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Book Cover for: Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann

Malina

Ingeborg Bachmann

Paperback
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Reader Score

82%

82% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Great

Based on 14 reviews on

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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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • Publish Date: Jun 25th, 2019
  • Pages: 283
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.40in - 1.30in - 0.85lb
  • EAN: 9780811228725
  • Categories: • Women• Literary• War & Military

About the Author

Boehm, Philip: - Philip Boehm is an American playwright, theater director, and the translator of numerous books, including Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina (forthcoming from New Directions).
Kushner, Rachel: - Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, Telex from Cuba, The Mars Room, and, most recently, Creation Lake.
Bachmann, Ingeborg: - Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is widely regarded as one of the greatest German-language writers of the twentieth century. Her poems, plays, stories, and only finished novel, Malina, have been championed by Paul Celan, Hannah Arendt, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Christa Wolf, and Elfriede Jelinek.

More books by Ingeborg Bachmann

Book Cover for: Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Ingeborg Bachmann
Book Cover for: The Honditsch Cross, Ingeborg Bachmann
Book Cover for: Correspondence, Paul Celan
Book Cover for: War Diary, Ingeborg Bachmann
Book Cover for: The Critical Writings of Ingeborg Bachmann, Ingeborg Bachmann
Book Cover for: The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann, Ingeborg Bachmann
Book Cover for: The Radio Family, Ingeborg Bachmann

What people are saying

Mentioner image for: Zoilus Press
Zoilus Press
@ZoilusPress
1 year

Independent publisher. Fiction and non-fiction. Idiosyncratic.

Ingeborg Bachmann, trans Philip Boehm, 'Malina' (Holmes & Meier, 1990) "Plunging towards its riveting finale, 'Malina' brutally lays bare the struggle for love and the limits of discourse between women and men" - "equal to the best of Woolf and Beckett" NYT BOOK REVIEW https://t.co/PqTeOAYuHN

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Mentioner image for: Catherine Quan Damman
Catherine Quan Damman
@catherinedamman
2 years

linda nochlin visiting asst prof @nyuifa • book on performance and affective labor in the 1970s TK • 2022–2023 @ACLS1919 fellow • criticism @artforum et al •

Finally finished both Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon and Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina, in rapid succession, over the "break"––my current state of mind should be studied for scientific purposes

twitter.com
Mentioner image for: Berfrois
Berfrois
@berfrois
2 years

Literature. Ideas. Tea. 2009-2022.

While Reading Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina https://t.co/S7WzKfUYuP @Greg_Gerke @medhawrites #IngeborgBachmann https://t.co/QBTmY7kiSK

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Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

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
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"
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" (6/25/2019 12:00:00 AM)
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" (7/24/2019 12:00:00 AM)
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" (6/29/2029 12:00:00 AM)
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" (7/9/2019 12:00:00 AM)
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" (6/18/2019 12:00:00 AM)
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" (6/18/2019 12:00:00 AM)
A feminist classic.-- "The Paris Review" (7/9/2019 12:00:00 AM)
If I was permitted to keep one book only it would be Malina. Malina has everything.--Claire-Louise Bennett
It seems in Malina there is nothing Bachmann cannot do with words.-- "The New York Review of Books"

What people are saying

Mentioner image for: Zoilus Press
Zoilus Press
@ZoilusPress
1 year

Independent publisher. Fiction and non-fiction. Idiosyncratic.

Ingeborg Bachmann, trans Philip Boehm, 'Malina' (Holmes & Meier, 1990) "Plunging towards its riveting finale, 'Malina' brutally lays bare the struggle for love and the limits of discourse between women and men" - "equal to the best of Woolf and Beckett" NYT BOOK REVIEW https://t.co/PqTeOAYuHN

twitter.com
Mentioner image for: Catherine Quan Damman
Catherine Quan Damman
@catherinedamman
2 years

linda nochlin visiting asst prof @nyuifa • book on performance and affective labor in the 1970s TK • 2022–2023 @ACLS1919 fellow • criticism @artforum et al •

Finally finished both Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon and Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina, in rapid succession, over the "break"––my current state of mind should be studied for scientific purposes

twitter.com
See more