Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann’s teenage years overlapped almost precisely with the official beginning and end of World War II. Her father was a Nazi. The one novel Bachmann finished, “Malina,” is very much a war story, if not in conventional ways.
Originally published in German in 1971, and in English first in 1990 and now in an extensive reworking by the same translator, Philip Boehm, “Malina” is also 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.
The unnamed narrator, a female writer, lives in Vienna with a man named Malina who works at a military museum, and she is conducting an affair with a Hungarian man named Ivan, who lives nearby and has two young children.
The first of the book’s three distinct sections, its longest, is devoted primarily to the narrator’s relationship with Ivan, whom she met outside a florist’s shop.
She implies that love is a “virus,” and thinks: “I’ve accumulated more antibodies than you need to be immune — mistrust, indifference, the fearlessness which comes from too much fear, and I don’t know how Ivan coped with such resistance, such impregnable misery.”
There are brief flashes of the narrator’s wartime trauma in this first section — memories of being evacuated to a border town in 1945, and of someone threatening to shoot her and a young friend — but this trauma fully lights up the book’s blazing second section. It’s a stunning stretch, filled with the recounting of vivid nightmares, which include gas chambers and incest and being slowly poisoned.
The narrator dreams of being left alone to die in a gas chamber after her father disappears through a door he hadn’t shown her. “While I am dying my wish to see him once more and tell him just one thing dies as well,” she writes. “My father, I say to him who is no longer there, I wouldn’t have told anyone, I would not have betrayed you. There’s no resistance going on here.”
In this section, in a technique that will begin to appear more frequently throughout the rest of the novel, the narrator and Malina have conversations formatted as scripts.
“Malina: There is no peace in you, not even in you.
“Me: Don’t say that, not today. You’re terrible.
“Malina: It’s war. And you are the war. You yourself.
“Me: Not me.
“Malina: We all are, you included.”
It’s worth noting, before the anguish piles up too high, that Bachmann can be funny, her humor another shade of darkness on her palette.
“Sometimes a person gets lucky, but I’m sure most women are never lucky. What I’m talking about has nothing to do with the supposition that there are some men who are good lovers, there really aren’t,” she writes. “At most there are men with whom it is completely hopeless and a few with whom it’s not quite so hopeless.”
You might wonder while reading “Malina” who is really in it and who isn’t. Rachel Kushner, in a new introduction to the novel, writes: “The male characters in the book, some have speculated, are mere alter egos, not ‘real’ men, but part of her own psyche.” One can make a convincing case that Malina especially is, in fact, just a facet of the narrator’s mind.
“He never forgets,” the narrator writes, “I never have to ask him to do anything.” When Ivan suddenly asks, “Who is Malina?” she thinks, seeming more stumped than secretive: “I don’t have an answer for that.” In lines frequently cited as evidence, she writes: “I don’t want to lead Ivan astray, but he’ll never realize that I am double. I am also Malina’s creation. Unconcerned, Ivan sticks to the appearance, my living bodily self gives him a reference point.”
Reading Malina this way, he seems like a civilizing drive inside the narrator, for better and worse — both protecting her from the full rawness of her traumatic memories and wanting her to begin making an uneasy peace with them.
Ivan, given his children and other details, seems more reliably corporeal, but who knows. Nothing is nailed down in this book, not even at the very end. Its terse and chilling final line lands with enduring ambiguity. (Bachmann planned this to be the first in a trilogy, but the other books were unfinished when she died, at 47, from injuries sustained in a fire at her apartment.)
Taken in bites, Bachmann’s prose is often lucid and powerful, enlivened by her poetic gifts. At length, she can be tough chewing. She wrote a doctoral dissertation on Heidegger and was a devoted reader of Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” though she’s nowhere near that tough. For every aphoristic dart she throws at the human condition (“the world is sick and doesn’t want a healthy force to prevail”), there is a sentence or meaning that remains tightly knotted, and a general lack of clear orientation prevails. Whatever verifiable facts about the plot and characters might exist beneath the novel’s psychological static, you can imagine Bachmann insisting, are none of your business.
The churn of the narrator’s mind and the absurdist exchanges between characters earned the novel comparisons to Virginia Woolf and Beckett. 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. (“Can a man understand this book? Completely,” Kushner writes in her introduction, which gave me the courage to continue.)
“Women face an unhappiness which is particularly inevitable and absolutely unnecessary,” the narrator says. She envisions that she will become “an unknown woman murdered by some unknown man.” The specters not just of the father figure, but of fascism and patriarchy on scales large and small, hang over every line of the novel.
Like a lot of existential literature, “Malina” has digressive depths and charms impossible to summarize in such a small space, including the start of its final section, which begins: “At the moment my greatest fear may be the fate of our postal officials.”
In the closing pages, the narrator’s thoughts accelerate toward breakdown. “I am completely incapable of thinking straight, but who ever did think straight?” she wonders.
Her racing confusion seems to confirm something Malina has earlier explained to her: “Once one has survived something then survival itself interferes with understanding.”
—
Publication Notes:
“Malina”
By Ingeborg Bachmann.
Translated from the German by Philip Boehm.
283 pages. New Directions. Paper, $16.95.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.