Malina

Now a New Directions book, the legendary novel that is “equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett” (New York Times Book Review) In Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Ingeborg Bachmann invites the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men: viewed, through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety, and genius. Malina explores love, "deathstyles," the roots of fascism, and passion. "Now a New Directions book, the legendary novel that is 'equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett' (New York Times Book Review) 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.'"-- Provided by publisher Malina is a 1971 novel by the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. It tells the story of a female writer and her relationships with two different men, one joyous and one introverted. The text deals with themes including gender relations, guilt, mental illness, writing, and collective and personal trauma in the context of post-Second World War Vienna. The book was adapted into a 1991 film with the same title, directed by Werner Schroeter from a screenplay by Bachmann's compatriot Elfriede Jelinek.[1]