Novel
Malina
Ingeborg Bachmann · 1971
Synopsis
Vienna, Ungargasse. A woman who writes shares an apartment with Malina, a calm and ever-present man, an official at the Army Museum, and loves Ivan, a married Hungarian neighbour, often in a hurry, who returns her love without knowing what to do with it. Between the two, she tries to keep up a correspondence, a book and her days. At night, in a series of nightmares, a father who torments her returns.
Context
It is the only completed novel of a vast project that its author called “ways of dying”, the rest of which remained in manuscript form. It consists of three chapters of very different forms; the second, made up of nightmares in which the narrator accuses her father of complicity with Nazism, has been regarded as a founding scene of post-1945 literature. It appeared in 1971 and divided the critics: Marcel Reich-Ranicki judged it a failure, others saw in it a major book.
Who it is for
Three hundred pages that disconcert, the second part having nothing left of the narrative of the first. One must go to the end for the beginning to take on its meaning.
Prizes and reception
It became a classic of German-language literature after 1945, and was adapted for the cinema in 1991 by Werner Schroeter.
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