Rachel Kushner on Bachmann's Malina

The New Yorker has published an excerpt from Rachel Kushner's introduction to Philip Boehm's revised translation of Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina, which is coming out from New Directions this month. "Repeatedly, she was asked in interviews to defend her decision to give up poetry," writes Kushner of Bachmann. "'Quitting is a strength, not a weakness,' she retorted." More: 

In “Malina,” some of the narrator’s talk is embellished with musical notation—rubato, con fuoco, forte, fortissimo, and so on. Why is this narrator so agitated? By the virus, which isn’t exactly love, now that I think about it, but an undoing that seems almost criminal, because its grammar is so insufficient. She operates in a field of signs, an entire sensory reality, that is male. The male characters in the book, some have speculated, are mere alter egos, not “real” men but part of her own psyche. Her troubles are deeper than plain old patriarchy, though, and derive also from Nazism, and the ways in which fascism transforms from public to private menace, a postwar spectre of cruelty and destruction. She is steeped in a broad lexicon of existential issues that burn her like lit cigarettes. She’s also very funny, especially in the third section of the book, when her mind goes into overdrive. Asked by Malina if she’s going to a friend’s funeral, she says she doesn’t want to be constantly informed of that friend’s—or anyone’s—death. “They don’t constantly tell me that someone is alive,” she says. And anyhow, “it’s rare that anyone is living, except in the theatre of my thoughts.” The idea that there are men who are good lovers, she says, is “a legend that has to be destroyed.” A man might expose his bare back to her, on which some other woman has dug her nails and left traces. “What are you supposed to do with this back?” This echoes a question in the first chapter, in a letter addressed to a “Mr. President,” in which she declares that she was born with half a good-luck caul. “What would you do, Mr. President, with half a Presidency, half an honor, half a recognition, half a hat, what would you even do with this half letter?”

“Malina” was to be only one novel in a cycle that Bachmann called “death styles” or “ways of death.” After she died, it was made into a film by Werner Schroeter, starring Isabelle Huppert, with a script written by Elfriede Jelinek. Critics leapt on the film as lacking in nuance. I still haven’t seen it, but it’s probably better than they thought.

We've seen it, and she's right! Read on at the New Yorker.