Malina invites the reader on a linguistic journey, into a world that stretches the very limits of language with Wittgensteinian zeal and Joycean inventiveness, where Ingeborg Bachmann ventriloquizes-and in the process demolishes-Proust, Musil, and Balzac, and yet filters everything through her own utterly singular idiom. Malina is, quite simply, unlike anything else; it's a masterpiece.
In Malina, Bachmann uses the intertwined lives of three characters to explore the roots of society's breakdown that lead to fascism, and in Bachmann's own words, "it doesn't start with the first bombs that are dropped; it doesn't start with the terror that can be written about in every newspaper. It starts with relationships between people. Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman, and I attempted to say that here in this society there is always war. There isn't war and peace, there's only war."
Industry Reviews
"Exhilarating and claustrophobic" -- Will Harrison - Hudson Review
"Bachmann's only novel-set in Vienna and first published in 1971-takes on the vexed struggle between the sexes in a decaying city. Dense, compelling, often weirdly funny, a dark fairy tale told as a murder mystery. Rewarding and highly recommended." -- Kirkus (starred)
"A variation on the detective novel: Malina's first-person narrator proceeds from the 'universal prostitution' of Vienna to the proximate causes of her destruction." -- Los Angeles Review of Books
"It seems in Malina there is nothing Bachmann cannot do with words." -- Los Angeles Times
"In place of Wittgenstein's language as city, Malina creates a vision of Vienna as language, one might even say as mind: to what extent it may be feminine, masculine, or otherwise is impossible to discern." -- Jessie Ferguson - Music & Literature
"Enigmatic, yet piercing: equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett." -- New York Times Book Review
"A psychological thriller of a tormented, existential sort. And it's a love triangle, though a triangle most accurately drawn with dotted lines, given that it's debatable how many of its members are real....This revised translation appears at a time when the book feels quite contemporary. Though even innovative mainstream fiction now being published reads like "A Is for Apple" compared to Malina, there's no question that the book shares a spirit with any and all books about the unsought psychological challenges of being a woman in this world. Lucid and powerful." -- John Williams - New York Times Book Review
"A masterpiece!" -- Naja Marie Aidt - Publishers Weekly
"A masterpiece!" -- Naja Marie Aidt - Publishers Weekly
"Bachmann's vision is so original that the effect is like having a new letter of the alphabet." -- The Guardian
"In the astonishing desolation and wonder that is Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina... there is no certain narrative, but there are many, deeply internalised, stories." -- Nicci Gerard - The Guardian
"Although Bachmann imbibed the despondent charm of her forebears, her only finished novel reaches the contemporary reader as something strange and sui generis: an existential portrait, a work of desperate obsession, a proto-feminist classic, and one of the most jagged renderings of female consciousness European literature has produced. In its torrent of language, paralyzing lassitude, and relentless constriction of expectation and escape, Malina condenses-and then detonates-the neurasthenic legacy of the interwar Austrian novel." -- Dustin Illingworth - The Nation
"An existential portrait, a work of desperate obsession, a proto-feminist classic, and one of the most jagged renderings of female consciousness European literature has produced." -- Dustin Illingworth - The Nation
"It seems in Malina there is nothing Bachmann cannot do with words." -- The New York Review of Books
"A feminist classic." -- The Paris Review
"If I was permitted to keep one book only it would be Malina. Malina has everything." -- Claire-Louise Bennett
"The most intelligent and important woman writer our land has produced this century." -- Thomas Bernhard
"A Viennese woman cooks dinner for her lover, waits by the telephone, delays embarking on a trip or writing the book she's meant to write. And in that null-time, the abyss of twentieth-century trauma yawns wide open and engulfs her." -- Tom McCarthy
