no digo nada más, descúbranlo ustedes). Iván es la pasión, Malina es lo racional, y entre los dos polos, que parecen ignorarse mutuamente, se entabla una guerra interna que acabará en muerte (la novela es la primera, y única concluida, de las tres que la autora se propuso escribir bajo el título global de «Modos de muerte»).
“He vivido en Iván y muero en Malina”Iván, mucho más joven que ella (“cualquier hombre mayor me aterra”), le suponía una liberación: alguien que nunca interroga, que no advierte las evidencias del paso del tiempo en su piel, ante quién no tiene que brillar constantemente, con el que mantiene conversaciones intrascendentes, compañero de ajedrez en interminables partidas silenciosas, aquel que solo desea que en su cara se refleje el boletín meteorológico: “cielo despejado, temperatura en aumento, cinco horas de buen tiempo garantizado, sin nubes”. Su sola existencia da sentido a su vida que, a su vez, queda supeditada a la de él.
“… marcar el número siguiente: 726893. Sé que nadie puede responder, pero no me importa, siempre que el teléfono suene en la semipenumbra del apartamento, y como sé dónde está su teléfono, los timbrazos, desde allí, dirán a todas las pertenencias de Iván: soy yo, que estoy llamando. Y lo escuchará el sólido y profundo sillón donde le gusta arrellanarse y de pronto se duerme cinco minutos, y los armarios y la lámpara bajo la cual nos acostamos… Desde que puedo marcar este número, mi vida ha dejado de ir a la deriva… llamo por teléfono, fumo y espero.”Iván aparece en un momento de gran inestabilidad en su vida y parece ser la solución a sus problemas.
“… ha venido para hacer que las consonantes sean nuevamente sólidas y tangibles, para abrir de nuevo las vocales y que resuenen plenamente, para hacer que las palabras vuelvan a mis labios, para restablecer las primeras relaciones destruidas y solucionar los problemas.”Pero pronto Iván empieza a reprocharle su tendencia a escribir libros tristes, a que se cuestione continuamente, que es a lo que le obliga Malina con sus preguntas. Iván empieza a ocupar demasiado terreno en su vida, a anularla en sus facetas intelectuales. Esta interacción con Iván se cuenta en la primera de las tres partes en las que se divide la novela, «Feliz con Iván», la mejor en mi opinión. La tercera, «De las cosas últimas», tratará más directamente, a través de sus diálogos con Malina, de su cuestionamiento interno y de las relaciones hombre-mujer que parecen abocadas al fracaso o al sometimiento de la mujer. En la parte intermedia, «El tercer hombre», la autora relata una serie de sueños que van reflejando un oscuro pasado que es el origen de sus problemas… o, quizá, la situación general de las mujeres, de ahí que empiece diciendo:
“Esta vez no es Viena el lugar. Es un lugar llamado En todas partes y En ninguna. El tiempo no es hoy. El tiempo ya no es, pues podría haber sido ayer, o hace mucho tiempo, podría volver a ser, ser siempre, y algunas cosas no habrán sido nunca. No hay medida para las unidades de este tiempo en el cual se insertan todos los tiempos, ni tampoco lo hay para el no-tiempo, donde repercute lo que nunca ha sido en el tiempo.”Esta problemática se construye mediante una serie de escenas oníricas en torno a la figura de su padre, o de un padre genérico símbolo del patriarcado y del nacionalsocialismo, que, con la complicidad de su madre, abusa en diversas formas de su hija, o se plasma lo que han sido y siguen siendo los abusos a las mujeres en general, y de cuya figura es incapaz de distanciarse completamente a pesar de todo.
“Los hombres no cambian demasiado. Siempre hay algo que los emociona, con sólo que sea infinito, inconcebible o insondable, de un negro profundo, pasean por el bosque o se mueven por el espacio con su propio misterio dentro de otro misterio.”Malina es una novela irregular y, como digo al inicio, una novela difícil, filosófica, metafórica, experimental, una muestra de lo que para ella era la literatura, “ese delirio cristalizado en expresión”, un grito muchas veces indescifrable, pero también una conmovedora novela poética sobre la lucha de una mujer por su identidad.
May 7, 2023
I’ve read this novel 2.5 times in two translations. The first time I could not stop turning the pages. I’ve swallowed the book or the book has swallowed me, I am not sure. I’ve raised through it like a car without breaks, totally engrossed by the words, the imagery and the flow of this text. I knew it is packed with meaning. But I did not care for the meaning that much this first time. I could not slow down and I did not wanted to. It gave me a lot of amazement, aesthetic pleasure and some adrenalin.
The second time, I’ve read slowly. I’ve read for the meaning. I wanted to understand what was going on in this novel. And it was a very different experience, but as well powerful and intellectually unique.
I imagine this book is a plant, something organic and unshapely that refuses to fit into any box and grows out of it pretty quickly sticking the new stems in various directions. I thought of Tropisms. But a tropism is the directional growth of an organism in response of an external stimulus. The organism of this novel stimulates itself more from inside. Reading this novel is more like interacting with this creature rather than a classic immersion.
It reads more like a poetry in a sense that you can read it many times and each time it would be something different you would find, a new image, a new trick of the language, a new connection. It is evident that Bachmann has started as a poet.
I do not think it would suit anyone who wants to know what is exactly going on. It is probably needless to say that those looking for a character driven plotted story would be disappointed. I cannot even tell categorically how many characters are there. It is fragmentary, it mixes lots of styles: letters, dialogues, dream sequences, proper nightmares and even a legend. But what holds it all together it is this cosmic desperate energy. The book is brutal, it is devastating, it is raging and darkly funny and it is terribly beautiful. The way of writing is very special as she manages to combine very rich symbolic imagery with the language that sometimes rational and practical and always very exact in terms of the choice of the words.
It is the one of those books that is a puzzle on so many levels. But unlike Nabokov’s puzzles for example, this one does not have a single solution hidden by the author. There are hints and a lot of references left in the text, but everything is open to interpretation and any reading of this text would be different. I personally found it very rewarding, on the second read, putting my personal “version of events” together. But some might find this lack of clear path frustrating. I think it was wrong decision to get rid of footnotes in the last English edition of this book. I found them enriching my reading experience in my Russian edition.
Bachmann called this book herself “a spiritual, imaginary autobiography”. So yes it is about her, but it is far from auto fiction as we now know it.
In Malina, we meet with the woman, who narrates the whole thing from the first person “I”. She shares an apartment with one man, Malina. But at the same time, she is passionately in love with another, a Hungarian called Ivan. Those two seem to be not interested in each other’s existence.
She idolises Ivan to such an extent, that the relationship becomes almost metaphysical on her part. It is strange as Ivan is otherwise a pretty ordinary divorcee with two children. While Malina remains more as a conversational partner, at least initially. Both of those male characters are far from fully flashed. It is clear that their roles are symbolic. But how far that symbolism is going? This is the one of the main intrigues of this book.
And I do not think this question has got a single right answer. I put my interpretation and some background info is in the comment under a spoiler. It was a challenge, but it was a great pleasure trying to come up with the one. But I would recommend to read this comment only if you’ve read the book already. Here, I want to share a few ideas inspired by the book.
A need to be naive.
Once Ivan finds a few pages of her manuscript “Death styles”. Incidentally Bachmann planned to write a trilogy with such a name. But Malina is the only finished work. Ivan does not like the idea of it:
“…why isn’t there anything else, there must be other books, like EXSULTATE JUBILATE, which make you mad with joy, you’re always mad with joy yourself, so why don’t you write like that. It’s disgusting to put this misery on the market, just adding to what’s already there, these books are all absolutely loathsome….” He mentions Dostoyevsky’s “The Notes from the Dead House” as an example. And then he continues: “…they’re always suffering for all of humanity with all its troubles as well and they talk about all the wars and predict new ones…”
When I was reading it, I was thinking surely he is not right. And maybe he is not. But it reminded me David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. In there, he claimed there that Adam Smith has created an utopia in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The world was not like he described it in that book. He imagined it. But it has become like that in a few generations after sufficient amount of people has read his book. Graeber, in his turn was saying that it is what we need - to imagine a new world and to write about it. It is of course not that simple, far from it. But it would be fair to say that the big chunk of contemporary, forward looking fiction written today is dystopian. It is especially true for the young adults. The world created in those books is so gloomy and so scary. I know it represents the fears and concerns about the current state of the world. Those fears in Ivan’s words, predict the new wars by making them much easier to imagine, making them real. In other words, those gloomy dystopian books shape the reality of today and tomorrow. But why there is such a little place for more positive imagination, maybe for an utopia?
It seems Bachmann was thinking a lot about this transformative power of language. She said in one of her interviews: “If we would fully possess a word, possess a language, we would not need weapons.”
Moreover, in her Frankfurt lectures, she talks that we treat literature as if it were an utopia. She says “we give any work of literature the chance to exist by the single fact that we read it and we would read it tomorrow.”
And the language is our dream of complete expression: “Each word, each phrase, each period, each punctuation mark, each metaphor and each symbol add to this dream of being able to express everything - our dream which we would never be able to fully realise.”
It reminded me Nabokov’s saying: “I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”
Under Ivan’s influence the heroine experience the following:
“A storm of words starts in my head, then an incandescence, a few syllables begin to glow, and brightly colored commas fly out of all the dependent clauses and the periods which were once black have swollen into balloons and float up to my cranium, for everything will be like EXSULTATE JUBILATE in that glorious book I am thus just beginning to find. Should this book appear, as someday it must, people will writhe with laughter after only one page, they will leap for joy, they will be comforted, they will read on, biting their fists to suppress their cries of joy, it can’t be helped, and when they sit down by the window and read still further they’ll start flinging confetti to the pedestrians on the street below, so that they, too, will stop, astonished, as if they had walked into a carnival, and people will start throwing apples and nuts, dates and figs just like on St. Nicholas’ Day, they will lean out of their windows without getting dizzy and shout out: Hear, hear! look and see! I’ve just read something wonderful, may I read it to you, everybody come closer, it’s too wonderful!'
It is interesting she does not use the word ‘to create” or ‘to write” but “to find” about her “glorious book”. All of this is somewhere there. We just need keep looking for it, asking naive questions, it won’t work all the time, but sometimes we would be able to express something new. Utopia? Yes. Can a book make people in “leap with joy” in mass? I do not know, but it might re-shape a few little “bricks” of our reality.
And the heroine starts writing a beautiful legend of the Princes of Kargan. The story is inserted in fragments further into a fragmentary novel. She is “able to find myself in the legend of a woman who never existed”.
There is an image in the novel of a virus caught by her and Ivan at the beginning that she wishes would spread around. She says she would name this virus soon but never does. Many would think this virus is love. But I think the virus might be a bunch of new ideas available to her through a new language spread to the others in a form of a book and making people create good things. A type of positive social contagion through literature.
Does she win at the end? No. She faces a crashing defeat:
“In the apartment I lie down on the floor, thinking about my book, it’s gotten lost, there is no beautiful book, I can no longer write the beautiful book, I’ve stopped thinking about the book long ago, there’s no foundation, nothing more comes to me, not a single sentence. But I was so sure the beautiful book existed and that I would find it..”
But does it mean it was not worthwhile trying? No, again.
I think it is very important to challenge something that we think is obvious. Those concepts and narratives we’ve been told were alway there. The traditions that seemingly do not have a better alternative both in an individual life and a society. I think it is worthwhile to ask naive questions. Ivan, otherwise not very attractive character is really good at it. It is all in his name. Just try to move the letters around. Naive is Ivan. (Ok we need to drop “e” for this to work).
He asks:
“Wailing Wall, why hadn’t anyone ever built a Wall of Joy?”
I am not sure why I’ve picked up this theme out of this otherwise dark, brutal and beautiful novel. But it made me feel good thinking about it.
Back to “Normal”
One of the other themes of the novel is collective and individual repression of thoughts. In the post-war world, so many feelings and observations are required to be silenced, ignored or even replaced by blind hope.
“I almost believed it myself—that once the window and door frames are reinstalled, once the mountains of rubble disappear, then all of a sudden everything will be better, people will again live in their homes and be able to continue living. But just the fact that for years I wanted to say how strange I found this living—and continued living—is very revealing, though no one wanted to listen to me. I would never have thought that everything would first have to be plundered, stolen, pawned and then bought and sold three times over.”
Based upon her words, It seems people has plunged plundering and looting and then buying and selling, wildly consuming just because they simply could and also in order to forget what they’ve been through. All of this while the war was still pretty much raging in their minds. This has sadly reminded me our “Covid back to normal” strive, but of course on a incompatibly smaller scale.
Malina says at one point “there is always war inside you”. And also that:
“Once one has survived something then survival itself interferes with understanding, and you don't even know which lives came before and which is your life of today, you even mix up your own lives.”
Reading
This is the last thing I want to mention. Of course I could not let it slip from my review. There is a brilliant piece of writing in the book, sort of anti-interview where we do not hear the questions but only the answers by the main heroine. She completely subverts the whole thing as it is evident that there is no way her answers could be published. The exasperated interviewer switches off a tape-recorder a few times. But she talks about reading there among other things:
“Reading is a vice which can replace all other vices or temporarily take their place in more intensely helping people live, it is a debauchery, a consuming addiction. No, I don’t take any drugs, I take books..”
And what about this brutal and beautiful piece (after both she and her books and were physically hurt):
I lie down among the books, I again caress them, one after the other, in the beginning there were only three, then there were fifteen, then over a hundred, and I ran to my first bookcase in my pajamas. Good night, gentlemen, good night, Mr. Voltaire, good night, Fürst, may you rest well, my unknown authors, sweet dreams, Mr. Pirandello, my respect, Mr. Proust. Chaire, Thukydides! For the first time the gentlemen are saying good night to me, I try to avoid touching them so as not to stain them with blood. Good night, says Josef K. to me.
Bachmann is definitely a precursor of many contemporary works of fiction. Now, reading the others I probably would not help but noticing her influence. The most obvious recent example is Checkout 19. Where the narrator talks about the books she has read for about 20 pages, including Malina. I know now exactly where the inspiration was coming from. There is an exquisitely written sequence in Malina, very similar in spirit.
They’ve mutually influenced each other with Max Frisch and Paul Celan (more about in “What is going on” comment under the spoiler.) Also I’ve also read that Thomas Bernhard has modelled the character of a poetess in Extinction on her personality.
I could have cut and paste the whole book I think. It is so dense it is hardly a world there I would not want to quote. But one has to end somewhere. What is amazing is how she incorporated all these thoughts into the work of art. It seamlessly unites the personal, intimate stuff with the social and political. I’ve seen a lot of attempts to do that in the very recent novels, but it is rarely goes beyond a manifesto through the mouth of a character created specifically for this purpose.
I’ve written many paragraphs already and I have not even started. I do not want to reduce a multitude to something measurable. But if I need to say it in one sentence, “Malina” is a wonderful, devastating and complex work about loneliness, desperate courageous attempt to be understood and its defeat.
Bachmann said to someone somewhere:
“I think, all of the books talk about an impossibility of people to understand each other. All this fake understanding that they call openness is not there. Understanding does not exist. Openness is nothing but misunderstanding. In essence, every human being is left together with her thoughts and feelings that cannot be translated.”
The second time, I’ve read slowly. I’ve read for the meaning. I wanted to understand what was going on in this novel. And it was a very different experience, but as well powerful and intellectually unique.
I imagine this book is a plant, something organic and unshapely that refuses to fit into any box and grows out of it pretty quickly sticking the new stems in various directions. I thought of Tropisms. But a tropism is the directional growth of an organism in response of an external stimulus. The organism of this novel stimulates itself more from inside. Reading this novel is more like interacting with this creature rather than a classic immersion.
It reads more like a poetry in a sense that you can read it many times and each time it would be something different you would find, a new image, a new trick of the language, a new connection. It is evident that Bachmann has started as a poet.
I do not think it would suit anyone who wants to know what is exactly going on. It is probably needless to say that those looking for a character driven plotted story would be disappointed. I cannot even tell categorically how many characters are there. It is fragmentary, it mixes lots of styles: letters, dialogues, dream sequences, proper nightmares and even a legend. But what holds it all together it is this cosmic desperate energy. The book is brutal, it is devastating, it is raging and darkly funny and it is terribly beautiful. The way of writing is very special as she manages to combine very rich symbolic imagery with the language that sometimes rational and practical and always very exact in terms of the choice of the words.
It is the one of those books that is a puzzle on so many levels. But unlike Nabokov’s puzzles for example, this one does not have a single solution hidden by the author. There are hints and a lot of references left in the text, but everything is open to interpretation and any reading of this text would be different. I personally found it very rewarding, on the second read, putting my personal “version of events” together. But some might find this lack of clear path frustrating. I think it was wrong decision to get rid of footnotes in the last English edition of this book. I found them enriching my reading experience in my Russian edition.
Bachmann called this book herself “a spiritual, imaginary autobiography”. So yes it is about her, but it is far from auto fiction as we now know it.
In Malina, we meet with the woman, who narrates the whole thing from the first person “I”. She shares an apartment with one man, Malina. But at the same time, she is passionately in love with another, a Hungarian called Ivan. Those two seem to be not interested in each other’s existence.
She idolises Ivan to such an extent, that the relationship becomes almost metaphysical on her part. It is strange as Ivan is otherwise a pretty ordinary divorcee with two children. While Malina remains more as a conversational partner, at least initially. Both of those male characters are far from fully flashed. It is clear that their roles are symbolic. But how far that symbolism is going? This is the one of the main intrigues of this book.
And I do not think this question has got a single right answer. I put my interpretation and some background info is in the comment under a spoiler. It was a challenge, but it was a great pleasure trying to come up with the one. But I would recommend to read this comment only if you’ve read the book already. Here, I want to share a few ideas inspired by the book.
A need to be naive.
Once Ivan finds a few pages of her manuscript “Death styles”. Incidentally Bachmann planned to write a trilogy with such a name. But Malina is the only finished work. Ivan does not like the idea of it:
“…why isn’t there anything else, there must be other books, like EXSULTATE JUBILATE, which make you mad with joy, you’re always mad with joy yourself, so why don’t you write like that. It’s disgusting to put this misery on the market, just adding to what’s already there, these books are all absolutely loathsome….” He mentions Dostoyevsky’s “The Notes from the Dead House” as an example. And then he continues: “…they’re always suffering for all of humanity with all its troubles as well and they talk about all the wars and predict new ones…”
When I was reading it, I was thinking surely he is not right. And maybe he is not. But it reminded me David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. In there, he claimed there that Adam Smith has created an utopia in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The world was not like he described it in that book. He imagined it. But it has become like that in a few generations after sufficient amount of people has read his book. Graeber, in his turn was saying that it is what we need - to imagine a new world and to write about it. It is of course not that simple, far from it. But it would be fair to say that the big chunk of contemporary, forward looking fiction written today is dystopian. It is especially true for the young adults. The world created in those books is so gloomy and so scary. I know it represents the fears and concerns about the current state of the world. Those fears in Ivan’s words, predict the new wars by making them much easier to imagine, making them real. In other words, those gloomy dystopian books shape the reality of today and tomorrow. But why there is such a little place for more positive imagination, maybe for an utopia?
It seems Bachmann was thinking a lot about this transformative power of language. She said in one of her interviews: “If we would fully possess a word, possess a language, we would not need weapons.”
Moreover, in her Frankfurt lectures, she talks that we treat literature as if it were an utopia. She says “we give any work of literature the chance to exist by the single fact that we read it and we would read it tomorrow.”
And the language is our dream of complete expression: “Each word, each phrase, each period, each punctuation mark, each metaphor and each symbol add to this dream of being able to express everything - our dream which we would never be able to fully realise.”
It reminded me Nabokov’s saying: “I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”
Under Ivan’s influence the heroine experience the following:
“A storm of words starts in my head, then an incandescence, a few syllables begin to glow, and brightly colored commas fly out of all the dependent clauses and the periods which were once black have swollen into balloons and float up to my cranium, for everything will be like EXSULTATE JUBILATE in that glorious book I am thus just beginning to find. Should this book appear, as someday it must, people will writhe with laughter after only one page, they will leap for joy, they will be comforted, they will read on, biting their fists to suppress their cries of joy, it can’t be helped, and when they sit down by the window and read still further they’ll start flinging confetti to the pedestrians on the street below, so that they, too, will stop, astonished, as if they had walked into a carnival, and people will start throwing apples and nuts, dates and figs just like on St. Nicholas’ Day, they will lean out of their windows without getting dizzy and shout out: Hear, hear! look and see! I’ve just read something wonderful, may I read it to you, everybody come closer, it’s too wonderful!'
It is interesting she does not use the word ‘to create” or ‘to write” but “to find” about her “glorious book”. All of this is somewhere there. We just need keep looking for it, asking naive questions, it won’t work all the time, but sometimes we would be able to express something new. Utopia? Yes. Can a book make people in “leap with joy” in mass? I do not know, but it might re-shape a few little “bricks” of our reality.
And the heroine starts writing a beautiful legend of the Princes of Kargan. The story is inserted in fragments further into a fragmentary novel. She is “able to find myself in the legend of a woman who never existed”.
There is an image in the novel of a virus caught by her and Ivan at the beginning that she wishes would spread around. She says she would name this virus soon but never does. Many would think this virus is love. But I think the virus might be a bunch of new ideas available to her through a new language spread to the others in a form of a book and making people create good things. A type of positive social contagion through literature.
Does she win at the end? No. She faces a crashing defeat:
“In the apartment I lie down on the floor, thinking about my book, it’s gotten lost, there is no beautiful book, I can no longer write the beautiful book, I’ve stopped thinking about the book long ago, there’s no foundation, nothing more comes to me, not a single sentence. But I was so sure the beautiful book existed and that I would find it..”
But does it mean it was not worthwhile trying? No, again.
I think it is very important to challenge something that we think is obvious. Those concepts and narratives we’ve been told were alway there. The traditions that seemingly do not have a better alternative both in an individual life and a society. I think it is worthwhile to ask naive questions. Ivan, otherwise not very attractive character is really good at it. It is all in his name. Just try to move the letters around. Naive is Ivan. (Ok we need to drop “e” for this to work).
He asks:
“Wailing Wall, why hadn’t anyone ever built a Wall of Joy?”
I am not sure why I’ve picked up this theme out of this otherwise dark, brutal and beautiful novel. But it made me feel good thinking about it.
Back to “Normal”
One of the other themes of the novel is collective and individual repression of thoughts. In the post-war world, so many feelings and observations are required to be silenced, ignored or even replaced by blind hope.
“I almost believed it myself—that once the window and door frames are reinstalled, once the mountains of rubble disappear, then all of a sudden everything will be better, people will again live in their homes and be able to continue living. But just the fact that for years I wanted to say how strange I found this living—and continued living—is very revealing, though no one wanted to listen to me. I would never have thought that everything would first have to be plundered, stolen, pawned and then bought and sold three times over.”
Based upon her words, It seems people has plunged plundering and looting and then buying and selling, wildly consuming just because they simply could and also in order to forget what they’ve been through. All of this while the war was still pretty much raging in their minds. This has sadly reminded me our “Covid back to normal” strive, but of course on a incompatibly smaller scale.
Malina says at one point “there is always war inside you”. And also that:
“Once one has survived something then survival itself interferes with understanding, and you don't even know which lives came before and which is your life of today, you even mix up your own lives.”
Reading
This is the last thing I want to mention. Of course I could not let it slip from my review. There is a brilliant piece of writing in the book, sort of anti-interview where we do not hear the questions but only the answers by the main heroine. She completely subverts the whole thing as it is evident that there is no way her answers could be published. The exasperated interviewer switches off a tape-recorder a few times. But she talks about reading there among other things:
“Reading is a vice which can replace all other vices or temporarily take their place in more intensely helping people live, it is a debauchery, a consuming addiction. No, I don’t take any drugs, I take books..”
And what about this brutal and beautiful piece (after both she and her books and were physically hurt):
I lie down among the books, I again caress them, one after the other, in the beginning there were only three, then there were fifteen, then over a hundred, and I ran to my first bookcase in my pajamas. Good night, gentlemen, good night, Mr. Voltaire, good night, Fürst, may you rest well, my unknown authors, sweet dreams, Mr. Pirandello, my respect, Mr. Proust. Chaire, Thukydides! For the first time the gentlemen are saying good night to me, I try to avoid touching them so as not to stain them with blood. Good night, says Josef K. to me.
Bachmann is definitely a precursor of many contemporary works of fiction. Now, reading the others I probably would not help but noticing her influence. The most obvious recent example is Checkout 19. Where the narrator talks about the books she has read for about 20 pages, including Malina. I know now exactly where the inspiration was coming from. There is an exquisitely written sequence in Malina, very similar in spirit.
They’ve mutually influenced each other with Max Frisch and Paul Celan (more about in “What is going on” comment under the spoiler.) Also I’ve also read that Thomas Bernhard has modelled the character of a poetess in Extinction on her personality.
I could have cut and paste the whole book I think. It is so dense it is hardly a world there I would not want to quote. But one has to end somewhere. What is amazing is how she incorporated all these thoughts into the work of art. It seamlessly unites the personal, intimate stuff with the social and political. I’ve seen a lot of attempts to do that in the very recent novels, but it is rarely goes beyond a manifesto through the mouth of a character created specifically for this purpose.
I’ve written many paragraphs already and I have not even started. I do not want to reduce a multitude to something measurable. But if I need to say it in one sentence, “Malina” is a wonderful, devastating and complex work about loneliness, desperate courageous attempt to be understood and its defeat.
Bachmann said to someone somewhere:
“I think, all of the books talk about an impossibility of people to understand each other. All this fake understanding that they call openness is not there. Understanding does not exist. Openness is nothing but misunderstanding. In essence, every human being is left together with her thoughts and feelings that cannot be translated.”
November 17, 2023
After reading a succession of novels in the last year inspired by the brilliant Thomas Bernhard, it is fascinating to read one where the influence runs in the opposite direction.
Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann was a mentor of sorts to Bernhard and the basis for the poet Maria in his final novel Extinction.
Malina, published two years before her death (aged 47 in 1973) was her only novel, although intended to be the first of a trilogy called Todesarten (Ways of Dying)
The translation here is by Philip Boehm, revisited in this new 2019 edition: interestingly one editorial decision in the revised edition was to cut out the footnotes and some glosses, on the grounds that the interested reader now has access to the internet.
Malina is a wonderfully powerful work - intense, experimental, with a narrative that is both fragmentary yet compulsive - one that is difficult to absorb on a single reading, a novel that would repay much study and yet would still have its enigmas. At one point even the narrator admits: Something is dawning on me, I’m beginning to see some logic, but I don’t understand anything in particular.
For example: is the eponymous Malina, with whom she apparently lives (platonically) yet who seems to not even acknowledge the existence of her lover Ivan, a real person or a figment of her imagination, a male alter-ego (“we’re as different as nights and day”) or rather is she his female alter-ego: merely the dispensable product of his rib) or perhaps a figment of his.
There are many excellent reviews on the internet (https://www.thenation.com/article/ing... and from the ever-excellent Joseph Schreiber https://roughghosts.com/2017/11/26/li...) and Goodreads, so I will content myself with some of my favourite passages:
The narrator on reading:
It has less to do with the books, above all it has to do with the reading, with black on white, with the letters, syllables, lines, the signs, the setting down, this inhuman fixing, this insanity, which flows from people and is frozen into expression. Believe me, expression is insanity, it arises out of our insanity. It also has to do with turning pages, with hunting from one page to the other, with flight, with complicity in an absurd, solidified effusion, with a vile overflow of verse, with insuring life in a single sentence, and, in turn, with the sentences seeking insurance in life.
Reading is a vice which can replace all other vices or temporarily take their place in more intensely helping people live, it is a debauchery, a consuming addiction. No, I don’t take any drugs, I take books.
...
Speed is important, not only concentration, can you please tell me who can keep chewing on a simple or even a complex sentence without feeling disgust, either with the eyes or the mouth, just keep on grinding away, over and over, a sentence which only consists of subject and predicate must be consumed rapidly, a sentence with many appositions must for that very reason be taken at tremendous speed, with the eyeballs performing an imperceptible slalom.
...
I couldn’t list the books which have impressed me the most or explain why they made such an impression, in which places and for how long. What sticks, then, you will ask, but that’s not the point! there are only a few sentences, a few expressions that wake up inside my brain again and again, begging to be heard over the years.
And the narrator's take (I would say Bernhardian take but actually his takes are Bachmannian) on Vienna and its decline post the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire (sentences that one fears may mirror the fate of London and the UK post Brexit):
I get along well with this city and its diminished and disappearing surroundings which have retired from history. (Uneasy alarm of Herr Mühlbauer. Unruffled, I proceed.) You might also say that, as an example to the world, an empire, along with its practices and tactics embellished with ideas, was expelled from history. I am very happy to live here, because from this place on the planet, where nothing more is happening, a confrontation with the world is all the more frightening, here one is neither self-righteous nor self-satisfied, as this is not some protected island, but a haven of decay, wherever you go there is decay, decay everywhere, right before our eyes, and not just the decay of yesterday’s empire, but of today’s as well.
Highly recommended (although far from an easy read). 4.5 stars - my only reason for 4 not 5 is that I don't feel I did the novel justice, rather than vice versa.
Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann was a mentor of sorts to Bernhard and the basis for the poet Maria in his final novel Extinction.
Malina, published two years before her death (aged 47 in 1973) was her only novel, although intended to be the first of a trilogy called Todesarten (Ways of Dying)
The translation here is by Philip Boehm, revisited in this new 2019 edition: interestingly one editorial decision in the revised edition was to cut out the footnotes and some glosses, on the grounds that the interested reader now has access to the internet.
Malina is a wonderfully powerful work - intense, experimental, with a narrative that is both fragmentary yet compulsive - one that is difficult to absorb on a single reading, a novel that would repay much study and yet would still have its enigmas. At one point even the narrator admits: Something is dawning on me, I’m beginning to see some logic, but I don’t understand anything in particular.
For example: is the eponymous Malina, with whom she apparently lives (platonically) yet who seems to not even acknowledge the existence of her lover Ivan, a real person or a figment of her imagination, a male alter-ego (“we’re as different as nights and day”) or rather is she his female alter-ego: merely the dispensable product of his rib) or perhaps a figment of his.
There are many excellent reviews on the internet (https://www.thenation.com/article/ing... and from the ever-excellent Joseph Schreiber https://roughghosts.com/2017/11/26/li...) and Goodreads, so I will content myself with some of my favourite passages:
The narrator on reading:
It has less to do with the books, above all it has to do with the reading, with black on white, with the letters, syllables, lines, the signs, the setting down, this inhuman fixing, this insanity, which flows from people and is frozen into expression. Believe me, expression is insanity, it arises out of our insanity. It also has to do with turning pages, with hunting from one page to the other, with flight, with complicity in an absurd, solidified effusion, with a vile overflow of verse, with insuring life in a single sentence, and, in turn, with the sentences seeking insurance in life.
Reading is a vice which can replace all other vices or temporarily take their place in more intensely helping people live, it is a debauchery, a consuming addiction. No, I don’t take any drugs, I take books.
...
Speed is important, not only concentration, can you please tell me who can keep chewing on a simple or even a complex sentence without feeling disgust, either with the eyes or the mouth, just keep on grinding away, over and over, a sentence which only consists of subject and predicate must be consumed rapidly, a sentence with many appositions must for that very reason be taken at tremendous speed, with the eyeballs performing an imperceptible slalom.
...
I couldn’t list the books which have impressed me the most or explain why they made such an impression, in which places and for how long. What sticks, then, you will ask, but that’s not the point! there are only a few sentences, a few expressions that wake up inside my brain again and again, begging to be heard over the years.
And the narrator's take (I would say Bernhardian take but actually his takes are Bachmannian) on Vienna and its decline post the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire (sentences that one fears may mirror the fate of London and the UK post Brexit):
I get along well with this city and its diminished and disappearing surroundings which have retired from history. (Uneasy alarm of Herr Mühlbauer. Unruffled, I proceed.) You might also say that, as an example to the world, an empire, along with its practices and tactics embellished with ideas, was expelled from history. I am very happy to live here, because from this place on the planet, where nothing more is happening, a confrontation with the world is all the more frightening, here one is neither self-righteous nor self-satisfied, as this is not some protected island, but a haven of decay, wherever you go there is decay, decay everywhere, right before our eyes, and not just the decay of yesterday’s empire, but of today’s as well.
Highly recommended (although far from an easy read). 4.5 stars - my only reason for 4 not 5 is that I don't feel I did the novel justice, rather than vice versa.
September 11, 2021
There's the sense of a very clever literary trick waiting to happen in this novel. It revolves around the character Malina. Why is the novel called Malina? Malina sounds to me like a woman's name, not a man's. He's the man the female narrator lives with, a shadowy presence to begin with. At face value he seems a secondary character. So there must be far more to him that we haven't yet learned. You begin theorising. Perhaps he is an invention of the narrator's, a double or alter ego. And all will suddenly blaze into coherence at some point. So you're expecting some eureka moment when you understand why Malina is placed at the forefront of the novel. Perhaps the trick is simply creating the illusion of a trick because I never quite understood why this novel is titled Malina.
The female narrator is overly dependent on men for her sense of identity. She is pathologically obsessed by a man called Ivan who is elusive. Meanwhile she lives with the orderly dispassionate Malina. And we learn she has grown up with an abusive father. All takes place in Vienna, still haunted by its Nazi past. When her men begin failing her the narrator's identity comes apart.
It's a very convincing depiction of madness. The problem perhaps is that, by its own definition, madness is excessive and this novel has excesses. The sense everything is a figment of imagination sometimes works splendidly, other times seems a cheapish trick. Malina is an enigmatic book, rather uneven, brilliantly inspired at times, a little clichéd and self-indulgent at others. Once again I was forced to think about Roland Barthes' claim that an author's biography should play no meaningful part in the reading of a novel's text. I generally don't like to know much about an author's biography. But I think there are times when felt misgivings about a book find explanation in learning about the life of its author. Bachman's father, I learned after finishing, was a member of the Nazi party. This explained to me the rather heavy handed deployment of Nazi imagery and the bombastic repetitive section dealing with the father which for me let the book down. I don't think anyone would claim Malina is a subtle novel. It's intense and raw and sometimes gets carried away with itself, but there's no question it displays a virtuoso talent at work. It's tragic that she died before she could write another novel. There's the sense she was still finding her feet as a novelist. And that she was exorcising demons in this novel.
The female narrator is overly dependent on men for her sense of identity. She is pathologically obsessed by a man called Ivan who is elusive. Meanwhile she lives with the orderly dispassionate Malina. And we learn she has grown up with an abusive father. All takes place in Vienna, still haunted by its Nazi past. When her men begin failing her the narrator's identity comes apart.
It's a very convincing depiction of madness. The problem perhaps is that, by its own definition, madness is excessive and this novel has excesses. The sense everything is a figment of imagination sometimes works splendidly, other times seems a cheapish trick. Malina is an enigmatic book, rather uneven, brilliantly inspired at times, a little clichéd and self-indulgent at others. Once again I was forced to think about Roland Barthes' claim that an author's biography should play no meaningful part in the reading of a novel's text. I generally don't like to know much about an author's biography. But I think there are times when felt misgivings about a book find explanation in learning about the life of its author. Bachman's father, I learned after finishing, was a member of the Nazi party. This explained to me the rather heavy handed deployment of Nazi imagery and the bombastic repetitive section dealing with the father which for me let the book down. I don't think anyone would claim Malina is a subtle novel. It's intense and raw and sometimes gets carried away with itself, but there's no question it displays a virtuoso talent at work. It's tragic that she died before she could write another novel. There's the sense she was still finding her feet as a novelist. And that she was exorcising demons in this novel.
June 17, 2013
"The name alone suffices to be in the world."Malina is one of those novels that feels completely natural to me, arising almost like an organism, without pretense or premeditated designs. Its easy playful voice keeps me reading despite the somber themes that run underneath. It is a particularly difficult novel for me to describe, as it tackles many serious topics (war, post-war, time, history, personal relationships, men and women) yet when you pull back, its main thrust is elusive. What is this book about? Who even is Malina? I have no answers and in a way the answers don't really matter. Yes, I read the afterword with some pretty convincing angles. And some of it has validity.
What matters to me is that it is enjoyable at every juncture. And it feels so right just in my bones, like I buy everything it says. Just the whole damn thing seems so necessary and true, like a lived thing. It seems less a novel and more a byproduct of someone's having been alive.
Once one has survived something then survival itself interferes with understanding. p146
December 21, 2013
I have lived in Ivan and die in Malina.
Happy with Ivan. I never knew her when she was living in Ivan. Maybe if I were standing across the street I'd watch her spinning out of control. Her Hungarian boyfriend who sends avalanches of stone cold epithets. Don't ask if I love you, don't say I..., don't make believe important, be fun, be happy, be the first time I saw you. Strangers, for the last time. A dead telephone in her apartment is visited by the spirits of everyone who isn't Ivan. I saw her with his two kids, their tugging arms and spinning happy. The rarest tummy butterfly bright and eye blinking crushed. I only saw her living in the never landing. When she has to make up everything about zoo animals (has anyone else noticed the phenomenon of men reading aloud from placards? Any botanical garden, zoo, museum or anything. They read as if the woman [it's always a woman] is supposed to think this is their combustible wisdom and not the same damn placard right in front of their same faces). If Ivan is out of their range she can be what they want. If the her of him and the her of they and the her of others collide pop goes the butterflies wings. Please let them have ice cream, I promised them ice cream. Dancing and spinning that is dizzy and on strings. If she is happy it happened before she thought about it. She thinks about it before it can happen, lives in here lies. Ivan is more important in his absence. And it was perfect this way. This how he doesn't belong to her if she sends him off to be him without her. I never wanted her to love Ivan. I begged her inside of me to just forget about him. When he tells her who she is. This isn't you, you're happy, you don't write like this. The unreal love pulled my butterflies wings off and shoved them under a microscope. I didn't want to hold my breath when she waits for that phone to ring and I did.
She lives with Malina. It was perfect this deliberate I'm not living it because I'm pedestaling to the burning synthetic world stuffs. I don't know how Bachmann managed to weave this web of psychological life of stepping outside of yourself and then when you are actually living it. There's a big fat spider of wish fulfillment to eat you alive because you couldn't stop thinking. If it was on purpose she feels safe to tether to Malina as she strangles herself to wait for Ivan.
Malina tells her Don't forget that not one of your enemies has ever seen you, and you have never seen one of them.
I had this feeling that she performs that mime of sewing your lips shut and throwing the needle into the biggest haystack. The haystack of needles of the universe. You can't see the threads that sew everyone together because the haystack is too big for that. She and Malina talk about the war, what people got up and could pretend never happened. If people did a spontaneous dance of everyone knew the moves on the day you didn't want to wake up. It never happened. It happened. They talk about what peace is to war. The interlude between war. Crocodile tears evaporate in reptilian flesh. Tears in Austria for Bangladesh, for Syria. Her father murdered her, she murders them in her eyelids prison gate shut (cha chung) and her sister loses a name. Malina asks and she doesn't know. She's a survivor of real life and a prisoner of its memory. It is so much more to run from than if she can be rescued if only Ivan or Malina will hold her down. I had the feeling they were talking about everyone, or who could be anyone, Austria, the world. They don't talk about Malina. I think Bachmann was a genius in how Malina's silences and the not asking about him is spoken concurrently. She slips out of time into a fantasy of a princess and murder and riding. When she flies she is only spinning. I think Bachmann was a genius to do the way people name everything. They talk and talk and make important and they talk about what they talk about when they talk about everything. And what you think you are living is that foot in your over analyzing mental lands. I'm one of those intense mental life that overlaps real life like if you wore a sweat shirt with a skeleton on it for Halloween. It gave me chills to see it this way in a book that felt so real and so not real (it's experimental as fancy foot work goes. Not the "that looks easy!" dancing but you know they practiced that dance in their bedroom alone every night and dreamed someone would see it and at the same time it was a vigil for never, ever being understood). Malina is a strange book. I don't have a handle on it because it slips out of time. I've been thinking about what to write in a review for ages. It is if you lived past what you didn't think would ever end and then you don't know how to leave of world war II Austria and it is relationships are hell, man and it is a telling.
Malina says this. I can't get over this.
Once one has survived something then survival itself interferes with understanding, and you don't even know which lives came before and which is your life of today, you even mix up your own lives.
I had this feeling all of the time that she wanted them to tell her who she was. Malina is the web beneath the dizzy spin of Ivan. I know that his face falls from her reach when she's not... I don't believe he let her burn to death. I know what the essay in the book says about his sudden apathy. I don't think that was it. She had to know who she was for herself. Forget about Ivan. I want to forget about Ivan even though she made him important so she can stay hungry. I think she slips into the wall because she murdered herself.
Beauty is no longer flowing from me, it could have flowed from me, it came in waves to me from Ivan, Ivan who is beautiful, I have known one single beautiful human being, nonetheless I have seen beauty, in the final analysis even I became beautiful one single time, through Ivan.
No alarm, no sirens. No one comes to help. Not the ambulance and not the police. It is a very old wall, a very strong wall, from which no one can fall, which no one can break open, from which nothing can ever be heard again.
Malina haunts me. This killing yourself. When did it stop the death wish to stream into the drowning so you can suspend in freeze, over your face no direction. Only the other side of the invisible corners black dream.
Happy with Ivan. I never knew her when she was living in Ivan. Maybe if I were standing across the street I'd watch her spinning out of control. Her Hungarian boyfriend who sends avalanches of stone cold epithets. Don't ask if I love you, don't say I..., don't make believe important, be fun, be happy, be the first time I saw you. Strangers, for the last time. A dead telephone in her apartment is visited by the spirits of everyone who isn't Ivan. I saw her with his two kids, their tugging arms and spinning happy. The rarest tummy butterfly bright and eye blinking crushed. I only saw her living in the never landing. When she has to make up everything about zoo animals (has anyone else noticed the phenomenon of men reading aloud from placards? Any botanical garden, zoo, museum or anything. They read as if the woman [it's always a woman] is supposed to think this is their combustible wisdom and not the same damn placard right in front of their same faces). If Ivan is out of their range she can be what they want. If the her of him and the her of they and the her of others collide pop goes the butterflies wings. Please let them have ice cream, I promised them ice cream. Dancing and spinning that is dizzy and on strings. If she is happy it happened before she thought about it. She thinks about it before it can happen, lives in here lies. Ivan is more important in his absence. And it was perfect this way. This how he doesn't belong to her if she sends him off to be him without her. I never wanted her to love Ivan. I begged her inside of me to just forget about him. When he tells her who she is. This isn't you, you're happy, you don't write like this. The unreal love pulled my butterflies wings off and shoved them under a microscope. I didn't want to hold my breath when she waits for that phone to ring and I did.
She lives with Malina. It was perfect this deliberate I'm not living it because I'm pedestaling to the burning synthetic world stuffs. I don't know how Bachmann managed to weave this web of psychological life of stepping outside of yourself and then when you are actually living it. There's a big fat spider of wish fulfillment to eat you alive because you couldn't stop thinking. If it was on purpose she feels safe to tether to Malina as she strangles herself to wait for Ivan.
Malina tells her Don't forget that not one of your enemies has ever seen you, and you have never seen one of them.
I had this feeling that she performs that mime of sewing your lips shut and throwing the needle into the biggest haystack. The haystack of needles of the universe. You can't see the threads that sew everyone together because the haystack is too big for that. She and Malina talk about the war, what people got up and could pretend never happened. If people did a spontaneous dance of everyone knew the moves on the day you didn't want to wake up. It never happened. It happened. They talk about what peace is to war. The interlude between war. Crocodile tears evaporate in reptilian flesh. Tears in Austria for Bangladesh, for Syria. Her father murdered her, she murders them in her eyelids prison gate shut (cha chung) and her sister loses a name. Malina asks and she doesn't know. She's a survivor of real life and a prisoner of its memory. It is so much more to run from than if she can be rescued if only Ivan or Malina will hold her down. I had the feeling they were talking about everyone, or who could be anyone, Austria, the world. They don't talk about Malina. I think Bachmann was a genius in how Malina's silences and the not asking about him is spoken concurrently. She slips out of time into a fantasy of a princess and murder and riding. When she flies she is only spinning. I think Bachmann was a genius to do the way people name everything. They talk and talk and make important and they talk about what they talk about when they talk about everything. And what you think you are living is that foot in your over analyzing mental lands. I'm one of those intense mental life that overlaps real life like if you wore a sweat shirt with a skeleton on it for Halloween. It gave me chills to see it this way in a book that felt so real and so not real (it's experimental as fancy foot work goes. Not the "that looks easy!" dancing but you know they practiced that dance in their bedroom alone every night and dreamed someone would see it and at the same time it was a vigil for never, ever being understood). Malina is a strange book. I don't have a handle on it because it slips out of time. I've been thinking about what to write in a review for ages. It is if you lived past what you didn't think would ever end and then you don't know how to leave of world war II Austria and it is relationships are hell, man and it is a telling.
Malina says this. I can't get over this.
Once one has survived something then survival itself interferes with understanding, and you don't even know which lives came before and which is your life of today, you even mix up your own lives.
I had this feeling all of the time that she wanted them to tell her who she was. Malina is the web beneath the dizzy spin of Ivan. I know that his face falls from her reach when she's not... I don't believe he let her burn to death. I know what the essay in the book says about his sudden apathy. I don't think that was it. She had to know who she was for herself. Forget about Ivan. I want to forget about Ivan even though she made him important so she can stay hungry. I think she slips into the wall because she murdered herself.
Beauty is no longer flowing from me, it could have flowed from me, it came in waves to me from Ivan, Ivan who is beautiful, I have known one single beautiful human being, nonetheless I have seen beauty, in the final analysis even I became beautiful one single time, through Ivan.
No alarm, no sirens. No one comes to help. Not the ambulance and not the police. It is a very old wall, a very strong wall, from which no one can fall, which no one can break open, from which nothing can ever be heard again.
Malina haunts me. This killing yourself. When did it stop the death wish to stream into the drowning so you can suspend in freeze, over your face no direction. Only the other side of the invisible corners black dream.
February 16, 2021
Ingeborg Bachmann’ın kitabın içinde de geçen ve üç kitaplık bir seri olmasını planladığı “ Ölüm Türleri” nin üvertür kısmı. İlk bakışta yüzeysel bir aşk üçgeninin başlangıcı ve sonu gibi görünüyor. Ancak aslında hikaye, anlatıcının iç dünyasında dönüyor ve odak noktası kendini bulmaya çalışan kadın benliğinin algısı ve bastırılması.
Roman üç bölümden oluşuyor ve tıpkı oyunlardaki gibi bir karakter tanıtımıyla başlıyor. Birinci bölüm “Ivan’la Mutluluk” çoğu kişinin Max Frisch olarak tanımladığı; çaresiz aşık anlatıcının bu özlemini yansıtıcı olarak gördüğü ve kadın benliğini yükselten Ivan ile ilişkisinin anlattığı bir bölüm. Ancak aralarındaki ilişki fiziksel temastan ziyade diyaloglar üzerinden yürüyen ve ortak bir aşinalığa dayanan, içsel boşluğunu ise koruyan belirsiz bir ilişki.
İkinci bölüm olan “Üçüncü Adam” ise okurken hem anlatı hem de konu açısından en zorlayıcı kısımlardan. Aynı zamanda, bir aşk üçgeni hikayesi altına gömülü olan kadın benliğinin maruz kaldığı şiddetin, baskının ve faşizmin yüzeye çıkarıldığı bölüm. “Faşizm, atılan ilk bombalarla başlamaz, her gazetede üzerine bir şeyler yazılabilecek olan terörle de başlamaz. Faşizm, insanlar arasındaki ilişkilerde başlar, iki insan arasındaki ilişkide başlar… ve ben anlatmak istedim ki, savaş ve barış yoktur. Hep savaş vardır.”
Anlatıcıyı, benliğini bastırmak ve parçalamakla tehdit eden karakter ve kızına tecavüz eden, parçalayan, gaz odalarında boğan kafkaesk baba figürü aslında toplumda erkek egemenliğinin de temsili olarak görülüyor. “Toplum görülebilecek en kanlı arenadır.” Anlatıcı özelinden genele yayılan alt metinde toplumsal kırılmayı, asla eşit statüde tutulamayan kadın ve erkek benliği arasındaki kaotik ilişkiyi; kadının toplum içinde yaşadığı yabancılaşma, kimlik kaybı ve yıkımı, erkek egemenliği karşısında varlığını sürdüremenin imkansızlığını ve belirlenen rol modeller ile dayatılan yıkıcı şiddetini gösteriyor.
Otobiyografik öğeler taşıyan kitabın geleneksel bir olay örgüsü de bulunmuyor. Rüya parçaları, eskizler, diyaloglar ve bilinç akışı arasında gidip gelen, kurgusal gerçek ile hayal gücü arasındaki sınırın sık sık bulanıklaştığı, karmaşık bir tarzı var. Bu da okumayı ayrıca zorlaştıran unsurlardan birisi. Sosyal çevre içindeki gizli şiddet, nasyonel sosyalizm ve ataerkil toplum içindeki cinsiyet ayrımcılığı ve kadın benliği üzerine baş yapıt niteliğindeki bir kitap. Ancak herkese tavsiye edebileceğim ve “mutlaka okunmalı” şeklinde tanımlayabileceğim bir roman değil. Özellikle de Ingeborg Bachmann’ın hayatına ve dönemine dair bilginiz olması kitabın tamamlanabilmesi için etkili. Benim yazarla tanışmam öyküleri ile olmuştu. Çok da sevmiştim ama Malina zorlayıcı bir metin oldu. Her ne kadar benim gibi gidip beş aya yaymayacak olsanız da öyle kısa bir sürede bitirilebilecek ve çözümlenebilecek bir kitap değil. “Ivan’da yaşadım, Malina’da ölüyorum” “Cinayetti.” Sonuyla büyüleyici olsa da ilerleyen yıllarda bir kez daha okumayı göze alamayacağım kitaplardan.
Roman üç bölümden oluşuyor ve tıpkı oyunlardaki gibi bir karakter tanıtımıyla başlıyor. Birinci bölüm “Ivan’la Mutluluk” çoğu kişinin Max Frisch olarak tanımladığı; çaresiz aşık anlatıcının bu özlemini yansıtıcı olarak gördüğü ve kadın benliğini yükselten Ivan ile ilişkisinin anlattığı bir bölüm. Ancak aralarındaki ilişki fiziksel temastan ziyade diyaloglar üzerinden yürüyen ve ortak bir aşinalığa dayanan, içsel boşluğunu ise koruyan belirsiz bir ilişki.
İkinci bölüm olan “Üçüncü Adam” ise okurken hem anlatı hem de konu açısından en zorlayıcı kısımlardan. Aynı zamanda, bir aşk üçgeni hikayesi altına gömülü olan kadın benliğinin maruz kaldığı şiddetin, baskının ve faşizmin yüzeye çıkarıldığı bölüm. “Faşizm, atılan ilk bombalarla başlamaz, her gazetede üzerine bir şeyler yazılabilecek olan terörle de başlamaz. Faşizm, insanlar arasındaki ilişkilerde başlar, iki insan arasındaki ilişkide başlar… ve ben anlatmak istedim ki, savaş ve barış yoktur. Hep savaş vardır.”
Anlatıcıyı, benliğini bastırmak ve parçalamakla tehdit eden karakter ve kızına tecavüz eden, parçalayan, gaz odalarında boğan kafkaesk baba figürü aslında toplumda erkek egemenliğinin de temsili olarak görülüyor. “Toplum görülebilecek en kanlı arenadır.” Anlatıcı özelinden genele yayılan alt metinde toplumsal kırılmayı, asla eşit statüde tutulamayan kadın ve erkek benliği arasındaki kaotik ilişkiyi; kadının toplum içinde yaşadığı yabancılaşma, kimlik kaybı ve yıkımı, erkek egemenliği karşısında varlığını sürdüremenin imkansızlığını ve belirlenen rol modeller ile dayatılan yıkıcı şiddetini gösteriyor.
Otobiyografik öğeler taşıyan kitabın geleneksel bir olay örgüsü de bulunmuyor. Rüya parçaları, eskizler, diyaloglar ve bilinç akışı arasında gidip gelen, kurgusal gerçek ile hayal gücü arasındaki sınırın sık sık bulanıklaştığı, karmaşık bir tarzı var. Bu da okumayı ayrıca zorlaştıran unsurlardan birisi. Sosyal çevre içindeki gizli şiddet, nasyonel sosyalizm ve ataerkil toplum içindeki cinsiyet ayrımcılığı ve kadın benliği üzerine baş yapıt niteliğindeki bir kitap. Ancak herkese tavsiye edebileceğim ve “mutlaka okunmalı” şeklinde tanımlayabileceğim bir roman değil. Özellikle de Ingeborg Bachmann’ın hayatına ve dönemine dair bilginiz olması kitabın tamamlanabilmesi için etkili. Benim yazarla tanışmam öyküleri ile olmuştu. Çok da sevmiştim ama Malina zorlayıcı bir metin oldu. Her ne kadar benim gibi gidip beş aya yaymayacak olsanız da öyle kısa bir sürede bitirilebilecek ve çözümlenebilecek bir kitap değil. “Ivan’da yaşadım, Malina’da ölüyorum” “Cinayetti.” Sonuyla büyüleyici olsa da ilerleyen yıllarda bir kez daha okumayı göze alamayacağım kitaplardan.
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June 28, 2022Why "Malina" Has no Message for Feminists
The English translation of "Malina" ends with an academic essay, intended to explain the book's cultural and historical references, and also to help readers who may be confused by the book's experimental form and content. The first purpose is reasonable for North American readers; the second is ridiculous. The book is hermetic, desperately unhappy, relentless, disconsolate, dissociative, and by turns realistic, mythic, and allegorical. Those should all be signs that a brief explanation won't be helpful.
This is how Mark Anderson summarizes the book's reception in the afterword:
"To those familiar with her poetry, 'Malina' seems the continuation in narrative of the problems and images informing the lyrical work of the 1950s. To a new generation of feminist readers (who had little patience with what they saw as her hermetic, aestheticist poetry) 'Malina' and the other unfinished novels of the 'Death Styles' cycle have come to stand for a radically 'other Bachmann,' the critic of patriarchal capitalist society where women are systematically denied a voice and language of their own. To historians familiar with the art and philosophy of Hapsburg Vienna, the novel represents a masterly synthesis of a distinctly Austrian tradition, one that reached it apogee at the turn of the century in the work of Freud, Musil, Roth, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, Hofmannsthal and Kraus. Finally, to contemporary German writers as diverse as Christa Wolf, Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke ot stands as an inspirational example for their own work." (pp. 239-40)
Note that only one of these three, the one attributed to "feminist readers," is an interpretation of the text itself. Many of the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are similarly concerned with gender roles. The translation seems to be read as a memoir, autobiography, or trauma narrative. (A good exception to this is "Life? Or Thearer?," a review by Jennifer Krasinski in "Bookforum," Sept./Oct./Nov. 2019, p. 31.) One reviewer on Goodreads puts it this way:
"The generation Bachmann describes has made female victimhood an art form. It grated on my nerves because I have been fighting my whole life both against the male attitude of condescension and property and the female passive voice of pleasurable suffering. 'Look at me, I am killed by male dominance! Don't I look pretty in all my indignation?'" ("Lisa" on Goodreads, 2018)
But Bachmann was much stranger than the pugilist advocate of women's rights imagined by online reviewers. Readings like these are misguided because they project later desires for empowerment onto a text that is determinedly closed to meliorist narratives. The novel continues to be taken as a prelude to some feminism, but "Malina" does not imply any such future or hope. It isn't about "disempowerment," "gender roles," or "the lasting impact of child abuse in adult life" (Sarah Porter on Amazon). Those are things the novel can only be about when it is read for use-value by a 21st century audience accustomed to trauma narratives and self-help books. "Malina" itself does not want to be saved: its narrator knows that the air we all breathe is poison. Chapter 2 is full of scenes of violence, incest, rape, and murder, mostly centered on a father figure, but as Peter Filkins wrote in the "New York Times," the narrator
"...realizes that the menace of her dreams is 'not my father. It's my murderer.' The distinction is important. For though Bachmann is clearly concerned with patriarchal power and the ravages of family violence inflicted upon women, she also sees such issues as inextricably bound up with the violence done to both genders in the flawed, if not fatal, workings of society and history, as well as the violence we do to and by words because we find it impossible to give full expression to such outrage."
Language itself, for Bachmann, is a form of violence, a "disease," an "expression of insanity." (The first quotation is Filkins's; the second is Bachmann's.) Nor will it do to say that the two men in the narrator's life, Ivan and Malina, are absent or manipulative. Ivan, one of the two male characters, cannot love anyone but his children, even though the unnamed narrator declares her love for him; but it is not at all clear that their miscommunication is a picture of conventional gender roles; and the third character, Malina, is too strange, and too nearly allegorical, to be counted as an independent character at all. (Anderson thinks Malina is part of the narrator, and that he's modeled on the Jungian anima. There is some support for this in an interview with Bachmann.)
The narrator herself does sometimes fit the model of trauma narratives: she is in continuous crisis; she cries, she shakes, she smokes, drinks, takes painkillers, can't sleep or write. And yet she doesn't communicate any better than the male characters. This isn't feminist advocacy; this is a world in which people try as best they can to remain minimally human.
In Bachmann's mind, the poisons of language are personal in a way they aren't for Paul Celan. There is an extended allegory of language and writing on pp. 156-61, where the narrator tells the story of Otto Kranetizer, a postal worker accused of hoarding unopened letters in his apartment.
"...in every profession [i.e., including writing] there must be at least one man who lives in deep doubt and comes into a conflict. Mail delivery [the profession of a writer] in particular would seem to require a latent angest, a seismographic recording of emotional tremors which is otherwise accepted only in the higher and highest professions [later described as professors of philosophy and science], as if the mail couldn't have its own crisis, no Thinking-Wanting-Being for it [Denken-Wollen-Sein]" (p. 159, 253 in the original; see also Surika Simon, "Mail-Orders: The Fiction of Writing in Postmodern Culture")
This is as close to Kafka as anyone in postwar fiction: it's an extended allegory of artistic work, as in "Josephine the Singer" or "The Hunger Artist," and it is infused with anxiety, anger, and fear. What poisons the narrator in "Malina" is a different from what poisons words in Celan.
Readings of "Malina" that take their bearing from contemporary diary-novels, trauma narratives, memoirs, self-help books, or feminist theories, draw on a simplified and domesticated sense of the book. This novel is a tremendous achievement: it is deeply experimental, to the point of continuously undermining its supposedly secure three-act form (blithely announced at the beginning and elaborated by optimistic critics); it is unsure of the relation between allegory, dream, and history; and its story (involving the narrator's death, while living, and her transformation into her spectral alter-ego) is darker than anything that a realist, political, or historical reading could use or comprehend.
Postscript 1, on metafiction
I'll just close with two smaller points. First, "Malina" is a forerunner of the current interest in minimally fictional novels, made popular by Ben Lerner. At one point Ivan discovers notes for a manuscript the narrator intends to write called "Todesarten" ("Arts of Death" or 'Death Styles"), which is the name of the trilogy of books Bachmann contemplated ("Malina" is the only one she finished before she burned to death in her apartment in Rome) on the ways people die while living -- through relationships, by institutions and politics, by language itself. Ivan counsels the narrator to write a happy book instead. "Malina" is not that book, but the coincidence of the name of the book occurring in the book is parallel to Lerner's "10:04" and other novels. Writing the thinnest possible veneer of fiction on an experimental, non-linear narrative is one of several things Bachmann was experimenting with in the late 1960's. It would be interesting if the contemporary moment could acknowledge its belatedness.
Postscript 2, on humor
I'd also like to register that "Malina" has some very funny pages. I cringe when reviewers say this sort of thing, because I usually don't agree. Bachmann's humor comes from a desperate fear and hatred of people in general, a kind of acidic combination of Kafka and Bernhard. Here is her suggestion for how to write back to someone who blithely wishes you a happy birthday (as so many social media sites do these days):
"Dear...
You wish me... best wishes for my birthday. Permit me to tell you how shocked I was precisely today. To be sure I have no doubt as to your tact, since I had the honor of meeting you some years ago... However you are alluding to a day, perhaps even a specific hour and an irrevocable moment, which must have been a most private matter for my mother, my father too, as we may assume for the sake of propriety. Naturally nothing in particular was shared with me about this day, I just had to memorize a date which I have to write down on every registration form in every city, in every country, even if I'm only passing through. But I stopped passing through countries a long time ago..." (p. 90).
The English translation of "Malina" ends with an academic essay, intended to explain the book's cultural and historical references, and also to help readers who may be confused by the book's experimental form and content. The first purpose is reasonable for North American readers; the second is ridiculous. The book is hermetic, desperately unhappy, relentless, disconsolate, dissociative, and by turns realistic, mythic, and allegorical. Those should all be signs that a brief explanation won't be helpful.
This is how Mark Anderson summarizes the book's reception in the afterword:
"To those familiar with her poetry, 'Malina' seems the continuation in narrative of the problems and images informing the lyrical work of the 1950s. To a new generation of feminist readers (who had little patience with what they saw as her hermetic, aestheticist poetry) 'Malina' and the other unfinished novels of the 'Death Styles' cycle have come to stand for a radically 'other Bachmann,' the critic of patriarchal capitalist society where women are systematically denied a voice and language of their own. To historians familiar with the art and philosophy of Hapsburg Vienna, the novel represents a masterly synthesis of a distinctly Austrian tradition, one that reached it apogee at the turn of the century in the work of Freud, Musil, Roth, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, Hofmannsthal and Kraus. Finally, to contemporary German writers as diverse as Christa Wolf, Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke ot stands as an inspirational example for their own work." (pp. 239-40)
Note that only one of these three, the one attributed to "feminist readers," is an interpretation of the text itself. Many of the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are similarly concerned with gender roles. The translation seems to be read as a memoir, autobiography, or trauma narrative. (A good exception to this is "Life? Or Thearer?," a review by Jennifer Krasinski in "Bookforum," Sept./Oct./Nov. 2019, p. 31.) One reviewer on Goodreads puts it this way:
"The generation Bachmann describes has made female victimhood an art form. It grated on my nerves because I have been fighting my whole life both against the male attitude of condescension and property and the female passive voice of pleasurable suffering. 'Look at me, I am killed by male dominance! Don't I look pretty in all my indignation?'" ("Lisa" on Goodreads, 2018)
But Bachmann was much stranger than the pugilist advocate of women's rights imagined by online reviewers. Readings like these are misguided because they project later desires for empowerment onto a text that is determinedly closed to meliorist narratives. The novel continues to be taken as a prelude to some feminism, but "Malina" does not imply any such future or hope. It isn't about "disempowerment," "gender roles," or "the lasting impact of child abuse in adult life" (Sarah Porter on Amazon). Those are things the novel can only be about when it is read for use-value by a 21st century audience accustomed to trauma narratives and self-help books. "Malina" itself does not want to be saved: its narrator knows that the air we all breathe is poison. Chapter 2 is full of scenes of violence, incest, rape, and murder, mostly centered on a father figure, but as Peter Filkins wrote in the "New York Times," the narrator
"...realizes that the menace of her dreams is 'not my father. It's my murderer.' The distinction is important. For though Bachmann is clearly concerned with patriarchal power and the ravages of family violence inflicted upon women, she also sees such issues as inextricably bound up with the violence done to both genders in the flawed, if not fatal, workings of society and history, as well as the violence we do to and by words because we find it impossible to give full expression to such outrage."
Language itself, for Bachmann, is a form of violence, a "disease," an "expression of insanity." (The first quotation is Filkins's; the second is Bachmann's.) Nor will it do to say that the two men in the narrator's life, Ivan and Malina, are absent or manipulative. Ivan, one of the two male characters, cannot love anyone but his children, even though the unnamed narrator declares her love for him; but it is not at all clear that their miscommunication is a picture of conventional gender roles; and the third character, Malina, is too strange, and too nearly allegorical, to be counted as an independent character at all. (Anderson thinks Malina is part of the narrator, and that he's modeled on the Jungian anima. There is some support for this in an interview with Bachmann.)
The narrator herself does sometimes fit the model of trauma narratives: she is in continuous crisis; she cries, she shakes, she smokes, drinks, takes painkillers, can't sleep or write. And yet she doesn't communicate any better than the male characters. This isn't feminist advocacy; this is a world in which people try as best they can to remain minimally human.
In Bachmann's mind, the poisons of language are personal in a way they aren't for Paul Celan. There is an extended allegory of language and writing on pp. 156-61, where the narrator tells the story of Otto Kranetizer, a postal worker accused of hoarding unopened letters in his apartment.
"...in every profession [i.e., including writing] there must be at least one man who lives in deep doubt and comes into a conflict. Mail delivery [the profession of a writer] in particular would seem to require a latent angest, a seismographic recording of emotional tremors which is otherwise accepted only in the higher and highest professions [later described as professors of philosophy and science], as if the mail couldn't have its own crisis, no Thinking-Wanting-Being for it [Denken-Wollen-Sein]" (p. 159, 253 in the original; see also Surika Simon, "Mail-Orders: The Fiction of Writing in Postmodern Culture")
This is as close to Kafka as anyone in postwar fiction: it's an extended allegory of artistic work, as in "Josephine the Singer" or "The Hunger Artist," and it is infused with anxiety, anger, and fear. What poisons the narrator in "Malina" is a different from what poisons words in Celan.
Readings of "Malina" that take their bearing from contemporary diary-novels, trauma narratives, memoirs, self-help books, or feminist theories, draw on a simplified and domesticated sense of the book. This novel is a tremendous achievement: it is deeply experimental, to the point of continuously undermining its supposedly secure three-act form (blithely announced at the beginning and elaborated by optimistic critics); it is unsure of the relation between allegory, dream, and history; and its story (involving the narrator's death, while living, and her transformation into her spectral alter-ego) is darker than anything that a realist, political, or historical reading could use or comprehend.
Postscript 1, on metafiction
I'll just close with two smaller points. First, "Malina" is a forerunner of the current interest in minimally fictional novels, made popular by Ben Lerner. At one point Ivan discovers notes for a manuscript the narrator intends to write called "Todesarten" ("Arts of Death" or 'Death Styles"), which is the name of the trilogy of books Bachmann contemplated ("Malina" is the only one she finished before she burned to death in her apartment in Rome) on the ways people die while living -- through relationships, by institutions and politics, by language itself. Ivan counsels the narrator to write a happy book instead. "Malina" is not that book, but the coincidence of the name of the book occurring in the book is parallel to Lerner's "10:04" and other novels. Writing the thinnest possible veneer of fiction on an experimental, non-linear narrative is one of several things Bachmann was experimenting with in the late 1960's. It would be interesting if the contemporary moment could acknowledge its belatedness.
Postscript 2, on humor
I'd also like to register that "Malina" has some very funny pages. I cringe when reviewers say this sort of thing, because I usually don't agree. Bachmann's humor comes from a desperate fear and hatred of people in general, a kind of acidic combination of Kafka and Bernhard. Here is her suggestion for how to write back to someone who blithely wishes you a happy birthday (as so many social media sites do these days):
"Dear...
You wish me... best wishes for my birthday. Permit me to tell you how shocked I was precisely today. To be sure I have no doubt as to your tact, since I had the honor of meeting you some years ago... However you are alluding to a day, perhaps even a specific hour and an irrevocable moment, which must have been a most private matter for my mother, my father too, as we may assume for the sake of propriety. Naturally nothing in particular was shared with me about this day, I just had to memorize a date which I have to write down on every registration form in every city, in every country, even if I'm only passing through. But I stopped passing through countries a long time ago..." (p. 90).
June 1, 2015
“It’s disgusting to put all this misery on the market, just adding to what’s already there, these books are all absolutely loathsome. What kind of obsession is this anyway, all this gloom, everything’s always sad and these books make it even worse in folio editions.”
Malina is an incredibly complex tragedy on the nature of insanity and to read it, especially in the beginning, is quite a labour. A woman believes that she is a writer and all her men are fruits of her sick consciousness or personages of her unwritten book or alter egos of her cracked mind. And fragment after fragment her consciousness keeps deteriorating more and more but the end shatters everything once again so all that has been happening comes up in absolutely different light and changes the meaning of reality. Malina is an anagram of ‘animal’ and it isn’t accidental but symbolic to the entire surrealistic and existential substance of the book. Malina is a unique and utterly fabulous novel having many layers of narration and elucidation.
Malina is an incredibly complex tragedy on the nature of insanity and to read it, especially in the beginning, is quite a labour. A woman believes that she is a writer and all her men are fruits of her sick consciousness or personages of her unwritten book or alter egos of her cracked mind. And fragment after fragment her consciousness keeps deteriorating more and more but the end shatters everything once again so all that has been happening comes up in absolutely different light and changes the meaning of reality. Malina is an anagram of ‘animal’ and it isn’t accidental but symbolic to the entire surrealistic and existential substance of the book. Malina is a unique and utterly fabulous novel having many layers of narration and elucidation.
March 1, 2013
Dense, fraught and at times stunningly beautiful prose. A narrator in love with her own performance and, at times, too melodramatic for complete empathy. A fascinating attempt to combine the world of the personal with the political and the conflicts of gender. I only wish she had been able to finish her planned cycle of novels. I cannot say that I "enjoyed" it, and doubt I will re-read it, but would not hesitate to recommend it.
March 11, 2018
Ich bezweifle nicht, dass es sich hier um ein Meisterwerk handelt. Die Sprache, die Bilder, die Fähigkeit einen sicher pathologischen Zustand zu beschreiben sind faszinierend. Und obwohl ich diesen Roman nicht zu Ende lesen kann, werde ich mir sicher die Gedichte Bachmanns irgendwann vornehmen.
Mich hat der Stil anfangs ein wenig an Marlen Haushofer erinnert, die sicher in einer ganz anderen Liga spielte, aber ähnliche Themen und Perspektiven vermittelte. Und als Teenager haben mich ihre Bücher sehr fasziniert – und gleichzeitig befremdet, denn diese Frauen, die in ihren Büchern erzählen, hatten sogar nichts mit mir gemein, mit ihrem Kreisen um sich selbst, der Passivität, ihrer Haltung zu ihren Männern. Dennoch, oder grade deshalb?, hat mich das damals angezogen. Vielleicht wenn mir Malina damals in die Finger gefallen wäre, hätte ich dieses Buch geliebt. Heute aber erkenne ich zwar die dichterische Meisterschaft, doch die Figuren, die weibliche wie die männlichen, reizen meine Ungeduld. Und das, ohne dass ich mir einen Erkenntnisgewinn davon verspreche.
Kann man das Buch vielleicht nur als Zeugnis seiner Zeit lesen? Bei Erscheinen war das sicher einzigartig, sowohl aus literarischer wie weiblicher Sicht. Ist Empathie mit den Figuren aus heutiger Sicht also nahezu unmöglich?
Sicher ist es unfair, ein Buch schlecht zu bewerten, das man nicht zu Ende gelesen hat und dem man ja doch einige Könnerschaft zugestehen muss. Aber es handelt sich hier ja immer um ein individuelles Urteil und für mich waren die ersten 160 Seiten eine Qual.
Mich hat der Stil anfangs ein wenig an Marlen Haushofer erinnert, die sicher in einer ganz anderen Liga spielte, aber ähnliche Themen und Perspektiven vermittelte. Und als Teenager haben mich ihre Bücher sehr fasziniert – und gleichzeitig befremdet, denn diese Frauen, die in ihren Büchern erzählen, hatten sogar nichts mit mir gemein, mit ihrem Kreisen um sich selbst, der Passivität, ihrer Haltung zu ihren Männern. Dennoch, oder grade deshalb?, hat mich das damals angezogen. Vielleicht wenn mir Malina damals in die Finger gefallen wäre, hätte ich dieses Buch geliebt. Heute aber erkenne ich zwar die dichterische Meisterschaft, doch die Figuren, die weibliche wie die männlichen, reizen meine Ungeduld. Und das, ohne dass ich mir einen Erkenntnisgewinn davon verspreche.
Kann man das Buch vielleicht nur als Zeugnis seiner Zeit lesen? Bei Erscheinen war das sicher einzigartig, sowohl aus literarischer wie weiblicher Sicht. Ist Empathie mit den Figuren aus heutiger Sicht also nahezu unmöglich?
Sicher ist es unfair, ein Buch schlecht zu bewerten, das man nicht zu Ende gelesen hat und dem man ja doch einige Könnerschaft zugestehen muss. Aber es handelt sich hier ja immer um ein individuelles Urteil und für mich waren die ersten 160 Seiten eine Qual.
March 11, 2018
Darf ich ein Buch positiv bewerten, obwohl sich hinterher herausstellt, dass ich die Geschichte ganz offensichtlich falsch verstanden habe? In dieser leicht schizophrenen Lage befinde ich mich nämlich, nachdem ich Ingeborg Bachmanns Roman gelesen habe. Bis zum Ende war ich in der Vorstellung verhaftet, dass es sich um die Geschichte einer traumabedingten, psychischen Erkrankung handelt. Im Nachwort weist Elfriede Jelinek in ihrer Deutung, eher in Richtung einer allgemeinen Mann-Frau-Thematik und der Gesellschaft inhärenter, misogyner Tendenzen. Meine Interpretation bezog sich dagegen mehr auf die individuelle Situation der Erzählerin. In Folge dieses Fehlschlusses, habe ich auch die Figur Malina ganz anders aufgefasst. Bis zum Schluss war ich in dem Glauben, Malina sei nur eine Imagination der Erzählerin. Trotzdem hat mir der Roman ganz gut gefallen, besonders hinsichtlich seiner poetischen Sprache. Vermutlich muss ich ihn nochmal lesen, dann in der von Ingeborg Bachmann ursprünglich beabsichtigten Weise.
August 2, 2023
Istina je, čitala sam ovu knjigu (s dugim pauzama) skoro dve godine.
Ne mislim da zbog toga treba da mi bude neprijatno. Kažu neki ovde da nisu završili knjigu jer nisu mogli da podnesu frustraciju i to me je odmah podsetilo na ljude koji nisu završili Kafkin Proces, iz istih razloga.
Izbegavam velike reči inače, ali Malina je maestralno delo, tekst kao živ organizam, neprohodan i neprijatan i u potpunosti ono što treba da bude. Zato mi i nije neprijatno što sam povremeno odustajala, ova knjiga je to zaslužila i bilo bi pogrešno boriti se s njom u periodima smanjenih intelektualnih kapaciteta koji su u poslednje dve godine kod mene bili prečesti i predugi. Osećaj je kao da sam prvi put posle mnogo vremena duboko udahnula, ali ipak ne bih to nazvala olakšanjem.
Ne mislim da zbog toga treba da mi bude neprijatno. Kažu neki ovde da nisu završili knjigu jer nisu mogli da podnesu frustraciju i to me je odmah podsetilo na ljude koji nisu završili Kafkin Proces, iz istih razloga.
Izbegavam velike reči inače, ali Malina je maestralno delo, tekst kao živ organizam, neprohodan i neprijatan i u potpunosti ono što treba da bude. Zato mi i nije neprijatno što sam povremeno odustajala, ova knjiga je to zaslužila i bilo bi pogrešno boriti se s njom u periodima smanjenih intelektualnih kapaciteta koji su u poslednje dve godine kod mene bili prečesti i predugi. Osećaj je kao da sam prvi put posle mnogo vremena duboko udahnula, ali ipak ne bih to nazvala olakšanjem.
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December 30, 2021I'm going to have to pass this up for a second reading, and - judging by the reviews on this site - apparently I'm not the only one. It fits perfectly what my book friend Lisa writes: “this (is a) novel of internalized female pain”, a hallucinatory portrait of a woman in Vienna whose psyche is at the mercy of different men. The first part was fairly easy to follow, with a clever evocation of a woman who swings back and forth between the 'adventurous' Ivan and the somewhat shadowy 'tower of strength' Malina. But then the second part, with a succession of what appears to be hallucinations of the same woman, admitted in a psychiatric institute and with bizarre scenes in which incest is explicitly discussed. I have to admit that in the course of the third part (200 pages into the book), after another chain of fragmented scenes which barely seemed to make sense, I gave up. Maybe external circumstances were at play when I read it, causing too much distraction, but I just couldn't put myself in the masochistic world of this writer anymore. I know that the Austrian Bachmann is regarded as Thomas Bernard's source of inspiration, and a great deal of that was recognizable. But personally I think a link with the harsh universum of Elfriede Jelinek is much more obvious. As said, I'm putting this aside for a second reading, because the fact is that this book, this struggle, won't let you go.
August 25, 2017
Si tratta di un libro difficilmente classificabile e di difficile lettura. Pensieri a ruota libera, parole, sogni, paure. La Bachmann usa tantissime tecniche narrative: un continuo monologo interiore, fiabe, leggende, telefonate con frasi a metà, espressioni musicali sul pentagramma, poesie, telegrammi, lettere non spedite, interviste, espressioni in francese e in inglese, silenzi. Il tutto inserito in diversi livelli narrativi che si congiungono e si dividono in continuazione.
Il libro vede, almeno a una prima lettura, tre protagonisti: Ivan, ungherese cinico e senza interessi intellettuali, Malina, studioso di storia di quarant’anni e infine la narratrice della quale si sa solo che è bionda e con gli occhi scuri. Con tutta probabilità è la scrittrice stessa.
"Io scuoto di nuovo la testa, non vuol dire niente, e poi non so niente, e se sapessi o lui me lo dicesse, non ci sarebbe una risposta, non qui e non ora e mai più sulla terra. Finché vivo non ci sarà una risposta".
Il mondo diventa un'immensa camera a gas: “e prima che possa gridare aspiro già tutto il gas, sempre più gas. Sono nella camera a gas, ecco cos'è, la più grande camera a gas del mondo, e ci sto dentro sola. Non ci si difende dal gas”.
”Il pensiero nell'altro è risvegliato dall’infelicità che gli provochiamo. Non c'è relazione di pensiero, non esiste fenomeno di pensiero senza l'infelicità perché soltanto attraverso l'infelicità raggiungiamo la mente degli altri”.
Un libro esistenziale arduo, misterioso, complicato e decisamente impegnativo. Ho faticato parecchio a inseguire un filo logico che di fatto non c’è; ma alla fine devo dire che ne è valsa la pena.
Il libro vede, almeno a una prima lettura, tre protagonisti: Ivan, ungherese cinico e senza interessi intellettuali, Malina, studioso di storia di quarant’anni e infine la narratrice della quale si sa solo che è bionda e con gli occhi scuri. Con tutta probabilità è la scrittrice stessa.
"Io scuoto di nuovo la testa, non vuol dire niente, e poi non so niente, e se sapessi o lui me lo dicesse, non ci sarebbe una risposta, non qui e non ora e mai più sulla terra. Finché vivo non ci sarà una risposta".
Il mondo diventa un'immensa camera a gas: “e prima che possa gridare aspiro già tutto il gas, sempre più gas. Sono nella camera a gas, ecco cos'è, la più grande camera a gas del mondo, e ci sto dentro sola. Non ci si difende dal gas”.
”Il pensiero nell'altro è risvegliato dall’infelicità che gli provochiamo. Non c'è relazione di pensiero, non esiste fenomeno di pensiero senza l'infelicità perché soltanto attraverso l'infelicità raggiungiamo la mente degli altri”.
Un libro esistenziale arduo, misterioso, complicato e decisamente impegnativo. Ho faticato parecchio a inseguire un filo logico che di fatto non c’è; ma alla fine devo dire che ne è valsa la pena.
February 1, 2022
Bir solukta okunamayacak, yorucu ancak bir o kadar da doyurucu bir kitap Malina. Üzerine ne yazılabilir düşünüldüğünde, sarsıcı, içsel olarak yorgun bir ruh halinin hatta karakterler arasındaki geçiş, psikoanalizler ve monologları dolu dolu içeren bir kitap diyebilirim. Kesinlikle tek seferde anlam arayışına girilemeyecek bir kitap. Ivan ve Malina arasında geçişler ile kitabın ikinci kısmının ilk kısımdan daha karışıklaştığı ancak akışların ve temanın sonuna doğru keyif verdiği bir okuma deneyimi oldu. Kült bir aşk kitabı olmamakla birlikte yazarın romandaki eril egemenliğinin etkisini yansıtmasını çok net anlayabiliyoruz.
Genel anlamda takdir ettiğim bir diğer kısım da bu denli uzun cümlelerin anlam bütünlüğüne göre eşsiz çevirisi oldu.
Dikkat gerektiren bir dönemde okumanızı tavsiye ederim.
Genel anlamda takdir ettiğim bir diğer kısım da bu denli uzun cümlelerin anlam bütünlüğüne göre eşsiz çevirisi oldu.
Dikkat gerektiren bir dönemde okumanızı tavsiye ederim.
February 20, 2024
4,5☆
"Malina" patrzyła na mnie prowokacyjnie nie tylko z półki, ale i ze "Ściany" - uznałam to za tropy niewarte przeoczenia. I bardzo słusznie. Lubię takie bujne, roztrzepane narratorki - gubiące retorykę, prześwietlające słowami, błyskotliwie szalone. Nie wystarczają im formy płaskie, linearne, ciągłe i dopracowane. Dlatego przekładają listy legendami, urwane rozmowy telefoniczne dramatycznymi dialogami, a dekodując je, docierają do niewyczerpanej miękkości monologu. Takie jak one piszą o miłości. O obsesji i współzatracaniu. A Bachmann w tym pisaniu jest przepięknie rytmiczna; roztacza płynność, która uwodzi. To autofikcja, która sprawia przyjemność warstwami, rozpięta od ironii po horyzont rozpaczy.
"Malina" patrzyła na mnie prowokacyjnie nie tylko z półki, ale i ze "Ściany" - uznałam to za tropy niewarte przeoczenia. I bardzo słusznie. Lubię takie bujne, roztrzepane narratorki - gubiące retorykę, prześwietlające słowami, błyskotliwie szalone. Nie wystarczają im formy płaskie, linearne, ciągłe i dopracowane. Dlatego przekładają listy legendami, urwane rozmowy telefoniczne dramatycznymi dialogami, a dekodując je, docierają do niewyczerpanej miękkości monologu. Takie jak one piszą o miłości. O obsesji i współzatracaniu. A Bachmann w tym pisaniu jest przepięknie rytmiczna; roztacza płynność, która uwodzi. To autofikcja, która sprawia przyjemność warstwami, rozpięta od ironii po horyzont rozpaczy.
June 6, 2022
Eu am citit ediția în limba română apărută la Humanitas în 2007, dar există și o reeditare recentă, căreia i s-a ales ironic (sau probabil din alte considerente) o copertă fucsia electrizant. Nu pot să nu zâmbesc, gândindu-mă la ce surpriză vor avea cei care o vor cumpăra ca pe o carte de vacanță. În acest sens, poate ar trebui menționat încă de la început că romanul se voia a fi parte a unei trilogii Todesarten, adicătelea Ways of Death, doar că Ingeborg săraca a murit prematur (intenționat sau nu) doi ani mai tarziu si nu a mai apucat să-și termine capodopera.
Romanul e o înșiruire de morți treptate, forțate, ritmice, evident simbolice, atât la nivel existențial cât și textual, care se concretizează în jurul marii întrebări: Când ai încercat să trăiești?, intrebare pe care de altfel Malina i-o adresează naratoarei spre finalul cărții, urmată de o alta ”Ce-ai așteptat?”. Și adevărul e că nu personajul principal feminin care ne (și își) vorbește, ci angoasa și frica de moarte impun tonul romanului acestuia bizar și experimental, furându-i începutul și sfârșitul, lăsând cititorul împietrit într-un limbo atemporal. Or mie indeterminarea asta temporală anunțată încă de la început, tot acolo unde aflăm că suntem în Viena și îi cunoaștem pe Ivan și Malina -acest continuu ”astăzi”, de temut și el, câteva paragrafe mai târziu ”mi-e teamă însă că astăzi e pentru mine mult prea bulversant, prea fără măsură, prea acaparator, iar în starea asta de agitație patologică pentru mine va fi astăzi până-n ultima clipă”- mi-a părut fascinantă. Un roman scris în ‘71 vorbește despre o unitate de timp recognoscibilă și improbabilă în egală măsură.
În a doua parte ne adâncim și mai mult în indeterminare, pierzându-ne și reperele geografice “Este un loc numit Pretutindeni și Nicăieri. Timpul nu mai este astăzi. De fapt timpul nu mai există, căci ar fi putut să fie ieri, ar fi putut să fie înainte, tot mereu, iar anumite lucruri nu vor fi niciodată. Pentru unitățile acestui timp, în care se strecoară și alte timpuri, nu există măsură, după cum nu există măsură nici pentru ne-timpurile în care pulsează ceea ce n-a fost niciodată în timp”(Pg. 143), iar în ultima parte ne întoarcem la un astăzi, de astă dată dezirabil, dar și amenințat cu finitudinea ”e-al sufletului frumos mâine, care niciodată nu mai vine…În cazul meu n-a fost defel un mâine, a fost frumosul astăzi al sufletului meu, al așteptării dintre șase și șapte seara, după orele de birou, al așteptării de după miezul nopții, în fața unui telefon, nu se poate ca astăzi să treacă. Nu poate fi adevărat.” (Pg 260)
În fine, nu o mai lungesc pentru că oricum îmi lipsesc lecturile filozofice care să-mi traducă mai bine intenția autoarei, însă cert e că mi-a plăcut romanul, chiar dacă a fost o lectură obositoare. Nu-i ușor să înaintezi prin dezordinea apartamentului (al ei, nu al meu, desi…) la unison cu dezordinea interioară, prin dialoguri și scrisori eliptice, prin visele recurente în care tatăl e o brută, prin povestea cu prințesa Kagran decorată cu trimiteri la poeziile lui Celan la fel cum nu-i ușor să suporți amețelile, stările de nervozitate, de tensiune, relațiile disfuncționale cu bărbații reali sau imaginari, amintirile sau luările în posesie ale alter-egou-urilor și apoi uciderea lor. Ultima frază pe care am subliniat-o în text ”Am trăit în Ivan și mor în Malina” îmi pare cel mai bun rezumat al cărții ăsteia hipnotice.
Nu, nu-i o carte pentru vacanța care ne bate la geam și nici una de citit pe nerăsuflate. Dacă însă îți reglezi corect așteptările, cred că poate fi o carte care lasă ecouri pe termen lung in conștiința ta, cititorule.
Romanul e o înșiruire de morți treptate, forțate, ritmice, evident simbolice, atât la nivel existențial cât și textual, care se concretizează în jurul marii întrebări: Când ai încercat să trăiești?, intrebare pe care de altfel Malina i-o adresează naratoarei spre finalul cărții, urmată de o alta ”Ce-ai așteptat?”. Și adevărul e că nu personajul principal feminin care ne (și își) vorbește, ci angoasa și frica de moarte impun tonul romanului acestuia bizar și experimental, furându-i începutul și sfârșitul, lăsând cititorul împietrit într-un limbo atemporal. Or mie indeterminarea asta temporală anunțată încă de la început, tot acolo unde aflăm că suntem în Viena și îi cunoaștem pe Ivan și Malina -acest continuu ”astăzi”, de temut și el, câteva paragrafe mai târziu ”mi-e teamă însă că astăzi e pentru mine mult prea bulversant, prea fără măsură, prea acaparator, iar în starea asta de agitație patologică pentru mine va fi astăzi până-n ultima clipă”- mi-a părut fascinantă. Un roman scris în ‘71 vorbește despre o unitate de timp recognoscibilă și improbabilă în egală măsură.
În a doua parte ne adâncim și mai mult în indeterminare, pierzându-ne și reperele geografice “Este un loc numit Pretutindeni și Nicăieri. Timpul nu mai este astăzi. De fapt timpul nu mai există, căci ar fi putut să fie ieri, ar fi putut să fie înainte, tot mereu, iar anumite lucruri nu vor fi niciodată. Pentru unitățile acestui timp, în care se strecoară și alte timpuri, nu există măsură, după cum nu există măsură nici pentru ne-timpurile în care pulsează ceea ce n-a fost niciodată în timp”(Pg. 143), iar în ultima parte ne întoarcem la un astăzi, de astă dată dezirabil, dar și amenințat cu finitudinea ”e-al sufletului frumos mâine, care niciodată nu mai vine…În cazul meu n-a fost defel un mâine, a fost frumosul astăzi al sufletului meu, al așteptării dintre șase și șapte seara, după orele de birou, al așteptării de după miezul nopții, în fața unui telefon, nu se poate ca astăzi să treacă. Nu poate fi adevărat.” (Pg 260)
În fine, nu o mai lungesc pentru că oricum îmi lipsesc lecturile filozofice care să-mi traducă mai bine intenția autoarei, însă cert e că mi-a plăcut romanul, chiar dacă a fost o lectură obositoare. Nu-i ușor să înaintezi prin dezordinea apartamentului (al ei, nu al meu, desi…) la unison cu dezordinea interioară, prin dialoguri și scrisori eliptice, prin visele recurente în care tatăl e o brută, prin povestea cu prințesa Kagran decorată cu trimiteri la poeziile lui Celan la fel cum nu-i ușor să suporți amețelile, stările de nervozitate, de tensiune, relațiile disfuncționale cu bărbații reali sau imaginari, amintirile sau luările în posesie ale alter-egou-urilor și apoi uciderea lor. Ultima frază pe care am subliniat-o în text ”Am trăit în Ivan și mor în Malina” îmi pare cel mai bun rezumat al cărții ăsteia hipnotice.
Nu, nu-i o carte pentru vacanța care ne bate la geam și nici una de citit pe nerăsuflate. Dacă însă îți reglezi corect așteptările, cred că poate fi o carte care lasă ecouri pe termen lung in conștiința ta, cititorule.
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April 20, 2023Still thinking through this complex book — in the comment thread.
December 14, 2019
“Ben, mutlak nitelikteki ilk israfın simgesiyim, kendimi esrikliğe kaptırmışım, dünyadan akıllı bir biçimde yararlanabilme yeteneğim yok; ve adına toplum denen maskeli baloda boy gösterebilirim, ama gelmeyebilirim de; engeli çıkmış biri gibi, ya da kendine maske yapmayı unutmuş, ihmali yüzünden kostümünü artık bulamayan ve bundan ötürü de günün birinde artık davet edilmeyen biri gibi”
July 21, 2010
Ingeborg Bachmann writes:
In the Psychological Institute in the Liebiggasse we always drank tea or coffee. I knew a man there who always used shorthand to record what everyone said, and sometimes other things besides. I don't know shorthand. Sometimes we'd give each other Rorschach tests, Szondi tests, TAT, and would diagnose each other's character and personality, we would observe our performance and behavior and examine our expressions. Once he asked how many men I had slept with, and I couldn't think of any except this one-legged thief who had been in jail, and a lamp covered with flies in a room in Mariahilf rented by the hour, but I said at random: seven! He laughed surprised and said, then naturally he'd like to marry me, our children would certainly be intelligent, also very pretty, and what did I think of that. We went to the Prater, and I wanted to go on the Ferris wheel, because at that time I was never afraid, just happy the way I felt while gliding and later on while skiing, I could laugh for hours out of sheer happiness. Of course then we didn't ever speak again. Shortly afterward I had to take my oral examinations, and in the morning before the three big exams all the embers spilled out of the oven at the Philosophical Institute, I stomped on some pieces of coal or wood, I ran to get a broom and dustpan, since the janitors hadn't come yet, it was burning and smoking terribly, I didn't want a fire, I trampled the embers with my feet, the stench stayed in the institute for days, my shoes were singed, but nothing burned down. I also opened all the windows. Even so I managed to take my first exam at eight in the morning, I was supposed to be there with another candidate but he didn't come; he had had a stroke during the night, as I found out just before going in to be examined about Leibnitz, Kant and Hume. The Old Privy Councillor, who was also Rector at the the time, was wearing a dirty gown, earlier he had received some honorary order from Greece, I don't know what for, and he began asking questions, very annoyed that a candidate had missed an exam due to demise, but at least I was there and not dead yet. In his anger he had forgotten what subjects had been agreed upon, and during the exam someone phoned - I believe it was his sister - one moment we were discussing the neo-Kantians, the next moment we were with the English deists, but still quite far from Kant himself, and I didn't know very much. After the phone call things improved a little, I proceeded right away to discuss what had been agreed upon, and he didn't notice. I asked him an anxious question relating to the problem of time and space, admittedly a question without meaning for me at the time, but he felt quite flattered that I had asked, and then I was dismissed. I ran back to our institute, it wasn't burning, and I went on to the next two exams. I passed all of them. But later I never did solve the problem relating to time and space. It grew and grew.
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October 27, 2022I won't be rating this book because I didn't finish it. I'm stopping almost at the middle mark because I can feel the familiar frustration growing, and I've been on this ride before and I know I'll end up angry at both myself and this wonderful book if I keep reading it out of sheer obstinacy. This is a clever book, one which I said to a friend recently that I truly admire but don't enjoy. Ingeborg Bachmann was among three writers I became interested in after reading Christa Wolf's essays. The first of the writers who I read earlier this year, Anna Seghers, became a fast favourite and her book Transit is one of the best books I've ever read. Max Frisch ,who completes the trinity of Wolf's recommendations, I plan to read early next year.
This book is controlled chaos. All that the writer is doing with narrative, character, time, and place was both fascinating and disorienting. Random tales that borrow from Folklore tradition that break into text, one-sided conversations where we only know of the unnamed narrator's part, letters that don't seem to have anything to do with the story, and the initial curiosity and awe waned and the resolution to finish it can't be powered by persistence any longer. I've truly tried, to the extent of learning about the German pronoun "Sie" in its complexity as used in this book, and I don't think my efforts were in vain since I do admire this work and it did make me work and think. Perhaps I'll return to it some other time.
This book is controlled chaos. All that the writer is doing with narrative, character, time, and place was both fascinating and disorienting. Random tales that borrow from Folklore tradition that break into text, one-sided conversations where we only know of the unnamed narrator's part, letters that don't seem to have anything to do with the story, and the initial curiosity and awe waned and the resolution to finish it can't be powered by persistence any longer. I've truly tried, to the extent of learning about the German pronoun "Sie" in its complexity as used in this book, and I don't think my efforts were in vain since I do admire this work and it did make me work and think. Perhaps I'll return to it some other time.
January 17, 2021
A soberba adaptação de Malina roteirizada por Elfriede Jelinek estreava há exatos 30 anos na Alemanha e eu sinceramente não sei do qual gosto mais, se do livro ou do filme.
O livro tem uma estrutura interessante: dividido em três partes, a primeira dá conta do envolvimento da narradora (obviamente com tintas autobiográficas da Bachmann) com Ivan, na segunda parte (e seu ápice narrativo) é um desenrolar contínuo e febril sobre as questões arquetípicas que envolvem o passado austríaco (especialmente a contemporaneidade/conterraneidade da narradora com Hitler) e finalmente a terceira parte é sobre o apagamento e invisibilidade feminina e o porquê de Malina ser o personagem título.
Na versão fílmica tudo isso é trazido de forma brilhante com um ponto que me fez gostar ainda mais: o leitmotiv do fogo sempre em cena, indicando também a causa da morte da própria Ingeborg Bachmann, o apagamento da escritora diante da chama sempre presente.
O livro tem uma estrutura interessante: dividido em três partes, a primeira dá conta do envolvimento da narradora (obviamente com tintas autobiográficas da Bachmann) com Ivan, na segunda parte (e seu ápice narrativo) é um desenrolar contínuo e febril sobre as questões arquetípicas que envolvem o passado austríaco (especialmente a contemporaneidade/conterraneidade da narradora com Hitler) e finalmente a terceira parte é sobre o apagamento e invisibilidade feminina e o porquê de Malina ser o personagem título.
Na versão fílmica tudo isso é trazido de forma brilhante com um ponto que me fez gostar ainda mais: o leitmotiv do fogo sempre em cena, indicando também a causa da morte da própria Ingeborg Bachmann, o apagamento da escritora diante da chama sempre presente.
June 18, 2021
ისეთი წიგნია, რომელზე ლაპარაკიც შეუძლებელია. უბრალოდ კითხულობ და თვალწინ გიდგება ინგებორგ ბახმანი, რომელიც მაილზ დევისის მუსიკის ფონზე მოდის ვენის ქუჩებში (როგორც ჟანა მორო ლუი მალის ფილმში "ლიფტი ეშაფოტისკენ") და გიყვება საკუთარ განცდებზე, სიზმრებზე, რთულ ურთიერთობებზე პაულ ცელანსა და მაქს ფრიშთან... ან ოთახში იკეტება და გაუთავებლად მისჩერებია ტელეფონის ყურმილს, როგორც ჟან კოკტოს პიესის გმირი ან ცეცხლის სცენებით თითქოს წინასწარმეტყველებს საკუთარ სიკვდილს... შემდეგ კი ქრება, მაგრამ არა უკვალოდ... რჩება პოეზიის სტრიქონებში, ამ წიგნის ფურცლებზე...
May 28, 2021
Irgendwie faszinierend, manchmal erschreckend und manchmal sterbenslangweilig. Ein eindrucksvoller Blick, tief in die gemarterte Seele von Ingeborg Bachmann, in Bereiche, die man manchmal nicht sehen möchte und dazwischen schöne Wienmotive.
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March 4, 2021„Malina: Taj put nema svrhu, on postoji za svakoga, ali ne mora svako da krene njim. Trebalo bi, međutim, jednog dana imati mogućnost prelaska sa jednog na drugo, sa ponovo pronađenog Ja na neko buduće koje ne može više da bude ono staro Ja. Bez napora, bez bolesti, bez žaljenja.“
March 28, 2017
1. Vienna crumbling between, behind and beneath the lines.
2. delicate, cruel, funny, sad, beautiful, strange, heart-tugging, -pushing, -pulling, -boxing, -kissing, -scratching
3. Bachmann understands about the preverbal
4. Fading into the wall
2. delicate, cruel, funny, sad, beautiful, strange, heart-tugging, -pushing, -pulling, -boxing, -kissing, -scratching
3. Bachmann understands about the preverbal
4. Fading into the wall
March 14, 2013
Overwhelmingly perfect.
October 16, 2022
4.5
when mitski said “and i’ve been a forest fire i am a forest fire and i am the fire and i am the forest and i am a witness watching it i stand in a valley watching it and you are not there at all”
[if you’ve ever wanted to slip into a crack in the wall read this book]
when mitski said “and i’ve been a forest fire i am a forest fire and i am the fire and i am the forest and i am a witness watching it i stand in a valley watching it and you are not there at all”
[if you’ve ever wanted to slip into a crack in the wall read this book]
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