![]() ![]() ![]() I am also Malina’s creation.”) Nothing is really certain even her passport has her profession “crossed out twice and written over”. Is he a man, Malina, or a woman, Lina? Is he real, or an aspect of the narrator? (“I don’t want to lead Ivan astray, but he will never realise that I am double. Malina is a mystery, defined only by the impact he has on our narrator. And why, we wonder, doesn’t Ivan seem interested in Malina, the person she lives with? She doesn’t communicate with him, but chops up her narrative with fairytales and imagined interviews, confiding in the reader. For he has come to make consonants constant once again and comprehensible, to unlock vowels to their full resounding … ” She worships Ivan “for retrieving me from underneath all the rubble”, even though he insults her in staccato, cut-off conversations (“Gray and brown clothes make you old”). Her lover is Ivan, for whom she shows a dedication less romantic than pathological: “Even if Ivan was created just for me, as he certainly was, I can never claim him solely for myself. Around those basic facts is constructed a startling edifice of psychological intensity, centred on the men in her life. And with mind-bending novels such as this around, who could argue? Bachmann described it as an “imaginary autobiography” and, like her, the narrator is a middle-aged writer living in Vienna. “No, I don’t take any drugs, I take books,” says the unnamed narrator of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, first published in 1971 and translated from German by Philip Boehm. ![]()
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