Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina Reviewed at NYT

The New York Times's John Williams takes a look into the reissue of the only novel Ingeborg Bachmann published in her lifetime, Malina. Williams begins with some context for Bachmann's life and gives the broad strokes of the novel, from the top:

The 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 woman 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.

Continue on at the New York Times.