Instead, appreciating Malina requires abandoning yourself to Bachmann’s darkly ponderous prose, which creeps and flows like magma, enfolding and swallowing up the bric-a-brac of reality-street names, childhood memories, momentary meetings.
The plot of Malina, out next week by New Directions, is impossible to follow it exists only in the form of a wavering procession of scenes in the nameless narrator’s mind. Malina, her only completed novel, has maintained a high critical reputation in Europe since its publication, but hasn’t captured the attention of critics stateside, unlike the works of Thomas Bernhard, Bachmann’s contemporary. Toward the end of her life, the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann began work on the first in a trilogy of novels before her untimely death-addicted to painkillers, her arms spotted with mottled burns where her cigarettes had lain carelessly on unfeeling skin, Bachmann died in 1973 after a fire erupted in her bedroom.
